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Summary The Handmaid's Tale - literary devices
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Notes in literary devices used within the novel
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The handmaid’s tale revisionLiterary devices:
Protagonist
- Narrator, Offred
- Goal is to preserve her identity as a person in the face of a regime that degrades her to just be a
walking womb to bear children to fix the state
- Lots of the novel is internal as her goal is internal and psychological
Real conflicts are found in her head – struggles to keep her identity along with the novel’s events
o Describing her daily experience is considered a triumph
o Being overwhelmed by fear of what might happen are considered her defeats
- Rescued by chance rather than intention
When the rescue arrives, she still has a sense of who she is
- The novel itself is a spoken account of her life, identity and memories
Antagonist
- Oppressive regime of republic of Gilead
- Denies offer personhood, treats her as a national resource
- Draws on tools used by real totalitarian regimes – deny identity to their citizens, determine what they
must do, who they must sleep with, where people live, who they can talk to and what people can
wear
- Novel suggests these tools are used, although in a lesser extent, to deny women full control of their
identity in contemporary life in the unites states
- Offred’s memories of the past tell us that in the late 20 th century she felt restricted by the clothes she
could wear for fear of sexual assault
True antagonist of novel is political domination of women by men
- Novel suggests that gender norms in our own society are not as different as Gileadean totalitarianism
norms
Argues that contemporary gender norms are a mild form of Gilead’s totalitarianism
Setting
- Based on idea that in the future of our own world, a political group called ‘the sons of Jacob’ will have
overthrown the us government and created a new country – the republic of Gilead
- Gileadean law is loosely based on an extremist reading of the old testament – extremely oppressive
Black Americans have been forcibly removed and relocate to ‘homelands’
Women are not allowed to work, possess any property of their own or even read
Sex outside of marriage is strictly forbidden
o Women can go to colonies (death wish) or become handmaids and have sex with
husband of ‘barren wife’ – any children she has will go to the wife
- Most action focused in home of commander – Offred feels as though she is in a prison and watched
all the time
- Garden of house serves as reminder of the forces being repressed
- Setting of US/Harvard to show how easily it was overrun by totalitarian forces
- Old buildings still in use – repurposed for the new society
Constant reminder of the past
Speculative fiction
- Imagines alternate world that is not so dissimilar to our set in the future
- Trends from the 80’s satirized – poor treatment of women, disease and fertility, corruption of religion
Exploring consequences that could result due to these trends
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