The handmaids tale
Essay on the narrator
In Margret Atwood’s ‘The handmaids tale’, the main character is Offred, a handmaid in the fictitious
totalitarian theocracy of Gilead. However, she also provides the main narrative voice of the novel,
and therefore what we learn about the society in which she lives derives completely from her
thoughts, opinions, memories of the past and experiences in the present. Atwood’s use of the
metanarrative also tells the reader that her narration is not completely reliable; it is a construct, a
story. Equally, Offred also gives a female view, consciously crafted by Atwood in order to convey her
own opinions of feminism and the balance of power between men and women, which reflects the
uncertainty that women faced in the 1980’s, at the time Atwood was writing. At this time, it was yet
unclear whether women would ever be equal to men in terms of sectors work and pay; with the rise
of second wave feminists such as Offred’s mother fighting for such equality with some success. She is
essentially an ‘everywoman’, an expansive representation of the effect that such a controlling
society can have on a person’s mentality and behaviour.
As mentioned previously, Offred is the main narrator in the novel, she speaks in first person, though
tends to add the voices of other characters from her own memory. In terms of manipulation of
language, Offred’s name is, in itself, a patronym; she takes the name of her current commander
‘Fred’. The construction of this fabricated name , with the prefix ‘Off’, followed by the suffix of the
commander’s name ‘Fred’, shows the way that she has to take the name of a man, instead of having
an identity of her own. The fact that the composition of the name is generic to all handmaids,
‘Ofglen’ for example, makes this all the more worse- not only does she have no identity, but her
identity is shared among the other handmaids. This depicts the literal subordination of women
through the use of language. She states quite clearly ‘My name isn’t Offred. I have another name,
which nobody uses now’, her decided surety in the contraction ‘isn’t’, followed by the use of the
pronoun ‘nobody’ emphasises the knowledge that she no longer has any control over identity, she
has become government property, and ‘nobody’ knows who she really is, apart from her
reproductive functions, her ‘viable ovaries’. However, to her, her name is very precious ‘like an
amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant past’. Furthermore, the use of the
simile to compare her name to an ‘amulet’ conveys to the reader that she views her name as
something of significant value, like a preserved historic amulet. Equally, her view of the past as
‘unimaginably distant’ is hyperbolic , as the adverb ‘unimaginably’ makes the distance between her
life in Gilead and her life in the ‘time before’ seem unrealistically large, considering that it has
actually only been three years in real time. Therefore, Offred’s narration provides us with an
insightful view of how it feels for her to have her identity removed, and her lack of identity makes
her more relatable to a larger number of people, women in particular. Despite this, the fact that her
emotions influence her words, causing her to over-dramatize and overreact shows that she is not a
wholly reliable narrator. However, this lack of reliability also makes her seems like a much more
realistic narrator, particularly as real people never speak the complete and absolute truth, especially
when trying to recall something emotionally traumatising. This believability makes Atwood’s
messages about control of identity and powers within governments seem all the strong. As with
many dystopian novels, Atwood draws on the political conditions at the time she was writing; the
novel draws on ideology from The American new right movement in the 1980’s, a conservative
coalition which supported ideals of anti-feminism, anti-homosexuality and racism. The new right
aimed to return to traditional and puritanist ideas, under the influence of reaganism (the support of
President Ronald Reagan). Hence, Atwood has over exaggerated relevant political issues and
therefore portrays Offred as a nameless narrator, as she believed that if such ideology were to come
