This document offers any analysis of The Handmaid's Tale. The headings included in the document look at individual characters, themes, motifs, context, key events and places. At the end of the document there is a reference page for where important parts of the plot are to make it easier to quickly ...
Offred
★ Homodiegetic narrator- protagonist
★ Offred could be derived from: “offered”, “afraid”, “off-red”(due to her resistant
attitude) or “off-read”(as in misread)
★ Posses a dark-humour that makes her grim descriptions of Gilead bearable
★ Memories and the use of analepsis is Offred’s way to escape Gilead
○ She lives in her head
★ Atwood contrasts her with her feminist activist mother (and Moira)
★ Although she is not indoctrinated, Offred possesses a strong fear of actively
rebelling
○ She passively rebels through her thoughts and through reading anything she
can- she has psychological freedom- she separates her memories and
thoughts from the physicality of Gilead (trauma?)- through the use of
chapters and lack of speech marks in certain areas
○ She also rebels through refusing to forget her actual name- she never tells
the reader but she does tell Nick (perhaps as a token of love?)
★ Throughout the novel she appears to gain agency- she commands her Commander
to stop something
○ When she meets Nick, however, she seems to lose it and even wants to stay
in Gilead
○ This shows the destructive nature of Gilead- the regime destroyed Offred’s
ability to resist it
★ Describes emotionally and poetically- shows her intelligence despite Gilead's
oppressive regime. It also shows her refusal to give up on life
○ Also presented as intelligent through her love for words and academic traits
(Scrabble, FAITH, latin phrase)- shows her resistance to Gilead’s rhetoric
★ Her attitude is discreetly subversive but never fully rebellious
○ She refuses to be deceived by Gilead’s rhetoric- she believes in the value of
every individual (yet she still puts herself first in terms of Ofglen. However,
in her past life she would’ve died for her child. Gilead has perhaps changed
her more than she thinks)
★ The affair with the Commander parallels with her affair with Luke- it’s a parody of
the past, a masquerade, not reality
★ Can be seen as a sympathetic narrator
○ She analyses each person in the house as individuals with specific roles
○ She is particularly attentive to those of lower roles like the Marthas
★ Reminisces her past life through rose tinted glasses
,The Handmaid’s Tale Revision
Serena Joy
★ Was an advocate for ‘traditional values’ however she is bitter with the outcome
○ She is forced into a polyamourous relationship, restricted to her house and is
reminded (through the existence of Offred) that she is deteriorating
○ She teeters on the edge of deserving the reader’s sympathy however her
lack of compassion for other women diminishes this
★ A representation of Phylis Schlaffley and her war against the ERA
★ She surprises Offred when Serena becomes willing to break the rules to get Offred
pregnant
○ Although this seems kind it is mainly for her own desires as then she’d have
a baby
○ She exploits Offred’s loss of a child to get what she wants by promising to
show Offred a photo of her daughter if she sleeps with Nick
○ Serena’s lack of sympathy makes her the perfect tool for Gilead’s social order
(which relies on women to oppress women)
★ Atwood implies that cruel selfish women are the glue that holds Gilead together
★ She is the most powerful woman present in Offred’s life- as Offred observes her
throughout her narrative Serena becomes more than just a member of the class in
the hierarchy- she calls Serena by her name unlike the rest of the Wives in the novel
★ Irony that Offred recounts Serena's past life. She was a media presenter that spoke
out for extreme conservative domestic policies and believed a woman's place was at
home. Yet now she is trapped in her own ideology on which she had based her
popularity
★ Serena’s life is a parody of the Virtuous Woman(a woman in the Old Testament who
is content to be ruled over by a man)- her only place of power is her living room and
the only place for self expression is her garden although she still needs the help of
her husband’s chauffeur
★ Offred describes Serena thoroughly
The Commander
★ The most powerful authority figure in Offred’s life
★ His unhappiness and need for companionship makes him as much a prisoner of
Gilead’s structure as anyone else- Offred is sympathetic towards him and therefore
the reader is invited to join her
○ If he is a prisoner, he is a prisoner in a prison of his own making and the
prison he created for women were a lot worse
○ As the novel progresses, it is revealed that Offred’s visits are for his selfish
needs and he doesn’t care about Offred- he’s aware of the risk but his moral
blindness which is apparent in his attempts to explain the virtues of Gilead
, The Handmaid’s Tale Revision
★ Jezebel’s reveals te rank hypocrisy that runs through Gilead and also highlights it’s
corruption and lack of consistency and how it is primarily a way to just oppress
women
★ Offred’s relationship with the Commander is best represented by a situation she
remembers from a documentary on the Holocaust
○ In the film, the mistress of a brutal death camp guard defended the man she
loved, claiming that he was not a monster. “How easy it is to invent a
humanity,”
○ anyone can seem human, and even likeable, given the right set of
circumstances. But even if the Commander is likable and can be kind or
considerate, his responsibility for the creation of Gilead and his callousness
to the hell he created for women means that he, like the Nazi guard, is a
monster.
★ His image is presented as that of male power- isolated and benignly indifferent to
domestic matters
○ However, he is seen by Offred peeking into her room- he is silently curious
yet has to hide it as that is not his place
○ His stereotypical image of male power starts to break down after the
Ceremony where Offred starts her visits- he seeks an approximation of
‘normal life’ with conversations, books, magazines
★ The relationship between Offred and the Commander is that of sexual power
politics where he holds most of the power
○ He believes in a traditional patrictacy where the men hold the power
○ Their private sexual encounter in Jezebel’s ends in “futility and bathos” which
contrasts her later sexual experience with Nick
★ Atwood explores the ay memory can obscure history, changing it to fit their own
fictional view of the past
○ The Commander describes their outing to Jezebel’s as “walking into the
past”- the Commander yearns for a relationship now forbidden by Gilead. All
he achieves is ‘cheap sex’ in a hotel room and reduces his moral figure of
higher authority to immoral dirty old man.
■ Offred notices that he “looks smaller, older, like something being
dried”
Offred’s Mother
★ Deprived of the freedoms her mother fought for, Offred admires her mother’s
courage and values the memory of her as a link to her own lost identity. This
underlines the thematic motif of Missing Persons, and particularly lost mothers and
daughters, which is important throughout the novel
★ She resists classification- like Moria
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