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IEB Summary & Notes: THE HANDMAIDS TALE
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The Handmaid's Tale Atwood Extensive Notes
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The handmaid's tale notes on Atwood's context - A STAR
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THE HANDMAID’S TALECharacters:
- Main character: Offred (she is Fred’s handmaid ‘of Fred’)- June
- Fred (commander)
- Serena Joy (commander’s wife)
- Luke (June’s husband)
- Hannah (June’s daughter)
- Ofglen (handmaid that walks with June to shops)
- Aunt Lydia (trained June to become a handmaid in the red centre)
- Nick (driver)
- Moira (handmaid)
- Janine (handmaid)= Ofwarren (gives birth)
- Alma (handmaid)
- Dolores (handmaid)
- Rita (Martha)
- Cora (Martha)
Themes:
- Control and resistance
- Survival
- Responsibility
- Fertility
- Power
- Women’s roles
- Religion
- The individual
- Guilt
- History
- Love
About:
- Gilead takes over North America
- Christian government
- Most women are infertile as there has been a war and the radiation has made women sterile
- Every woman married to a commander that cannot have a baby is assigned a handmaid
- The handmaid is raped once a month by the commander
- A handmaids job is to provide children for the commander and his wife
Narrative techniques:
- Emphasis on process and reconstruction where the truth is only a matter of the teller’s
perspective. Her narrative is a discontinuous one, with frequent time shifts, short scenes and
unfinished ending.
- Abrupt shifts from one scene to another and from present to past so that her present
situations and past are only gradually revealed.
- Offred also tells the story of other women, like her own mother, Moira, Janine and even her
predecessor at the commander’s house
- Offred tells the story of other Handmaids, all of them rebels or victims or both, which form a
sad subtext to Offred’s narrative.
To sum up…
- Discontinuous narrative
, - Time shifts
- Fragments and flashbacks
- Subtext
Representation of male and female roles:
- Names and connotations
- Power positions
- Control
- Unwomen (gay and infertile) and unbabies (anything wrong)
Symbols:
- Look for similarities between Gilead and our world today
- Red= colour of blood and menstruation (fertility)
- Flowers= fertility
Quotes:
- “This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long
parenthesis of nothing.”
- “They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to”
- “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.”
- “Women were not protected then.”
- “There must have been needles, pills, something like that.”
- “Was he in my room? I called it mine.”
- “Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit. Shoulders, legs.”
- “I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I feel. What I
feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.”
- “There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore”
- “It’s the choice that terrifies me, a way out.”
- “This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long
parenthesis of nothing.”
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