The handmaid’s tale
(book report)
Ilse Fousert
V5a
, Title: The handmaid’s tale
Explanation:
Author: Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939. she is a Canadian poet, novelist,
literary critic, essayist, inventor, and environmental activist. She has published 17 books of
poetry, 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children’s
books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and
fiction. Atwood has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times, winning in 2000 for
The Blind Assassin. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award,Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.She has been a finalist for the
Governor General's Award 10 times, winning in 1966 for The Circle Game and 1985 for The
Handmaid's Tale.In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. Atwood is the 2016
recipient of The National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and
the 2017 recipient of the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.Among
innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood was a founding trustee of the
Griffin Poetry Prize, as well as a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary
organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.
Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that
facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. She is the Co-Founder and Director of
Syngrafii Inc. (formerly Unotchit Inc.), a company that she started in 2004 to develop,
produce and distribute the LongPen technology. She holds various patents related to the
LongPen technologies.
Release date
The book was released in 1985
Genre
The genres are Utopian and dystopian fiction, Sciencefiction, Speculatieve fictie.
Theme
Manipulation of power, women and femininity and freedom and confinement.
Setting
Place: The Republic of Gilead
Time: The story takes place in the not-too-distant future
Mood
The mood is emotionless and factual.
Summary
When the book begins, the narrator—whose real name we never learn—is being held with
other women in an old school gym. We later find out this is called the Women's Center.
When we see her again, she's been working for five weeks as a Handmaid.
The house where she works is run by a married Commander, whom the narrator must have
sex with on a regular basis (in a standard Ceremony) in an attempt to become pregnant and
provide the household with a child. The narrator has one uniform, assigned tasks, and very