HMT

Question 1

‘Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse for some’ (Chapter 12)

Answer 1

• The Commander acknowledges that powerful state regimes inevitably perpetuate inequalities.
• In an earlier line, Fred Waterford utters the clichéd idiom ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
• Atwood emphasises both his willingness to justify violence as a means to mould Gilead’s society, and the lack of originality involved in suppressing female thought and sexuality.

Question 2

‘I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure…
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object’ (Chapter 13)

Answer 2

• The grotesque stative verb ‘congealed’ encapsulates Offred’s disgust at how her body has been appropriated for the sole purpose of (ironically unlikely) reproduction.
• Links with her caustic description of handmaids as ‘two-legged wombs’.
• The flesh is personified: such is her dehumanisation and lack of agency that the body feels like a remote ‘object’ that works independently of her thoughts and neglects her past desires.

Question 3

‘There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia.
Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.’ (Chapter 5)

Answer 3

• Patronisingly dismissive of female independence and intelligence
• paradoxical ‘freedom from’ describing imprisonment framed as protection, it’s a classic example of Orwellian doublethink.

Question 4

‘If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending.
Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it.’ (Chapter 7)

Answer 4

• As with Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Offred’s use of the written word has the potential to be a symbolically powerful act of rebellion, a way to emphasise that she, and women like her, cannot be silenced.

• In narrating her life, she attempts to exert ‘control’. Whether her escape to ‘real life’ is successful is unclear, but we do know for sure that her story does indeed live on.

Question 5

‘A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze’ (Chapter 27)

Answer 5

Reinforcing Aunt Lydia’s paradoxical ‘freedom from’, the zoomorphic comparison with a caged ‘rat’ highlights the illusion of Offred’s liberty, which is in reality controlled by impossibly strict, grossly restricting parameters.