The Handmaids Tale part one

Question 1

What does the novel present?

Answer 1

The Handmaid’s Tale presents the reader with a bleak futuristic scenario. Margaret Atwood’s story takes place in the near future in the new American fundamentalist Republic of Gilead. In Atwood’s invented world, democratic institutions have been violently overthrown and replaced by a new totalitarian regime. Due to a falling birth rate, fertile young women like Offred are forced to work for Commanders as surrogate mothers, or Handmaids.

Atwood’s novel belongs to the genre of anti-utopian or dystopian fiction. In both novels, privacy, individuality and holding unorthodox beliefs are punishable offences.

Question 2

Why is it a tale of resistance and survival?

Answer 2

The story is told in the first person like a diary or letter. Offred provides the reader with a vivid and witty eyewitness account of events, paying great attention to documentary detail. She retains a sense of her own individuality and pyschological freedom, refusing to forget her names or her past. We hear Offred’s story of resistance in the face of terrible oppression, and of her fight for survival up to the point where she is taken away and possibly rescued from the oppressive regime. Atwood leaves her protagonist’s tale incomplete. However, Offred’s voice and her story, relayed through the edited transcript of her cassette tapes, remain as testimony to the survival of the human spirit.

Question 3

Why is it a fragmented narrative?

Answer 3

On a first reading, we are plunged into a rather fragmented narrative, and a nightmarish world where we know very little about what is going on or what is going to happen to Offfed. The effect on the reader is likely to be one of shock and bewilderment and then suspense. Only at the end do we get a wider perspective on Offred’s fragmented narrative with the ‘Historical notes’ though by that point we we may have just finished reading. This disorientation effect is deliberate, for Atwood is challenging her readers to think not only about Offfred’s situation but also about how the events described in a nightmarish work of science fiction can become an everyday reality.

Question 4

How is the novel about gender politics?

Answer 4

All the women in the novel are survivors of the time before and their voices represent a range of voices about women’s role in society. We hear about Offred’s mother, a single parent, who identified with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that demanded equality between the sexes in a range of spheres, including sexual and reproductive freedoms. As she reminisces, Offred comments on her own indifference to her mother’s feminist activism and she laments the political apathy of many younger women. Some years later under the Gilead Regime, a woman’s function and value in society are bioologically determined by her ability or inability to concieve and bear children. The Handmaids’ names - Of-fred, Of-glen etc. - symbolise these women’s lack of status or even lack of an identity in their own right.

Question 5

What are the political and social comments that come out of the novel?

Answer 5

In the Handmaid’s tale, Atwood challenges the reader to think about the ways in which life in Gilead is both similar and different to our own society. Writing in the mid-1980s, Atwood drew on a range of issues that interested and concerned her at that time, including violence against women, pollution and environmental degradation, human rights abuses, extreme right-wing ideologies and religious fanaticism. Successive generations of readers continue to find sobering parallelss between their world and Atwood’s dystopian vision.

Question 6

What are the different readings and interpretations of this novel?

Answer 6

As an open-ended novel, the Handmaids Tale encourages a variety of possible readings, though this raises the question of how free we are to make our own interpretations. Of course, there is no single interpretation.

Question 7

What are the key issues to explore?

Answer 7

• The novel’s protagonist and what we learn about her.
• The narrative style and structure.
• The past, the present and the future.
• Women’s place in society.
• The importance of having an identity.
• Religious fundamentalism.
• Violence, control and fear.
• Documentary realism.
• The genres of science fiction and dystopian writing.
• Language power.
• The author’s purpose.