Themes:

Question 1

Rebellion:

Answer 1

• Moira rebels most boldly, disguising herself and managing to escape.
• Ofglen’s rebellion is more community-minded, since she works as part of an organized resistance.
• The commander breaks the law and helps Offred beyond his duties.
• The Commander’s Wife also tries to get around the strictures of Gilead, setting Offred up with Nick in an illegal attempt to make a family.

Question 2

Religion:

Answer 2

• Religious language enters into every part of the society. From Rita’s position as a Martha, named for a New Testament kitchen worker, to the store names like Milk and Honey.
• Religion is also the justification for many of Gilead’s most savage characteristics.
• Offred’s job as Handmaid is based on the biblical story of Rachel and Leah, where fertile servants can carry on adulterous relationships to allow infertile women like the Commander’s Wife to have families.
• Commander reads from Genesis the same lines that make the book’s epigraph, justifying and moralizing the crude intercourse that will take place. Many of the biblical quotes in the book are twisted.
• The handmaids tale is criticism of the way that people and theocracies use the Bible for their own oppressive purposes.

Question 3

Gender:

Answer 3

• Gilead expresses a difference between the genders.
• When Offred was fired from her job due to the the Gileadean revolutionaries take over after terrorism destroys the US government, Luke, didn’t t seem furious about this. Suggesting that even good men may have embedded misogynistic attitudes
• Soon Gileadean women find all liberties taken from them, from the right to choose their clothes to the right to read.
• Even women in positions of power, like Aunt Lydia, are only allowed cattle prods, never guns.
• The Commander’s Wife, trapped in the world she advocated for.
• Gilead also institutionalizes sexual violence toward women. Through the ceremony, Offred, is institutionalized adultery and a kind of rape.
• Jezebel’s, where Moira works, is a whorehouse for the society’s elite.

Question 4

Love:

Answer 4

• Love is significant to Offred to the point she spends her days daydreaming about her loved ones, rather than how to rebel.
• Love drives Nick to help Offred escape.
• Her love for her mother, her daughter, Luke, Moira, and ultimately Nick, allow her to stay sane, and cherish her memories. Living a life of perception rather than reality.
• Love is also a driving force behind other characters’ actions.
• The Commander’s desires to bend the rules for Offred.
• In the end, love is the best way to get around Gilead’s rules, allowing for both secret mental resistance, and for the trust and risk that result in Offred’s great escape.

Question 5

Sexuality:

Answer 5

• The focus Gileadean regime is on the control of sex and sexuality.
• They execute gays and lesbians; they destroy pornography and sexual clothing; they kill abortion doctors; they outlaw divorce and second marriages; and they ritualize bizarre sexual relations that they believe are supported by the Bible.
• Unsurprising at the end of the novel to learn that the Gileadean regime eventually destroys itself. In attempting to separate sex from sexuality, the regime demonstrates both its underestimation of and fear of sexuality.
• The Commander reveals that he carried out a series of affairs with his Handmaids and there’s a “secret” club where higher-ups consort with women sexually. This shows that the government cannot expunge illicit sexual acts merely by threatening fearful punishments.
• In fact, by destroying the privacy of even condoned sexual acts, the government is encouraging the bourgeoisies to commit these acts
• Finally, when Offred takes a series of risks to continue her affair with Nick, showing the power of sexual acts.
• The regime can impose as many punishments as it wants but no matter what it does, ordinary women like Offred will continue to risk everything for acts of sexuality inspired by the possibility of love.

Question 6

Power:

Answer 6

• Key theme presence and manipulation of power.
• Gilead is a theocratic dictatorship, so power is imposed entirely from the top. No hope that an outside power will intervene.
• In Gilead, the government must cover the streets and even individual homes with guards and guns. surveillance must be constant.
• Only place people are free is in their own heads, creating a significant amount of isolation between individuals.
• Atwood’s characters show that even if the substantial power is taken from people, they will still find a way to maintain control over themselves and other individuals.
• Offred manipulates her sexuality in the subtlest and gains an awareness for the first time of how much power she has by being a woman. She knows that she is awakening ideas in men’s heads, and that she is communicating with the Guardians under the Angels’ very noses. Offred learns that Handmaids kill themselves in order to maintain some final sense of power over their bodies and decisions, and indeed, the thought of suicide is always in the back of her mind. - Offred discovers that her powers over the commander were useless, as he will do nothing to save her from the wrath of his wife.

Question 7

Freedom:

Answer 7

• Freedom is one of the main themes that Gilead twists to establish its theocracy.
• One of the Aunts brainwashes the handmaids into thinking that they actually have freedom, but of a different kind.
• There is a distinction between freedom to and freedom from. Freedom to means liberty to do whatever you want and according the Aunt, that is pre-Gilead freedom where women ended up being raped or harassed or hurt. Instead the Aunt suggests that Gilead offers a freedom from all those things. - Essentially Gilead appears to be the saviour who put these women in this strict confinement so that they are safe from all the harm of freedom.