Study Questions

• What do we know from the narrator about the world "in the time before" ("Chapter 5" 35)? What are the problems in that world? What things are remembered? How are they remembered? fondly? nostalgically? distastefully? Is it true that "when we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that" ("Chapter 6" 40)?

• How is Gilead a better world from the one before? How is it worse?

• Examine the set of temptations in the Gileadean world. What do they imply about things denied? Look, for example, at the following instances:

  • I hunger to touch something other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch. ("Chapter 2" 21)

  • Why tempt her to friendship? ("Chapter 2" 21)

• Compare the language used to describe the Republic of Gilead and the world before it.

• What is the narrator like before and during Gilead? Consider her admission: "I used to be bad at waiting" ("Chapter 4" 28) in conjunction with an earlier declaration: "Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last" ("Chapter 2" 17).

• "Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia" ("Chapter 2" 17). How is the narrator's life like a soldier's? Consider other comparisons for the handmaids like the suggestion that they are cattle because the Aunts carry "electric cattle prods" (14), that they are children, sleeping on flannelette sheets (13), that they are nuns whose lives are "measured by bells, as once in nunneries" (18), or "less distinguished visitors" at a college, "ladies in reduced circumstances," and flowers "unfold[ing], into the sunlight." The narrator also likens herself to little red riding hood ("some fairytale figure in a red cloak" 19) and "a Sister, dipped in blood," evoking at once the nunnery mentioned earlier and female kinships of sisterhood and womanly support tantalizingly offered by "Aunts." What effect do these multiple comparative identities have on the identity of handmaids?
  

• Consider the fittings (or lack thereof) and reinforcements described at the beginning of chapter 2 to prevent escape, but not the running away kind. What do "those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge" mean (18)? What other structures and workings of Gilead are likewise designed to prevent the exercise of internal resources?

• Note Atwood's frequent and often staggering similes. What is the purpose of these similes? Consider, for example, such comparisons:

  • Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. ("Chapter 2" 17)

  • The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem; as if they had been cut and are beginning to heal there. ("Chapter 3" 22)

  • Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips. ("Chapter 4" 27)

  • Misfit as odour. ("Chapter 4" 28)
  • The sun is out, in the sky there are white fluffy clouds, the kind that look like headless sheep. ("Chapter 6" 40)

  • It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child's idea of a smile. ("Chapter 6" 42)

  Why are there so many similes—two things associated by means of explicit comparison, as we know—yet the reader (and narrator) is directed against making a link between them in the passage on page 43 (chapter 6)? "The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other," we are told. The narrator, with her repeated "effort" and "need," is taking pains to dissociate similarities evoked by the smile and tulip similes. What is the point of such rhetorical recantation?

• Explore Atwood's biblical references. In what ways does the novel highlight things differently from the Bible or give new meanings to the same characters, events, or words? Why might Atwood draw attention to them through these allusions?
  

• What do you make of Offred's eventual fate? Does she escape? Does she get caught? Is the ending left intentionally indeterminate? On the one hand, we get the almost hopeful final lines from her: "I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light" (307) and information from "Historical Notes" about finding tapes of her voice recordings in Bangor, Maine, a "way-station" on "The Underground Femaleroad," suggesting that at least Offred may have escaped that far (315, 322, 323). On the other, also from "Historical Notes," we learn that the narrator was living in the early days of the Gileadean empire (316). This was followed by a middle-period during which the Great Purge indicates that an even more powerful, conservative, and totalitarian group succeeded the founders (318, 322). The narrator may well have been caught up during one of the sweeps which "liquidated" even the top members of the original regime (318). What is the purpose of these multiple inconclusive endings?
  
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Rawida Komkai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

August 31, 2022

Reading Response: The Handmaid’s Tale

Pure Speculation: Mental and Verbal Exercise in The Handmaid’s Tale

Speculative fiction, as Atwood calls The Handmaid’s Tale and as she demonstrates in unrolling the past, present and future into one novel, is intensely active storytelling. “The difference between lie and lay” lies in, as it were, the oxymoronic act to “lie still” (47). To be incredibly active while seeming inactive is the narrator’s key to survival in Gilead and the author’s strategy of getting away with speaking an inconvenient truth in our contemporary world. How else can one write such hard facts but through the teeth of fiction? To stay real by lying, as the narrator does, “neatly as they, and step sideways out of my own time. Out of time. Though this is time, nor am I out of it.” This novel, mirroring darkly its narrator Offred’s nighttime travels, spins out of its own time—a product of its time ironically trying to grasp different times. The language of this act of complete guesswork that is rooted in history and current events, then, is magnificently paradoxical: constantly naysaying what it is actually doing, creating similes and disclaiming their links, using facts and presenting them as fiction.

Atwood’s frustrating passage in chapter 6 that refuses a tantalizing connection between her similes is elaborated in and explained by the beginning paragraph of chapter 7. In the earlier chapter, the narrator forces dissociation in this manner: “The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa. Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way” (43, emphasis mine). Paradox is the eternal struggle between two valid things which cannot be true at the same time yet true. The passage beginning chapter 7 deconstructs the tempting relationship between words and reality in discussing men’s description of their role in sex: “All this is pure speculation. I don’t really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it” (47). The narrator’s difficult problem of perception is explained here as the dangerous temptation of believing reality through hearsay. Like Offred, the author and the reader in their distorted circumstances, must constantly remind themselves to disown what they have a tendency to put too much stock in. What weight is the evidence of words against actuality? “I refuse to say my,” Offred declares even earlier (18) and forgets quickly the reality that she does not own her room, slipping easily into the lure of rhetorical tricks, the habit of language: “I called it mine” (59).

The Handmaid’s Tale, with its proliferating similes and self-conscious reminders of the disjunction between what actually happens and the words for it, is therefore imagination hard at work, not least because it envisions a world that could be, necessarily from a world that is, even as it invents a linguistic mirror through which to see it.

Works Cited

“An Interview with Margaret Atwood on Her Novel The Handmaid's Tale” <http://www.randomhouse.com/resources/bookgroup/handmaidstale_bgc.html>.

Atwood, Margaret.  The Handmaid’s Tale.  London: Joseph, 1979.

Nalini Pongsawang

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

September 6, 2011

Reading Response: The Handmaid’s Tale (revised)

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