Themes & Imagery

• Survival

  • Storytelling as an act of survival recording on audiotapes in the hope someone will hear them one day and know about her struggle
  • O's tale is an act of resistance to the regime as the Handmaid's are forbidden to speak
  • "I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it"
  • "If this is a story I'm telling then I have control over the ending"
• Language

  • Power for those who can manipulate it to reflect their beliefs
  • A tool to oppress and liberate
  • Handmaids can only speak in Biblical phrases "Blessed be the Fruit" and have to listen to passages read by the Commanders & Aunts who reinforce oppression under the name of God
  • Scrabble gives O access to "making" words saying "I would like to put them in my mouth...The letter C,Crisp" - gustatory imagery to show how starved she is of language and intellect
  • Zygote (sperm and egg fertilise), Larynx (refers to the voice box)
• Female Body

  • Becomes a battleground for ideology, violence and control
  • O feels like a "prize pig" after being prepared for the Ceremony
  • She dissociates herself "what he is fucking is the lower part of my body"
  • Bodies considered precious but made to feel shameful: bathing "I avoid looking down at my body...because i don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely"
  • New Right taken extreme in Western World
• Objectification of Women

  • Symbolism of wombs "she said think of yourselves as seeds ...let's pretend we're the trees"
  • Moira's escape-Aunt Lydia says "for our purposes your hands and feet are not essential" as her feet are beaten with metal cables
• The Garden

  • Recurring motif of tulips to symbolise the female reproductive organs
  • Yonic imagery (relating to female gentalia) as O feels nothing more than a vehicle for pregnancy
  • "The tulips are red" "the tulips along the border are redder than ever...thrusting themselves up"
  • "Shedding their petals one by one, like teeth" - refers to theory of a male phobia in which a vagina could castrate a penis when penetrating her
• Doubles

  • Depersonalisation of Handmaids as always have sometime to kep watch of them "Under his eye"
  • Ofglen when shopping "doubled I walk"
• Knowledge

  • Novel questions whether too much knowledge is dangerous and Modern Prometheus furthers this idea
  • All narrators self-educated and have a thirst for knowledge
  • V ignores all warnings about the dangers of curiosity from his father, teachers & nature