Handmaid's Tale

• Responsive to

  • Anti-feminist, right-wing and evangelist women like Tammy Faye Bakker or Phyllis Schlafly (satirized in the character of Serena Joy)
• Critical of

  • Radical, second-wave, separatist feminism
  • Warns that radicalism goes both way (Offred's mother and Moira)
• Atwood is an eco-feminist


  • Motifs of climate change being complicit in the oppression of women
  • Addresses pressing global issues
• Atwood: '"You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur."'
• Aunts

  • Indoctrinators of the Handmaids
  • Aunt Lydia as the blonde beast of birkenau- irma grese
• Gilead preys on the social confusion and unrest following the women's liberation movement
• Gilead

  • Gynocentic misogyny and traditional misogyny combined in one milatiristic socio-religious order
  • The work women do conspires to maintain the subjection of their own kind
• Reference to "familiars"

  Draws parallels to Atwood's ancestor Mary Webster who was tried for witchcraft
• Reference to past abuse of women in the workplace, with a glowing "old watch"=radium girls
• Moira: 'Quotes Tenyson "ours is not to reason why"- feminists don't question their oppression, but simply fight against it. Suggests a hopeless battle, as in the Charge of the five Thousand.'
• Rigney: 'redeems all men by his act of saving Offred, although it may mean his own death'
• Miner: 'the novel's only significant male characters are in fact eerily similar'
• Miner: 'whatever political commitment Offred might be capable of making vanishes in light of her commitment to romance'
• Miner presents the idea that Offred finds herself enclosed in the narrative of a fairytale rather than an agent rebellion
• Atwood: 'all men have power, and all women don't. That is not true'
• Atwood's quote

  Link to intra-masculine marginalisation as per Connell
• the relationship with the Commander is still a game of sexual power
• RW Connell's four aspects of masculinity

  • hegemony
  • subordination
  • marginalisation
  • complicity
• a critique to modern hegemonic masculine values and roles
• Semiotic analysis of masculinity in the novel would be beneficial: where are there differences between masculine and feminine —> power and the lack of it
• Suparna Banerjee argues that Luke is a memory of many that Offred uses to escapes the reality
• According to Miner, Luke uses his knowledge about etymology to enforce traditional gender roles and inequalities
• • Selective and revisionist theonomy
  • Link to America as a Puritan nation, and the rise of the far right under Reagan
  • Racism is justified by the analogy of the Sons of Jacob and Ham
  • “Religion is the opiate of the masses” Marx
  • A puritan minister named Connor Mather termed women “Handmaids of the lord”
• Docile body

  A body that is docile may be subjected, used transformed and improved
• Docile body

  • Achieved through surveillance and interior gaze
• Moral pornography

  A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of the current relation between the sexes
• "temple prostitutes doomed to a kind of purdah in perpetuity"
• How the handmaids are dressed signifies this dichotomy of purity and prostitution
• Having a name

  Crucial to identity
• The Commander controls Offred's moisturizer


  Able to control her exterior body and how she feels about it
• Unreliability, but constant revisions feed into the realisation of how the narrative is being recorded, and make Offred more human
• Piexoto and Wade have control over the narrative, and therefore disregard the emotional parts in the search for a quantifiable "HISstory" rather than an honest "HERstory"
• Offred the silenced Handmaid who becomes Gilead's principal historian: '(Howells)'
• The recording leads to the mixed chronology of the piece, and perhaps reinforces the fact Offred has been brainwashed into giving up writing all together
• The fact it is a recording means that it and its revisions are stream of consciousness, and therefore feed inot the post-modernist tradition
• The writer is always a reporter of truth, even when her subject is ficional: 'Barbara Hill Rigney'
• Gilead establishes stringent "patterns of life" and therefore mimics the cycle of life that Gileadean women have to lead : conception, birth, death
• her little message in a bottle: '(Atwood)'
• choice of a female narrator turns the traditionally masculine dystopian genre upside down: '(Howells)'
• Oppression is the mother of metaphor: 'Borges'