The Handmaid's Tale

Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
ISBN: 0771008139

Plot Summary: A theocratic dictatorship has overthrown the government of the United States and created the Republic of Gilead, in response to what it perceives as widespread immorality, corruption, and increasing infertility. In this dystopic future, women are not allowed to read, or even venture outside their homes except to run errands. In addition to the wives men already have, they are also allowed to take "handmaids," presumably still-fertile women who can provide them with now desperately needed offspring. A woman known only as Offred, a patronymic indicating only the name of the man she serves, feels stifled by her current life, remembering as she does the way things were before Gilead was founded, when she could live, love, and work as she chose. The only roles available to women in Gilead society are as wife, handmaid, or - for those who want a bit more freedom - prostitute. Offred makes plans to escape, but her ultimate fate remains unknown.


Critical Evaluation: This book is somewhat didactic in tone, contrasting a United States full of pornography and moral corruption with the hypocritical, totalitarian Gilead. However, the scenario it depicts, one in which men have complete power over multiple women who are used for their childbearing abilities alone, both in polygamist sects in this country and in other countries where multiple female partners are acceptable for one man. Its view of environmental degradation is also an imminent danger, with fertility rates already declining for both humans and animals, and climate change bringing about unexpected environmental consequences. However, although the reader is not ultimately told what becomes of Offred in her attempts to escape Gilead's clutches, the epilogue to the book, taking place in the future where Gilead has fallen and a new, freer society taken its place, gives hope that Offred's surroundings will eventually cease even if she herself does not live to see it. Margaret Atwood's writing style in this book is dense and frequently disjointed, befitting its flashback narrative, but the picture she paints of a nightmarish potential future is both powerful and plausible.


Reader's Annotation: Offred, a handmaid in the theocratic Republic of Gilead, depends on the man she serves for her survival, just as he and his wife depend on her and the other handmaidens for their fertility in a world racked by war and infertility. Offred can remember a time when she and other women had autonomy to love, act and believe as they chose, and longs to escape her current life regardless of the cost.

About the Author: Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She spent most of her childhood in Canada's various wildernesses and forests, due to her father's career as an entomologist. She began writing at an early age, doing so professionally starting at age 16, and received a Bachelor's degree in English, with minors in Philosophy and French, from Victoria University at the University of Toronto. She initially pursued graduate studies at Radcliffe and Harvard, but withdrew after failing to finish her dissertation. She has written fiction, criticism, and poetry, for which she has received numerous awards and honors, and lives in Ontario with her longtime companion, with whom she has one child.

Genre: Science Fiction, Fiction: Dystopia


Curriculum Ties: Women's Studies, World Religions

Booktalking Ideas:

Hook: The handmaids are shown feminist videos from the past, but many of their slogans are not blacked out, as other writing would be.
Approach: Scene-based
Ideas for Booktalk: "Every child a wanted child": formerly a pro-choice slogan, now used to remind women that every child they bear, unless hopelessly deformed, is desperately wanted. In the same scene, the women are shown old snuff films, and are also frequently reminded that any sexual contact, including rape, is ultimately their responsibility.

Hook: Offred takes her pleasures in small places, from stealing butter to use as skin lotion to vaguely sexually teasing young male soldiers by waving her hips in her voluminous outfit.
Approach: Character-based
Ideas for Booktalk: Offred is no longer supposed to care at all about her looks, her insides being the only important part of her body. She is so fully clothed when in public that her body shape is not even discernible, yet the mere existence of a female form under her Handmaid's outfit. Need to still feel desirable, have sexual or even personal agency, even if only briefly and in small doses.

Reading Level/Interest Age: Adult

Challenge Issues: Offensive language, sexual content, religious viewpoint.
This book presents a dystopic vision of a Fundamentalist Christian regime gone totalitarian, one which Christians of many stripes may find offensive. Taking anti-abortion and anti-feminist rhetoric to the extreme, the book depicts women living in a society that has, in essence, sent them back to the Dark Ages. Although Offred's personal religious views are never made clear, though, her primary objection is to a fascistic government cloaking its tactics in religious rhetoric, not necessarily the religion itself. The narrator often uses crude language, and does not shy away from describing her sexual encounters. That said, she gains little pleasure from these encounters, primarily designed to create children or give pleasure to the man, depending on context, and this lack of genuine lovemaking in Gileadian society indicates the degree to which the country is destined to ultimate failure. Sex without love or affection, the book appears to say, is meaningless and unfulfilling regardless of its intended purpose. Although this book may be hard to stomach, or even to follow, for younger readers, those with the willingness and maturity to attempt it may come away pleasantly surprised by its ultimately optimistic tone about the fate of the human race.

Why I Chose This Book: Although I grasped the book's feminist and anti-extremist messages when I first read it as a teen, I failed to grasp the implications it had for this country's present as well as its future. Atwood's allegory, like Orwell's 1984, may be related to current events and socio-political situations, not merely hypothetical ones or regimes of the past. The narrator's language choices, which struck me as salacious when younger, now seem yet another form of rebellion on Offred's part, a symbolic gesture of her desire to return to a freer state of being. This book, in the final analysis, gives hope that even though tyrannical regimes may rise to power, their inherent natures guarantee that they cannot last forever.