The Handmaid's Tale Notes PDF

The Handmaid’s Tale https://www.yorknotes.com/alevel/english-literature/the-handmaids-tale-2017/key-quotations CHARACTERS Offred *Offred could have a paragraph all to herself but all others should be written about characters in relation to Offred Notes - Protagonist, first person narrator...

The Handmaid’s Tale https://www.yorknotes.com/alevel/english-literature/the-handmaids-tale-2017/key-quotations CHARACTERS Offred *Offred could have a paragraph all to herself but all others should be written about characters in relation to Offred Notes - Protagonist, first person narrator - Novel chronicles her tale - Dystopian events unfold through her eyes and the changes in the world are seen through her eyes - Tells her story through numerous flashbacks and by directly addressing the reader (this serves to add suspense to the narrative as she only shares information when it is critical to the story but it also emphasises the different version of the truth that exist in reality which are highlighted by indoctrination) - Seemingly passive but she is resistant in her thoughts (Is she a resistor or an enabler of this society? - could argue either way) - She is supposed to be indoctrinated in her mind but she does not lose sanity, she thinks things again this dystopian world, keeps memories close to heart, connection to old life is a form of resistance - Handmaid for Commander Fred and his wife Serena Joy - Haunted by her past, had a lover (Luke) and a child (girl) that was taken away from her - Memories and love keep her from losing sanity - Secret meeting with the Commander where they play Scrabble and talk, she values his companionship to an extent - Strong attraction to Nick and sleeps with him at Serena’s request - Somewhat ambiguous ending, suggested that she is taken away from Commander’s house by the Resistance but it appears to be members of the Eyes who take her away Quotes - “Worthy vessel” (related to role as a handmaid. All characters are seen for just one aspect of their humanity and this is what dystopia does, takes this idealistic framework and corrupts it in some way and thus a loss of humanity.) - “The amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing” (all the boredom she has as the handmaid) - “Holding out her arms to me, being carried away” (about losing her daughter, haunting past, trying to escape) - “I would like to steal something from this room” “It would make me feel that I have power” - “I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I could once do, how others saw me.”  - “I want to steal something” - “I believe in the resistance as I believe that can be no light without shadow, or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.” (Idea of no matter how restrictive a society, there will still always be a form of resistance, a glimmer of hope) - “I didn’t want to live my life on her terms” - “What I coveted were the shears” - “I envy the Commander and his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal.” (As handmaid not seen or noticed) - “I make a point of keeping track. I should scratch marks on the wall … but what would be the use, this isn’t a jail sentence, there’s no time here than can be done and finished with” - “And so I step up into the darkness within; or else the light.” - “I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia” (Is the first person narrator reliable? We are listening to a series of tapes recorded by Offred. A lot of unknowns. This quote tells us this is a catalogue story, it has been curated for our ears. As much as we want to believe everything that Offred does, it is a first person narrative. Shows us story is flawed and is a bit interpretive OR shows us we can trust her because she is being truthful in admitting her faults) - “I don’t want to be a doll hung up on the wall.” As she tells the tapes about her life - in Gilead and before - she presents herself appealingly. She is no patsy for the current regime. She wishes to re-establish in Gilead two feelings rigorously suppressed: she wishes to talk and she hungers "to commit the act of touch" (2:14). As they are being indoctrinated to become Handmaids, she and the other women whisper, lip read, and hold hands in the semi-darkness when the Aunts are not looking (1:4), and she sneaks into the lavatory to talk with her friend Moira (13: 94-95) and touch fingers through a hole in the wall of the stalls (15:116). At the same time, Offred is savvy about how to live under the constraints of Gilead. She recognizes the social and power relations and conflicts that impinge upon her life. She notes the signs of the Commander's wealth and power, such as the model of car that he drives. She analyses her fellow housemates as individuals and roles. The Handmaid is attentive to those in low positions, such as the housekeepers (called Marthas). When she meets her shopping-mate and fellow Handmaid Ofglen, Offred is apprehensive, refusing to be drawn into a conversation about the on-going war: Ofglen "may be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name. I can't take the risk" (4:26). She sees Nick the chauffeur as a questionable character: in a lowly job, with apparently some shortcoming because the regime had not issued him a woman, with, as Offred notes, something fishy about him. "Perhaps he is an Eye" As the Handmaid recounts these episodes early in the book, she also looks back fondly to her life before the coup. She remembers the control she felt when she had her own money and clothes, when she could jog and go to the laundromat, and when she had family and friends. She looks back with longing and love for her husband Luke and her daughter, reminisces about her friend Moira, and thinks of her mother. Finally, at least for some readers, the Handmaid engages sympathy because she has some endearing academic traits. She loves words, she loves to listen to them, to play with their meanings, to explore the play, to take figurative words literally and literal words figuratively, to examine roots and derivations (2:15). She remembers Cambridge as it was before Gilead, with its shops and professional offices, its universities and libraries, its ice cream shops and movie-houses. Commander Fred Notes - Important and powerful man in Gilead - Married to Serena Joy - Conducts secret meetings with Offred under the claim to make her life more bearable, they play Scrabble and he gifts her with illegal materials - Relationship with Offred is up for debate, either honest and truthful or had some ulterior motive Quotes - “He has something we don’t have, he has the word” - “I’d like you to play Scrabble with me” - “If anyone asks, tell them you’re an evening rental.” (Take Offred to Jezebels. See theme of resistance. Even people who this system is supposed to be serving do things that go against this society but they are not going to pay the repercussions of their resistance, lower class people are on chopping block) Serena Joy Notes - Former television star - Married to Commander Fred - Busies herself with hobbies such as crafts and gardening - Condescending towards Offred - Acts as a foil to Offred, mean and condescending but also had a completely different life before, almost shell of former self, told unable to have child, takes away key aspect of her confidence, transformation from what she was to what she is now) Quotes - “She was a malicious and vengeful woman” Moira *Foil and also inspiration to Offred, try to write paragraph about Offred and Moira Notes - Offred’s outspoken college friend - Fierce feminist and resistor of new ways of Gilead - Escapes from Rachel and Leah Centre and ends up working as a prostitute at Jezebel’s - Offred is saddened by her story as Moira seems to have accepted her entrapment and has not continued to openly strive for liberty (shows effect of regime)  - A realist - Character Offred knows before and after regime, can see changing of relationship, mirrors the times Quotes - “friendships were suspicious” - “had mechanical ability, she used to fix her own car, the minor things” - “Moira had a bad reputation” - “She is a cunning and dangerous woman” - “Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose” - “Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure.” (She escapes from the red centre and Offred says that all the handmaids were looking at her and they had already accepted their lives there.) - “I don’t know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw her again” Ofglen Notes - Offred’s shopping partner - Part of the resistance (Mayday) - Kills herself to avoid capture - Companion - We are very judgemental of Offred and question if she actually resisted but her conversation with Ofglen are a big form of resistance, very brave and courageous because so dangerous - Another form of inspiration for Offred in not accepting status quo, being able to live in the society but also look to the future Quotes - “replaceable” (a few days later there is a new Ofglen) The Marthas Notes - The dutiful servants of the ‘noble’ families Offred’s Mother Notes - Outspoken feminist from 60s and 70s (2nd wave of feminism) - Sent to the Colonies after the changeover of power - Lot of similarities between Moira and Offred’s mother but Moira can still have children so taken to be trained but Offred’s mother can’t so sent to the colonies so they don’t have to deal with her radical nature - Also a form of inspiration for Offred, gets things done, confident Quotes - “They aren’t a patch on a woman except they’re better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?” - “I think of my mother, sweeping up deadly toxins … I can’t quite believe it. Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pzazz will get her out of this. She will think of something.” (Moira tells Offred at Jezebels that Offred’s mother has ended up in the colonies, the mother daughter relationship is still ambiguous, don’t know full story but ultimately her mother so cares for her deeply) Nick Notes - Works as a driver and gardener for Commander Fred and Serena Joy Quotes - “His cap is tilted at a jaunty angle” (Might seem trivial but in a society where conforming is so important, anything out of place is a cause for great concern, foreshadows that he will break the rules in some way) Luke Notes - Offred’s husband before her handmaid days - Cheated on first wife with Offred - Father of Offred’s daughter - Luke and their daughter haunt Offred’s thoughts - Offred is unsure about what happens to him, whether he was killed, captured or managed to escape - Very ambiguous feeling towards him as he had an affair and sometimes patronised Offred but at same time lots of love between them and Offred thinks about him often with happy memories Quotes - “Already he’s starting to patronise me. Then I thought, already you’re starting to get paranoid.” (When they take away woman’s rights to have a bank account, the beginning of the end) Aunt Lydia and Aunt Elizabeth Notes - Ladies in charge of Rachel and Leah Centre - Undertake roles of ‘re-education’ extremely seriously - Utilise violence and brutality - Have absolute and utter control of women at centre  - Teach distorted version of Christianity - Offred shares their disturbing teaching epigrams throughout the novel’s flashbacks (she recalls what they say and how they try to reeducate them to believe other things) - Aunt Lydia leads the Salvaging - Moira escapes in Aunt Elizabeth’s clothes after disarming her - Pivotal as turned women on women, women are teaching other women to degrade themselves and become less Quotes - “Why expect one woman to carry out all the functions necessary to the serene running of a household? It isn’t reasonable or humane. Your daughters will have greater freedom.” (They teach this belief that this is good for this women, they should be living their lives this way) - “What we’re aiming for, " says Aunt Lydia, "is a spirit of camaraderie among women. We must all pull together” (Deep indoctrination about the role of women being different to the role of men) Janine (Ofwarren) Notes - Woman who attended the same training as Offered at Rachel and Leah Centre - Has a child as a handmaid but it is revealed baby was not fathered by her commander - Loses her sanity (see dangers of what centre can do to someone) - Offred is resistor in terms of Ofwarren because Offred keeping her sanity is her form of resistance in this regime Professor James Darcy Pieixoto Notes - Analyses and interprets the tapes of Offred’s story in the future - Studies Offred’s story as a true historical narrative - Implores for Offred’s tale to be understood rather than judged - Quite similar to how historians today study historical literature, don’t put our own moral values onto history Quotes - “We must be cautious about passing moral judgement upon the Gileadean. Surely we have learned by now that such judgements are of necessity culture-specific” - “Our job is not to censure but to understand” FORM, STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE Form and Genre Dystopian Fiction - A dystopia is an imagined fictional future world straight out of a nightmare - Word comes from Greek meaning ‘not-good-place’ and is deliberate inversion of utopia  - Typical tropes: depiction of a society ruled by totalitarian government, a complete disregard among the ruling elite for the human rights of the individual and the aftermath of some kind of epic environmental disaster - Writers work with this genre to ‘forth tell’ rather than ‘foretell’; in other words they are less concerned with predicting the future than with expressing their worries about the contemporary society in which they live - Decision to use a female narrator puts an interesting spin on the traditionally masculine form of dystopian fiction, which Coral Ann Howells sees as evidence of Atwood’s homing in on both the genre’s satiric function and on the themes of patriarchal tyranny and absolute social control. Speculative Fiction - Not science fiction because invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent and the whole other part to the book which is Offred’s interior monologue - That has to do with experiencing of and responding to the events rather than the fact itself; it’s how the fact feels to a human being - Precisely because Offred remembers the time before the Republic of Gilead established its appealing theocratic dictatorship that she is the idea narrator; indeed this perspective is essential to the telling of the tale - Her memories of the time before the establishment are critical, providing the most startling points of contrast between the recent past and the reality of the present, as well as a reference point for future historians like Professor Pieixoto Slave Narrative - Narrator is treated as second class citizen, subject to sexual abuse, deprived of her child and dispossed of all civil rights - Offred speaks into a tape recorder, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” - HMT testifies to potential restorative and therapeutic effects of storytelling, as Offred tries to represent her existence as a narrative rather than a lived experience. - Perhaps we might interrupt her storytelling as a way of desensitising herself to the horrors of her situation, or of gaining some perspective of it I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one. - This serves to authenticate and legitimise the literary form of the memoir or diary as perhaps the fundamental method of communication for the oppressed Romance Fiction  - While the narrator wants to imagine these men (Luke, Commander, Nick) as unique: Luke as her “real love”, husband and father to her child; the Commander as her Gileadean “sugar-daddy” - powerful, distant, in control of her future; Nick as her illicit love, companion in crime, the novel’s only significant male characters are in fact eerily similar - Luke’s reaction to the loss of Offred’s post at the library after the Gileadean revolution is, at best, ambivalent; “It’s only a job”, he says. - Uneasy similarities exist between the nature of Offred’s connections with Luke and the Commander; most obviously her illicit sexual relationships with each of them begin in precisely the same location. The hotel room where she once met Luke when having an affair behind his first wife’s back is where the Commander takes her for illicit sex, thus betraying Serena Joy. “Everything is the same, the very same as it was, once upon a time. The drapes are the same, the heavy flowered ones that match the bedspread, orange poppies on royal blue … All is the same.” - In highlighting the fundamental similarity between Offred’s lost love and her patriarchal oppressor, Atwood poses uncomfortable questions about the extent to which Luke was ever really the romantic hero the narrator sometimes describes. - Even Nick who apparently helps Offred escape at the end of the novel, suppressed her capacity for independent resistance; after Offred begins her affair with Nick, she loses all interest in Mayday and in the possibility of escape … whatever political commitment Offred might be capable of making vanished in light of her commitment to romance. - In some ways it seems Offred’s desire to narrate a romance of fairy story closes off other plot options: what would happen if she were to work with Ofglen, to spy on the Commander and communicate his secrets to Mayday? Structure Movement in time: Night and Day - HMT, as a typically postmodern text, does not keep moving forward in time chronologically; instead, while the episodes set in Gilead move forward towards the dramatic climax of Offred’s arrest, we are also periodically taken back in time to the days before the Gileadean revolution - The clearest demarcations within the novel are between the sections dealing with past and present i.e “Night” and we might assume, “Day”. - In the “Night” sections, Offred describes past events and memories, some of which include her husband, Luke and her daughter, while elsewhere in the narrative she describes the daily round of events in her present life as Commander’s Handmaid Binary Opposites, Juxtapositioning, patterning and doubling - Structuralists argue that since the meaning of a word is not actually contained in its name, we tend to construct its meaning by relating each words to its opposite - They characterise words as symbols that signify society’s ideas and suggest that meaning emerges from the gap between two opposing concepts, thus in order to grasp an idea such as masculinity we refer to its binary opposite, femininity - Layers of inferential meaning can emerge when a writer consciously structures a text using core oppositions and patterns like this, and in HMT Atwood makes frequent use of this technique by inviting the reader to consider essential dichotomies, such as:  - Masculinity and femininity - Regeneration and decay - Physicality and spirituality - Present and past - Fertility and sterility - Inviting the reader to consider similar or contrasting ideas or concepts can shed light on them both, especially in these examples - Offred’s sexual encounter as the mistress of firstly Luke and then the Commander, which take place in the same hotel bedroom - The juxtapositioning of Offred’s encounters with the Commander and Nick on the same night - Janine’s two near-identical nervous breakdowns, firstly in the Red Centre and then following the Particicution - Offred’s view of herself in her Handmaid’s uniform and in the costume chosen for her by the Commander on their night out at Jezebel’s - Moira and Janine as foils; the narrator and the first Offred as doppelgängers - The two Offreds and the two Ofglens Epistolary Fiction - Epistolary novel is comprise of a series of documents, often taking the form of a series of letters exchanged between various characters or a sequence of diary entries - The HMT is perhaps best seen as a text that contains epistolary elements as opposed to a fully fledged example of the genre, as individual chapters are reminiscent of entries in an ongoing journal - Also possible to see the inserted story of Moira’s escape as rather like a letter - In handing over narrative control to another person, Atwood can tap into a different viewpoint while not making use of a traditional omniscient narrator - The certainty associated with the all-seeing all-knowing overarching narrative point of view would go completely against the grain of the novel, in which Offred’s difficulties with telling her story is one of the most crucial themes The Historical Notes - Atwood’s decision to switch narrative voices at the end of the book, replacing Offred with the Cambridge academic Professor Pieixoto, comes as a major shock, as a male critic appears to deconstruct the Handmaid’s challenge to masculine power and authority - The metafictional Historical Notes that follow Offred’s narrative do little to gloss or in any sense finalise the text for the disorientated reader, whatever Pieixoto might think. - There is also a thread of detection running through the text, as the central mystery - the solution to which Pieixoto fails to spot, although the attentive reader probably will, is that of the narrator’s real name; of the trainee Handmaids mentioned at the start of the novel, only one - June - is not specifically linked with another character as the story develops. - Another puzzle is the meaning of the cryptic message hidden by Commander Fred’s previous handmaid - These detective elements add another level of genre interest to an already dazzlingly multifaceted text Language In Gilead, language itself is under threat - literacy is being slowly eradicated as images replace writing on public signs. In some ways therefore, the HMT is all about the power of language and the problems we have with it; this in a world in which personal power, pleasure and satisfaction can be found in being able to play a simple word game like Scrabble The Novel’s Title - Atwood signals one of the central themes of the text, with a deceptively simple yet powerfully evocative title that gets straight to the heart of things - The implications of the word ‘Handmaid’ neatly encapsulate Offred’s predicament as a woman caught in a uneasy and twisted three way relationship, but it is the connotations of the word ‘tale’ that are the most striking - As well as evoking the idea of a ‘fairy tale’ - a simple children’s story too fantastical to be true - the term taps into our awareness of various negative idioms, such as an ‘old wives tale’, meaning a myth or piece of unreliable gossip, or ‘telling tales’, meaning spitefully getting someone into trouble. It evokes Shakespeare references to ‘a tale told by an idiot’ in Macbeth and seven-year-old Mamillius’ astute observation in The Winter’s Tale that ‘a sad tale’s best for winter’. As Pieixoto states, it is a label attached to Offred’s narrative ‘partly in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer’. - What difference would be made by changing the novel’s title to The Handmaid’s Narrative or The Handmaid’s History Chapter Headings - In HMT, they are often startling in apparent everyday ordinariness; ‘Shopping’ or ‘Nap’ for example. - Meanwhile, signs and symbols wobble in and out of focus, as when the reader discovers the mismatch between shopping as they know it and shopping in Gilead, where the brash logos of the typical high street or shopping centre have been replaced by religious pictograms because the Handmaids are forbidden to read Names and the naming process - Within Offred’s narrative as Prof Pieixoto points out, no one is identified by their real name; the narrator almost certainly used pseudonyms to protect others and Ofglen commits suicide rather than ‘name names’ under torture. - But without a name, how can anyone retain a sure grasp on their own identity? - We’re not even sure we know the narrator’s real name; the central protagonist is known only by her patronymic ‘Of/Fred’, which denotes her status as the Commander’s Handmaid. - As she declares: My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it like an amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably different past. - Other people have interpreted her name as:  - She is off-red, or not quite fully aligned with her role - She is offered up - She is offered, as in mis-read - She is afraid - Just as the narrator cannot read the subversive aphorism secretly carved into the wall of her bedroom cupboard by a previous Handmaid ‘nolite te bastardes carborundum’ meaning ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’, so the reader can struggle to decipher Offred’s own identity Titles - Classifies citizens into clearly defined and gendered groups Neologisms - Neologisms have entered language to reflect the new reality of everyday life. - Some of the words are portmanteau words or blends i.e. existing words that carry a resonant significance in the context of the theocratic dictatorship - Prayvaganza: compound word formed from words ‘prayer’ and ‘extravaganza’. Both words would seem to have positive connotations, but in context of Gilead, this word acquires a sinister negative overlay when applied to ostentatious public celebrations - Particicution: compound word from ‘participation’ and ‘execution’. Stresses that Handmaids are forced into complying with the scapegoating of an outsider, who is killed to solidify the crowd mentality of the in-group - Salvaging: blends diametrically opposed words ‘salvation’ and ‘savaging’ to convey something of the madness inherent in believing that executing someone can in some way save them - Underground Femaleroad: clearly emerged under the radar of the official regime that Moira describes to Offred, which must have been named in homage to the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves reach safety in the American Civil War era. It seems extremely unlikely that the regime itself would assign a name with such positive connotations of liberation to a network of safe houses designed to smuggle women northwards towards the Canadian border. To the Gileadean elite, this system would have been seen as a dangerous example of outright treachery. Ironically, in his lecture Prof Pieixoto refers to this network as the Underground Railroad, a further example of his supercilious and patronising humour that indicates a belief in the essential weakness of ‘frailty’ of women. Biblical Language - As a theocracy, the Republic is of course steeped in the language of the Bible, which it uses to shore up its norms and values. - “Blessed are the meek” pontificates Aunt Lydia, but in omitting the important second half of this Beatitude ‘for they shall inherit the earth’, she totally distorts Jesus’ original message that the oppressed will finally win the day. - The Republic that subjugates and oppresses women has called itself Gilead after ‘the mountain where Jacob promised his father-in-law, Laban, that he would protect his two daughters (Leah and Rachel)’ says Atwood  - Yet it chooses to pass over the awkward biblical description of Gilead in the Old Testament book of Hosea: ‘Gilead is a city of wicked men, stained with footprints of blood’ - The fundamentalists of the Republic are frequently engaged in sect wars - violent and bloody battles fought against Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious groups - Testifying, a term usually associated with a solemn Christian fundamentalist ritual in which the faithful describe how they gave up sin and embraced the love of God, has had its former meaning grotesquely wrestled out of shape in Gilead, where it means admitting to some past crime, real or often made up. - At the Rachel and Leah Re-Education Centre the trainee Handmaids are expected to admit past offences, such as illicit sexual activities (and this includes being a victim of rape) or having undergone an abortion, while the Aunts encourage the others to condemn them - The idea is to brainwash the Handmaids into accepting their current situation - On another occasion Offred recalls the way Aunt Lydia used to have the trainee Handmaid's chat a core Gileadean mantra: - “From each according to her ability, to each according to his needs… It was from the Bible, or so they said. St Paul again, in Acts.” - But Aunt Lydia is wrong to claim a biblical provenance here; these words are not from the Bible at all. In fact she is misquoting the political philosopher Karl Marx’s description of how a perfect communist society will be able to meet the needs of all its citizens, unlike the unequal distribution of wealth that occurs within a capitalist system. - Marx described organised state religion contemptuously as ‘the opium of the people’, meaning it leaves them in a state of stunned passivity and encourages them in mistakenly parroting his ideas as the equivalent of Holy Writ is downright funny - Beyond this, of course, Aunt Lydia is evening distorting Marx’s words in using them to vindicate the imbalance of power between men and women in Gilead, rather than accept his original meaning of everyone being provided for equally. On the other hand, the prepositions and pronouns she uses are significant; in this patriarchal theocracy, things are indeed taken from her and given to him. Puns and word play - Pen Is Envy: a saying of Aunt Lydia’s, this riff on the Freudian psychological term ‘penis envy’ is designed to warn the Handmaids off the very idea of writing. Sigmund Freud’s theory suggests that adolescent girls go through a period of severe psycosexual anxiety when they realise that they do not have a penis; Margeret Atwood is suggesting that what women envy is the power to express themselves in writing. - Nolite te bastardes carborundorum: meaning “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, the coded message left behind by the Commander’s previous Handmaid becomes a secret mantra for the narrator. It is written as a version of the Latin aphorism ‘Non illegitimi carborundum’, suggesting that the former Handmaid had not acquired it through official Latin lessons, but in a more informal way Images, Motifs and Symbols - Perhaps the most noticeable imagery clusters within the text are associated with Offred’s use of the natural world to create visual stimuli for the reader. These may be seen to function as  a kind of feminised language to counterbalance and challenge the harsh rhetoric and crass neologisms perpetuated by the Gileadean regime. - One especially noticeable imagery cluster centres on flowers, as their freedom to grow wild provides such a painful contrast with the circumscribed role of Offred herself. Red tulips come to represent the fertility of the Handmaid's themselves; very early in the novel Offred notes that ‘The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem; as if they had been cut and are beginning to heal there.’ - Serena Joy is a keen gardener, but symbolically as the tulips in her garden open out in their gorgeous crimson lushness, ‘the daffodils are now fading.’ - The identification of the Handmaid with the fertile tulip and the Commander’s wife with the dying daffodil is made explicit later on in the novel when Offred, feeling rebellious, sneaks down the living room determined to steal a ‘magic flower’. The one she settles on, a ‘withered daffodil’, is to be taken from Serena Joy’s vase. ‘The daffodils will soon be thrown out, they’re beginning to smell. Along with Serena’s stale fumes, the stench of her knitting.’ - Others symbols are - Items of clothing - Parts of the human (usually female) body - Nature’s miracles and fertile treasures The Motif of Doubles - For Offred, the anonymous woman who was in her room before her is her own ghostly double: ‘How could I have believed I was alone in here? There were always two of us. Get it over, she says’ (p. 305). - This motif of doubles recurs in the story of Ofglen: ‘Doubled, I walk the street’ (p. 33). - Yet Ofglen turns out to be more like Moira’s double than Offred’s, for she too is a rebel in disguise, a member of the Mayday Resistance movement and a whisperer of irreverent comments at the Prayvaganza. But her story does have an ending, for she commits suicide after the Salvaging (Chapter 44). - Whether women are rebels or willing victims, their chances of survival are slim, as the story of Janine illustrates. She appears and reappears, marking the various stages of a Handmaid’s career – from willing victim at the Rachel and Leah Centre where she almost has a nervous breakdown (Chapter 33), to her moment of triumph as the pregnant Ofwarren whose Birth Day is attended by all the Handmaids (Chapters 19 and 21). Her last, frightening, appearance is after the Particicution, where she holds a clump of bloodstained hair (Chapter 43). Janine has lost all hold on reality. She is also one of Offred’s doubles, a dreadful warning of what may happen if Offred, too, gives up hope. - Offred also tells the story of the Commander’s Wife, with flashbacks to her earlier career as a television personality on a gospel show in Chapters 3 and 8. We might say that Offred’s account presents Serena Joy as another of her own doubles, trapped like herself by Gileadean ideology. In one of her more curious anecdotes, Offred is disguised as Serena Joy when she has to wear her blue cloak to go with the Commander to Jezebel’s, and she is forced to look at her own face in Serena Joy’s silver mirror to put on her make-up. - Offred insists on telling the stories of other, silenced women. Her words contradict Gilead’s claims to absolute mastery and its myth of female submissiveness. We can describe her  narrative as symbolic: she writes on behalf of all women from the past and from the present who have no rights of representation. TOP 10 QUOTATIONS 1. “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of the print.” Offred reflects on her life before the Gileadean revolution as an ordinary woman whose life was never exciting or unusual enough to leave a permanent record. Now that newspapers are forbidden artefacts associated with the crime of reading, her point emphasises the invisibility of women within the context of the theocracy. With print having failed her, she has recourse to speech to tell her story, recording her voice on to a set of old cassette tapes. 2. “I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.” Here, Offred plays with two meanings of the verb ‘to compose’, i.e. ‘to calm oneself’ and ‘to create work of art’. On one level she needs to prepare herself with composure to undergo the Ceremony, during which she will participate in a surreal three-way sexual encounter with the Commander and Serena Joy. Underneath this, though, she must find a way of presenting an unreal doppelganger fashioned purely to endure this bizarre ordeal. Thus the quotation suggests the presence of two women, the ‘made thing’ she has faked in order to survive the Ceremony and the real Offred who is ‘something born’. In addition, these lines draw attention to the narrator’s conscious awareness that she is telling a story; she speaks of herself as being like a text in some ways - or at least a palimpsest (a piece of text in which, although the original writing has been wiped out, overwritten and altered, traces of the earlier writing remain) that has been deliberately overwritten. 3. “We are for breeding purposes: we aren’t concubines, geisha girls, courtesans … no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favours are to be wheedled, by them or us, there are no be no toeholds for love. We are two legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.” Offred analyses the nature of her role in Commander Fred’s life on the night she makes her first secret and forbidden visit to his study. She described herself as falling outside the category of mistress or desirable ‘other woman’, and the nouns ‘vesel’ and ‘chalice’ stress that it would be the child inside her that mattered, not the woman who carried it. Here, three types of women whose recognised roles are highly sexualised and juxtaposed with the holy purity of the religious iconography, stressing how in Gilead sexual pleasures and motherhood have become utterly severed. Offred described herself as virtually an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, insignificant other than for the child she could carry. 4. “Context is all.” This key phrase is, significantly, presented within its own micro paragraph. Playing Scrabble with Commander Fred makes Offred realise how everything changes when mapped onto a different time, place or set of circumstances. In pre-Gileadean days, Scrabble might have seemed like a dull board game for old people; in a world where women are forbidden to read, however it carried an unmistakable sexual charge, as illicit as if they were taking drugs. 5. “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I can’t see it in the dark but I trace the tiny scratched writing with the ends of my fingers, as if it’s a code in Braille. It sound in my head now less like a prayer, more like a command; but to do what?”  The mock-Latin motto of the Former Offred - don’t let the bastards grind you down - becomes a mantra for the narrator; even though for a long time sh does not understand its literal meaning. She murmurs it to herself as a prayer before undergoung the ordeal of the Ceremony, well before Commander Fred finally translates it for her. Her predecessor’s words transfrom the phrase into a talismanic chant that enables Offred to channel the spirit of her doppelgänger at key moments. As the narrator grows icnreasingly revellious, the phrases transmutes from a prayr into an exhoetation and reminder never to submit; for both the Offreds, as Chapter 46 makes it clear, suicide is preferable to ebing captured and exiled by the regime. 6. “Nature demands variety for men … it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan … Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day.” Commander Fred’s comment sums up his lazy and convenient assumption - or is it mere wishful thinking? - that men naturally are meant to want more than one woman, whereas woman are (presumably) designed to be faithful to one partner only. This breathtaking hypocrisy shows how, while the men of Gilead draw on biblical precedent to justify their system of arranged marriages and concubinage, they are equally happy to refer to a hazy belief in biological determinism as and when it suits them. The essential incompatibility of these two ideologies suggests the fundamentally misogynist nature of the theocracy. Moreover, his obsessive interest in female clothing and its symbolism is once again revealed. 7. “Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let’s get this over with or you’ll be here all night. Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly. It’s the least you can do.” Offred’s inability to make love to Commander Fred as if she means it sums up the tragic farce of their relationship. As one of the elite Sons of Jacob who codified and systemised the rules of the theocracy, Commander Fred decided to dispense with love in favour of arranged marriage and concubinage - yet even he finds it impossible to abide by the strict regulation he helped to establish. Officially he is allowed to have sex with Offred within the confines of the ceremony, yet these mechanical and loveless encounters offer him little pleasure. The supreme iront of this episode is that, having been forced into having Ceremonial sex, Offred is incapable of responding to him in any other way; in fact she finds this incident in some ways more futile and depressing than ever. The Commander has helped to ensure that what he most wants - an honest relationship with a woman who likes him for himself - can never happen. 8. “I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened.” Offred’s admission that she is recasting the account of her first night with Nick draws attention to the importance of telling stories within THT as well as to the novel’s status as a postmodern text. In positioning herself as a self-confessed unreliable narrator, however, Atwood paradoxically increased the reader’s belief that we can depend upon her essential truthfulness. While some details may be blurred, overall, Offred’s narrative conveys an unassailable sense of authenticity. 9. “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.” The last light of Offred’s narrative captures something of the postmodern brilliance of the text, with the tale, like the Handmaid herself, left frozen in time, poised between captivity and freedom. If this were the last line of the whole text, the ending would be totally open and unfixed; as it is, Prof Pieixoto’s Historical Notes suggest that she reaches the light at last.  10. “Are there any questions?” THEMES Storytelling as a means of resistance / as a survival strategy - https://freshwriting.nd.edu/essays/language-and-storytelling-as-a-means-of-resistance-in- a-handmaids-tale/#:~:text=Ultimately%2C%20language%20and%20storytelling%20becom e,influential%20rebel%20in%20Gilead's%20time. - https://philarchive.org/archive/LUZOSA - Ultimately, language and storytelling become the narrator’s primary and most effective methods of resisting Gilead. Through her storytelling, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale obtains the power to reclaim her identity and rewrite history, allowing her to become the most influential rebel in Gilead’s time. - The act of storytelling itself reveals the narrator’s hope, one of the primary means of resistance in a dystopian society that intends to dismantle all forms of ambition - The narrator’s decision to tell the story of her life demonstrates that she can imagine a future where society has changed and where there’s someone listening to what she has to say. Early in the novel, she reflects on her belief in a future audience. She recognizes that “if it’s a story, even in [her] head, she must be telling it to someone” since “you don’t tell a story to yourself” (39-40). Much of her narrative involves explanations of Gilead’s customs and rules, so it seems that the narrator imagines her audience to be far-removed from the present. She speaks with the hidden hope that they cannot remember Gilead or the world before it. She believes in the possibility for change in the world, which is a dangerous belief to have. Thus, the narrator has already proven herself to be more than a victim. - As critic Rob Luzecky claims, her willingness to tell the story “in the most adverse of worlds […] is her success in overcoming the retrograde concept of female as a demure other” (Luzecky 451). She may not have the “ability to start a generalised political revolution,” but she does have the bravery to carry out “the expression of this revolutionary hope” (Luzecky 445). - Because her actions are so dangerous, though, the narrator remains cautious and hesitates to ever explicitly define who her audience is. She instead spends time wondering at the size of her audience and imagining that her “you” could “mean thousands” of future readers who have escaped her fate (40). The narrator also reveals her hope through her retellings of the present. She builds alternate realities for those she loves, like Luke and Moira, always maintaining the belief that they escaped the dystopia. For example, she shares that she hopes Luke “will get [her] out, [they] will find her [daughter…,] and [they] will be all three of [them] together” (106). This alternate story “keeps [her] alive” (106), allowing her to cope with her trauma and resist Gilead - After making the initial decision to share her story, the narrator further resists Gilead by telling it in her own unique style and thus reclaiming her identity. - All of the Handmaids in Gilead are supposed to be replicas of one another. They all wear identical red capes meant to hide their faces and bodies, or any source of individuality, from  the world. They are supposed to embrace the present and forget the past versions of themselves. For the narrator, this would mean leaving behind the part of herself that worked in a library, a place filled with the power of words. - However, she rebels against this expectation and chooses to hold onto parts of her past identity by manipulating language. - She expresses her intelligence through unique word choices, creative puns, and vivid descriptions within her story. For example, before the Ceremony begins, she reflects that “The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow” (81). In this short reflection, she simultaneously manages to explain the Commander’s role in Gilead, play with the word “household,” reference wedding vows (a thing of the past for women in her current position), and critique the system by calling it “hollow.” This creative use of language ends up being a way for her to maintain individuality while also demonstrating that she has some power, even if that power is limited to her mastery of words. - She herself hints at this in another moment of contemplation about word choice. She notes that there’s a “difference between lie and lay” because “lay is always passive,” before continuing on to say, “I lie, then, inside the room” (37). She intentionally takes on the active role even if only through her language. - After this quote, the narrator transitions to telling stories about her life before Gilead, using language as a way to escape and remind herself of her old identity. She resists Gilead’s push towards uniformity by remembering what makes her unique. - Language not only allows the narrator to preserve her previous identity, but it also enables her to create a new one according to whoever she wants to be in the audience’s eyes. - Names, in particular, end up being a crucial component of one’s identity in Gilead. The leaders of Gilead renamed everything, using words as a subtle but powerful way to exert influence on all aspects of citizens’ daily lives. They even gave all the women new names directly tied to their Commanders’ names. For example, the narrator’s assigned name was “Offred,” or “of Fred” since she was the Handmaid for Fred. - Since names are used for self-identification, taking these away from the women was another way for the government to steal their individuality and redefine them as property. However, there was a flaw to this plan: all of the women can still remember their original names. The narrator uses this fact to her advantage. She recognizes that although it may seem unimportant, having control over her own name “does matter,” so she “[keeps] the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure [she’ll] come back to dig up, one day” (84). - Once again, language is the one aspect of her life that she can fully control. Her secret ownership of her name represents an act of resistance, along with her willingness to trade it, like “treasure,” as a way of revealing her true identity to those she trusts. - Notably though, she chooses not to reveal her name to the audience. This gives her power to redefine herself completely. - In her story, she’s no longer a handmaid or even Offred, since we know that’s only her government-assigned name. - Instead, she takes on the identity of a narrator. Gilead wanted to reduce her to her body, but she rebelled and gave herself a new, omniscient status through language. She illustrates this power when she claims that her “self is a thing [she] must compose, as one composes a speech” (66). These lines provide another example of her skill with words. Primarily, she’s saying she has to collect herself and calm herself down in preparation for the Ceremony. In this case, though, “compose” also refers to her ability to create a new identity, one that she’s entirely in control of as long as she continues to tell this story. The narrator has the freedom to do this secretly, as the government cannot access her thoughts, so she can continue opposing the dystopia without being caught. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is not primarily about the suppression of women but about their defiance. To what extent do you agree? ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a piece of speculative fiction about both the extensive oppression of women and their attempts to defy it, however their attempts exist in accordance with the misogyny that existed in the time before Gilead and this greatly limits the effectiveness of it. As philosopher Christopher Lasch would say, their protest is incurvatus in se or turned inward. This means that the protest throughout the narrative is lacklustre and far more about the actualisation of the self than the organised movement against total oppression. Atwood’s writing in the era of Reganism, where the rights of women were being pushed back against and thus the narrative reflects the internalised misogyny that each woman possessed via social conditioning that lowers one’s ability to protest effectively. Characters who defy do so by becoming more masculine as the culture hegemonic standard is that men are strong, and women are weak that existed long before Gilead came to be. Atwood seems to say with the lack of effective protest that the suppression of women existed before, it harmed women before, and it will continue to do so unless far greater pushback is made. Firstly, the character of Serena Joy is created such that her defiance comes from her personal brutality and masculinisation of the self. She is a character who smokes, a recurring motif seen in all protesting characters, however smoking itself is seen as a masculine trait throughout history, with instances such as the Nazi regime totally banning smoking for women when they came to power. Further, the image of a cigarette is incredibly phallic, and the fact that this phallus is used as a semiotic representor of protest reflects the nature of such an act for women. They see no other alternative but this masculine object to use as their defiance, the social conditioning from year of demonisation of feminine power stemming long before Gilead has run so deeply into the psyche that the characters look for a phallic object to protest using. Serena, in her smoking is described by Offred by putting ‘the cigarette out, half-smoked, decisively one jab and one grind’, this imagery is violent, it is the pressing of the cigarette downwards and crushing of its end. The use of the repetition of the determiner ‘one’ creates the imagery of conclusion, she has done this action before and she is used to pushing the cigarette out, she needs no further courses of action. These traits embody the stereotypical masculine, she has decisiveness and not the stereotypical questioning femininity that has been so greatly propounded by wider society. This line also relates to Offred later recognition that she must ‘steel herself’ when partaking in the ceremony, Serena seems steely here, she seems solid, she seems in practise and almost robotic. Further, the way Serena acts is told to be opposing those in in the same social class as her and Offred goes on to say that they ways she puts out her own cigarette is different to the ‘many series of genteel taps favoured by many wives’. Not only does this quote indicate that there is protest and the taking up of black-market objects across the female hierarchy, but it separates Serena and solidifies her as a far more masculine and expectation defiant character. The other wives are dainty and adhere to gender norms that were present pre-Gilead, their actions are graceful and ladylike, they are far more the ‘Angel in the House’ than Serena seems to be. In addition to this, to tap a cigarette is to remove the ash, presumably a fully smoked one, since the Wives cannot work they are reliant on their husbands for the money to buy the black-market cigarettes, yet Serena disrespects this, her cigarette is wasted. She defies the view of ‘waste not want not’. Atwood has stated previously that there are droughts and struggles to get things into the regime, but Serena does not care, her protest here is one of apathy. She removes herself from the feminine doting stereotype who cares over all small details. The character of Serena Joy is one of two opposing sides, on the one hand she is the defiant strong masculine woman who acts aggressively and appositionally, yet her protest is about becoming a man more than it is becoming a defiant individual. She is far more preoccupied with masculinising herself to remove from the expectation of women than fostering true escape from Gilead. This makes her character one entangled with both the suppression of women and the feminine and the defiance of expectation. Moreover, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ presents the extent that misogyny invades the self through the internalisation of Gileadean and pre-Gileadean ideas of women and stereotypes. Throughout the novel, the ideas of Gilead are presented through the character Aunt Lydia, who remains a construct within the mind of Offred until the near end of the book. In turning the character into a construction, Atwood is able to expertly show just how pervasive and condemning misogyny is to the minds of women, just how easily it finds itself inside the heads of those it infects. She uses no quotation marks around Aunt Lydia’s remarks to emphasise the degree at which it has been absorbed into each person. ‘Yours is a position of honour, she said’ is something Offred repeats in her internal narrative within the story. This idea has embedded itself in the protagonist and she speaks of how her ‘flesh arranges itself differently’ and she is less a woman and more of a ‘cloud’. Through this metaphorical imagery, the reader is shown the degree at which Gilead breaks the psyche of women. Offred is within Gilead to the point at which it has changed her flesh entirely and is no longer herself, no longer bodily autonomous. To include this detail, Atwood creates the impression that the ideas of the patriarchy imbed themselves so deeply within the women subjected to them that they gain the ability to almost change their existence and self-perception entirely. A feminist reader would conclude from this that the character of Offred is one afflicted with internalised misogyny, she becomes her own oppressor and the oppressor of those around her due to her social conditioning. This is backed up by the recollection of a session within the Red Centre that was reflective of the struggle sessions of Maoist China where abuse was shouted at a central, labelled dissident – in this case Janine. She says that ‘We meant it’, the ‘it’ in reference to the psychological attacks levied against the rape victim, yet she refuses to label it such due to well-placed shame, replacing it with a mediator, replacing it with the innocent and decent sounding ‘it’, she attempts to remove herself from her own actions. In using a collective pronoun, she is implicating the entirety of the Handmaidens who were with her in this abuse, she acts as though she understands their thoughts and in many ways she likely does as they were all put through the same cycle of abuse. It also creates the idea of togetherness and sisterhood; however, this is sisterhood that has been manufactured by the state to abuse someone, it is sisterhood that exists because of women coming together to attack another. So often in the modern media, women are pitted against one another and there seems a great manipulation to make them hate each other. This sisterhood is contrived, it is there because Gilead understands that they must give these women a slight amount of togetherness, so long as it is to attack another individual. This defiance here is a reflection of the patriarchy. Despite this internalisation, there are many instances of the creation of distinction between us and them within the narrative. Although much of what Aunt Lydia has told Offred is presented uncommented on and internalised, we are still seen some instances of the opposition to her word such as the criticism of her cherry picking of the Bible verse ‘Blessed are the meek’ and her decision to not ‘go on to say anything about inheriting the earth’. The Bible verse blessed are the meek was debated in DH Lawrence’s novel ‘The Rainbow’ wherein his defiant female Ursula character criticized the term due to the connotation it holds that you must be poor and weak to be ‘blessed’ by God. Her character believed that this term is used to satiate the poor and those in unfortunate positions. In many ways, Aunt Lydia’s statement of this term represents that, she is trying to say that the women are weak and must stay ‘meek’ to be drawn under God’s Grace, however Offred unpicks this and criticizes her use of the term in the fact it has so clearly been cherry picked for this purpose. It is meant to satiate the handmaids, lower their drive to protest and suppress them. Yet in Offred educated background she is aware that this is not the full quote and defies expectation by finishing it herself. A reader may believe that this means she sees a life outside of Gilead, that she believes she will ‘inherit the earth’, or rather there will be some form of balance restored. The use of ‘they’ within this recital also indicates a belief in a collective of Handmaids that will work to subvert the rule of Gilead, she does not talk about herself here and rather talks about a collective of the ‘meek’ who shall take over and repossess what they have been stripped of. Further, this idea of the collective ‘meek’ being together is emphasised in the idea that comes after Ofglen’s taking of Offred into the resistance. Offred thinks ‘there is an us then, there is a we’ before going onto say ‘what about them’. These three collective pronouns create the idea that there are two groups of people in Offred’s mind and that she is separate from the regime and its agents. The ‘them’ is in reference to the state actors that exist within Gilead and their violence. Offred separates herself from the violence in the recognition of a ‘them’, she is no longer a part of what has placed others on a wall, what has murdered those around her because she is able to self-actualise and join a group, to join a ‘we’, to join an ‘us’. and while this sentiment is incredible, it is short lived and just a few pages onward Offred reverts to the personal. The chapter ends with the pronoun ‘me’ in Offred joy that she was not taken away by the Eyes. This is a sad reflection that relates to the thesis that protest within Gilead is protest governed by laws of self-actualisation and not true revolutionary action. Offred creates an ‘us’, joins it, and, due to social conditioning, leaves it at the first sign of struggle. Finally, the way protest within the novel creates itself is in line with the concept of inward protest rather than outward revolutionary action. This is called incurvatus in se in the words of Christopher Lasch and generally forms itself in the self-actualisation over active opposition against injustice. One example of this is the stealing of a ‘withered daffodil’ from the kitchen by Offred. The daffodil is named after the Greek myth of narcissus and semiotically reflects narcissism. For Atwood to specify this flowers breed she creates the impression that what Offred is doing is to oppose standards of beauty set out by Gilead. However, a Laschian reader would take this symbol far differently. The fact that her protest is the taking of a symbol of narcissism is a reflection of the inability to protest non-narcissistically created in the 1980s during the creation of neo-liberalism. This phenomena praised the individuals actions over anything else and thus the individual saw themselves as more important than the collective group. Atwood, writing at a time where neoliberalism was being created, places her character past in the same time line as her own and thus Offred is afflicted by the same hegemonic standard. Offred exhibits much of the narcissistic tendencies that are noted by Lasch, namely the taking without much real action and what little action that does take place being to self-actualise. Her decision to take the Daffodil was arrived at because it ‘will not be missed’, this is an example of ‘meek’ defiance, and the aforementioned internalisation of such a thing. We have seen how Aunt Lydia wanted the handmaids to be ‘meek’ and Offred still acts in this way, she still internalises her message. The daffodil is ‘withered’, it is presumably about to be thrown out, it is dying. And Offred recognises this and takes it, because this protest is about self-actualising more than it is protest. Overall, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a novel that cannot be split into the suppression of women and their defiance. It must be viewed as a conjunction of the two; how the suppression of women harms their protest, how the protest of women changes their suppression. These two concepts exist in symbiosis, the protest of the female characters is in accordance to hegemonic weakening female stereotypes, the women are forced to internalise ideas about their own gender that are near impossible to refute Identity and the individual - A systematic stripping away of the self The novel examines our sense of self, or identity, and the challenges that can be brought to bear on the self by the state. The Gileadean state dictates the systematic stripping of identity from women – under its strict rule, women’s names are removed and they are reduced instead to gender roles: Handmaid, Econowife, and so on. Those who identify as feminist or are found to be infertile are reduced even further to the sub-human status of Unwoman. On page 94 Offred says, ‘My name isn’t Offred, I have another name’. We cannot be sure of Offred’s identity, but it is clear from her narrative that the story is focused on the story of one woman – it is The Handmaid’s Tale. Offred’s real name is very important to her and she does not reveal it to the reader. The Gilead label ‘Of-fred’ assigned to her indicates that she is owned by a man, a fact that she resists in her inner dialogue. - Concealed thoughts and emotions Offred’s account of her present existence often skims the surface of feeling. The opaque descriptions of the house she inhabits are devoid of emotion: ‘Mutely the varied surfaces present themselves’ (p. 89). But in the sections entitled ‘Night’, where she tells us that ‘The night is mine’ (p. 47), she explores her inner identity in personal memory. Her deprived and limited existence seems to have erased her identity so completely that even in private dialogue with herself, Offred’s emotions resist capture. Where do we find them? Her most private thoughts and feelings are concealed from us; they lie in the gaps between the text, in the literal white space on the page: ‘Why fight? That will never do’ (p. 237). Offred’s raw core of self exists in the unwritten word – she is not allowed to write. But we can read her grief and pain into these spaces; they make up the core of extreme emotion which threatens to make her lose all hope yet drives her to go on living. Here she is not Offred, but an individual human being with a past and a present self. The totalitarian state has erased women’s identities so efficiently and completely that the Commander is able to say jokingly about women: ‘For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four’ (p. 195). His simple equation evokes a chilling response: in Gilead, for women, the numbers do not make four, or even, as Offred anticipates, ‘five or three’. They add up to ‘Just one and one and one and one’. Women exist as a ‘disconnect’; they are not allowed to complete. - Men’s identities also erased It is not only the identity of women that the Gileadean state strips away: men, too, are reduced and objectified, as is evident in the bodies of victims that Offred and Ofglen see hanging on the Wall. The heads of these men are covered to hide their identity, and Offred says, ‘Their heads are zeros’ (p. 42). She compares them to dolls, scarecrows and stuffed sacks – imagery that disturbs. Offred sees that blood has seeped through the white cloth on one of these faceless, hanging shapes, to form ‘another mouth, a small red one’ (p. 42); ‘a smile of blood’. In this moment of bizarre irony we are reminded of the red, lipsticked mouth of a woman, but these are – were – men. The hanging is the ultimate reduction of person to inanimate object. Yet Offred resists, refusing to deny these men their identity. She begins to replace their selves: ‘You can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth’ (p. 42). Others, too, have the right to be seen as an individual. - Uniform The Republic of Gilead tries to erase identity in other ways. The rigid hierarchy eliminates the individual – all are in uniform, colour-coded to indicate their status or role. Offred and Ofglen are indistinguishable in their Handmaid clothing, just as the Commander wears black. Nick’s only claim to an identity beyond his role as chauffeur and gardener is the way he wears his hat to one side. The white wings of Offred’s outfit keep her face hidden; her red clothing, a‘red shroud’ (p. 31), covers her body completely. Her only means of communicating herself as an individual is with her eyes, as when she meets a Guardian: ‘he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes’ (p. 31). Ironically, the sinister spies of the regime are known as ‘Eyes’. Large control systems such as governments or prisons seek to institutionalise – a process of capitulation, or loss, of the individual; the institutionalised subject conforms. Notice how characters in The Handmaid’s Tale who refuse to capitulate may suddenly come into full focus, such as Of glen on page 176: ‘Her face is oval, pink, plump but not fat, her eyes roundish.’ Contrast this with Janine, who is fully institutionalised; on the Birth Day she remains indeterminate, reduced to the level of an animal as she ‘breathes in and out. Caresses her swollen breasts. Thinks of nothing’ (p. 125). Moira and Offred’s mother are also vividly depicted, while institutionalised groups such as Commanders’ Wives remain amorphous. - Dead daffodil Offred creeps downstairs in darkness to steal a dead daffodil. This small gesture of defiance allows her to remind herself ‘of what I once could do’ (p. 108). She is intent on pressing the flower and leaving it for whoever comes after her, just as the previous occupant of her room left her scratched words in the closet. These are the ways in which the women of Gilead rediscover precious fragments of identity in the ‘tiny peepholes’ of possibility (p. 31) that exist in the oppressive regime. For Atwood, being recognised as an individual, a fully acknowledged self, is vital; she has aptly summed this up in her poem ‘This is a photograph of me’ (published in her first poetry collection, The Circle Game, 1998), where she at first appears to be describing a landscape, but then tells us that, if we look closely enough, we will be able to see her. Offred faces Gilead's terrible might as she tries to survive with a sense of self and with constructive social interactions. Gilead seems able to overwhelm any potential opponent. To suppress individuality and maintain the regime, Gilead rewrites history, asserts governmental control of television newscasts, forbids books, magazines, and newspapers, and leaves only gossip (with its combination of accuracy, slippage, and disinformation) as an independent source of knowledge. Gilead simplifies and manipulates language, eliminates the written word where possible, generates its own forms of newspeak, debars women from writing, and keeps sacred texts locked away, inaccessible to most people except in carefully chosen readings or recordings. It establishes a strict moral code supported by public ceremonies, the omnipresent fear of the Eyes, and the mute warning proclaimed by the hooded and robed dead who hang along the wall. Squealing on your fellows is rewarded, and trust is dangerous. Gilead also adopts measures specifically aimed against women, their individuality, and their identity. Immediately after the coup, women were fired from their jobs, lost the rights of abortion and birth control, were subjected to arranged marriages, found that their testimony in a court of law was not accepted without corroboration, and discovered their charge cards closed and their bank accounts placed in the hands of their fathers, husbands, or other male custodians. (As the Handmaid says of her Commander's wife, an unhappy, bitter Serena Joy, who before the coup was a singing evangelist, a right-wing conservative hymning the return to traditional values, family unity, and female subordination: "She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless.... How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word" [8:61].) To these restrictions Gilead adds its patriarchal religion, its desperate quest for fertile (white) wombs, its indoctrination (in "Re-education" or "Red Centers") of Handmaids, their distinctive uniforms, the extreme division of (women's) labor, the narrowness and low skill requirements of their tasks, and the extremely truncated scope for self-expression, initiative, or independent action by women. Offred does try to retain some sense of herself as a distinct individual differentiated from others, but that self breaks down inexorably, and in the most minute detail. At first she rigorously and confidently refuses to call the room she sleeps in "mine," because it has no key for her to assure her privacy and exclude others and because it is at best a transitory way station for her (2:11). But eventually she labels it "mine" (8:65) precisely when her private life is being compromised. Then she joins herself to the false and splintered community of the Commander's household - she sees as "ours"(20:149) the house of the Commander and Serena Joy. Eventually even her skin becomes "ours," as the Commander watches her putting on the skin moisturizer during one of their late night furtive meetings (25:203). Finally, near the end of the tapes, she accepts Gilead: "Everything they taught at the Red Center, everything I've resisted, comes flooding in....They can do what they like with me" (45:368; see also 41:348-49). When Offred looks inside herself, she does find a set of memories that allow her to recall a sense of self. She can remember her job, her love for her husband Luke, her child, her friends, her education, fun - the successes and failures of everyday life. Throughout the book she tries to hold on to these, but they fade away. Luke and her daughter slip into the past tense (25:294). She fears that she is finally betraying Luke when she has her affair with Nick (40:340), and she feels erased by time, no longer a presence in her daughter's existence, when she is eventually shown a recent picture of her daughter (35:296). Her education and love of word games find a kind of fulfilment with the Commander, but in an illicit relation that makes her more vulnerable - not only to date rape but to manipulation by the Commander, his wife, or his enemies. When Offred looks outside herself, at the other human beings with whom she is in proximity, she finds little scope for satisfying interaction that could develop a sense of self. The structure of the household isolates Handmaids: each is the only Handmaid in the house, usually disliked by the Commander's Wife, and more trouble than help to the Marthas, whose tasks include cooking the Handmaid special, healthy food (to prepare her for pregnancy) and cutting it, because she cannot be trusted with a knife (35:296). A Handmaid has few activities. Daily she shops among the scarce supplies of food, standing in lengthy lines, buying only what the Marthas request, using tokens not money. Monthly she has intercourse with her Commander. Otherwise, she leads a boring life in which vast spaces of time repose unfilled. Lacking friends in the household, where every woman is of a different rank and every man is officially off-limits (except for the prescribed monthly ceremony), condemned to public silence except for official platitudes or surreptitious whispers with the Handmaids with whom she is paired for shopping expeditions, she has little to do. Defined in terms of her reproductive potential, she has little to be, other than a set of ovaries, a receptacle (13:95). Prevented from intersubjective interactions and communications of any but an extremely limited and repressed sort, without privacy and scope for her own will, and lacking any socially-sanctioned purpose or self beyond her reproductive organs, each Handmaid, like Offred, must struggle to maintain any sense of her identity as she faces empty days and lonely nights. She always lives on an edge: essentially powerless herself, she is vulnerable to the lurking Eyes, the spies of the regime who whisk wrong-doers away to death, and to the power, interests, and machinations of others. Offred's Commander encourages her to break the rules with him. His wife, fearing that he is sterile, bribes her - offering her the picture of her daughter - to sleep with Nick the chauffeur. Even without Serena Joy's plot, Nick himself is a temptation. So too is a doctor, who offers his sexual services so that Offred, on her third and if unsuccessful terminal assignment, can become pregnant. Ofglen, a member of the underground group Mayday, frequently asks Offred for information on her Commander. Amidst these requests and offers, Offred presents herself as cautious, fearful of the Eyes and knowing that to trust another means to risk one's own life. But she frequently gives in to powerful people or strong emotions: the Commander gets her time, her kisses, and her body; she accepts his wife's bribe; and she visits Nick regularly - all risky illegalities that could bring about her downfall. On the other hand, she rejects the anti-Gilead illegalities proposed by Ofglen; despite broad hints and specific requests from Ofglen, Offred does not encourage or assist her fellow Handmaid and so she cannot avail herself of the strengths that could flow from (dangerous) friendship and commitment. Within this vortex of fear and vulnerability, this contrast of "blank time" and intense interactions with powerful, inscrutable individuals, the Handmaid ultimately fails to maintain her identity. To a large extent, she is caught in the powerful grasp of the dystopia: Gilead's political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, utilises repressive laws and politics, and is solidified by the isolation of each woman, the fragmentation of her social world, and the reconstruction of each woman's world into Gilead's mould. In Gilead, the modes of personal identity formation and intersubjective relations are so weakened, degraded, and debased that the modes of domination and control - of physical force, political power, conflicting individual interests, and intrapsychic control - are internalised by those who are subjected to the regime. Power politics - State tyranny - An alternative, feminised version of history - A failed utopia Imprisonment and imagination - Present as a trap - Memory stories In a curious way the plot mirrors Offred’s memory stories, as characters from her remembered past reappear. Moira is there in Gilead in the flesh twice, while Offred’s mother’s ghost is resurrected twice (on films which Moira tells Offred she sees at the Rachel and Leah Centre in Chapters 7 and 39). Offred’s daughter is brought back in a photograph which Serena Joy shows to her (Chapter 35). Of course these presences do not remain with Offred; her story is an emotive mix of moments of joy, but also stabs of pain at their loss and her recognition of her own powerlessness. Her storytelling cannot change her entrapment in Gilead but it does give her the power to escape into imagination. It becomes an act of psychological survival. - Escape into memory - Language of the body She may be cocooned in the uniform that defines her role as Handmaid, but underneath her layers, Offred’s body is her own space. She resists the way Gilead reduces her physically to a breeder. She tells the story of her sensations, emotions and desires. She has the power to tell a different story from the one already scripted for her: in the language she uses to describe her own physiology, Offred finds freedom. She talks about her body as a wilderness. Her womb is a dark, cosmic space with the moon gliding across it every month. Her laughter, which wells up from her body, is volcanic. Future and present Though very different from Offred, Moira and Offred's mother can nei ther prevent nor survive Gilead. But Gilead as an imagined dystopia in Atwood's fiction is a warning to present-day readers about how perilous is their present, in which it is possible to imagine and project a Gilead, in which everything described in Gilead has recently been enacted in some form in some society (Davidson 24). The practices and powers of Gilead? and its ability physically to constrain Moira and Offred's mother and to con vert Offred?exist in contemporary societies. The future dystopia of Gilead is latent in the present. But the novel is more than a warning. It also suggests what is required to combat existing proto-Gileadean practices and powers, to construct and maintain a strong sense of self, and thereby to move towards a liberating society.16 Offred exemplifies what not to do before Gilead consolidated its power. Offred ignored, romanticized, and accommodated. She was com placent about her own status and rights.17 Her small resistances were inef fective or counter-productive. As the corrupted United States was gradually transformed into Gilead, she committed the ultimate collusion of doing nothing?or, more accurately, of being so concerned with her immediate personal life that she ignored events outside her immediate sphere. Once the dystopia was established, Offred continued to demonstrate what not to do, as she refused Ofglen's overtures, engaged in indiscretions with Nick, and enmeshed herself in illegalities with the Commander and his wife. Offred's mother and Moira suggest what needs to be done: they both maintain a skeptical distance from standard social expectations, define themselves according to their own feelings, and act in concert with other feminists to try to maintain or expand women's freedom. In short, what Offred's mother and Moira did (but without enough allies), and what the Handmaid failed to do, in pre Gilead United States and in Gilead, is to feel, judge, and act with others. The academic conference18 that ends The Handmaid's Tale displays a set of people who do not feel, judge, or act?and they do not question, either. They do not escape to the romanticism of love or heroism, as does 82 UTOPIAN STUDIES Offred, but they do have their own ways of accepting (and furthering) their own discrimination against women. Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge Uni versity gives a paper on Offred's tale to an audience that applauds frequently, asks no questions, and raises no objections to his (quite objectionable) inter pretation. Neither Pieixoto nor his audience feel with others: they are not open to others, to the experiences of others, to the possible validity and meaning of the reports, concerns, and interests of others. Rather, they lament that Offred did not give them more of what they (not she) wanted, i.e., straight (governmental) politics (HN.393). They use the norm of scholarly distance to avoid judgment: "'Our job is not to censure but to understand.' (Applause.)" (HN:383).19 Behind their self-proclaimed non-judgmental veneer, however, they do judge. They demean Offred's education; and no one questions Pieixoto's evaluation of two Gileadean leaders as men "of considerable ingenuity" (HN:387 & 391). In other words, as they joke and "understand" they commit a trahison des clercs of 2195; or, in Hannah Arendt's terms, they thoughtlessly participate in the "banality of evil": they accept great evil as an everyday event of ordi nary humanity. The scholars are like the mistress of the commander of the Nazi concentration camp whom Offred and her mother watched on televi sion: the mistress was "thinking about how not to think" and showed "how easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all" (24:188-89). Indeed the scholars and mistress are like Offred herself, who works at "ignoring" and eventually decides that "I have made a life for myself, here [in Gilead], of a sort"(41:349).20 The conferees, like many academics, do not act?or, rather, their only actions are their words. Their word play may satisfy them, give them a sense of identity, and assure their self-created superiority and power of interpretation over Offred and her tale. But as they gain that identity and superiority?through Pieixoto's words, the chair's acquiescence in them, and the audience's laughter and applause?they make themselves complicit in sexism, thoughtlessness, and lack of feeling for Gilead's victims and lack of concern to avoid another Gilead. Finally, they do not question: nothing Offred has said leads Pieixoto to question his own interpretive stance and concerns, and nothing he says leads the audience to raise any questions or objections. Atwood's book ends with applause for the lecture and Pieixoto's words: "Are there any questions?" The ending of the book?Atwood's blunt question following the gen eral approval of Pieixoto's paper?should take us as readers right back to our present. We should feel appalled by the academics of 2195, and should be driven to implore them to respond to the Handmaid's story, to learn from it, to question Pieixoto's interpretation of it, and to feel, judge with thought fulness, and act. But we as readers should also turn our implorings onto our selves, as we perceive that the present shares similarities with 2195?and with Gilead and with the pre-Gilead United States as described in the book. For our present, Atwood offers Offred's mother and Moira as examples of how to feel, think, and act, and Offred and the academics of how not to. Offred's mother and Moira undertake the unconventional, are committed to Identity, Complicity, and Resistance 83 friends and to others who need their help, and use techniques from humor to political action to try to undercut malevolent authorities. On the other hand, Offred and the academics mouth cliches instead of thinking, and respond with automatic stereotypes. The academics' humor is at the expense of the weaker; and both Offred and the academics defer to authority figures.21 Offred and the academics also display a critical lack of ability to under stand the political meaning existent within individual experience and activ ity. The academics adhere to a conventional (and traditionally masculine) sense of politics as the actions and interactions of governments and govern mental officials, excluding as insignificant the individuals who live and suf fer under those actions. Offred eschews a political interpretation of her life and identity for a romantic (and traditionally feminine) one, failing to acknowl edge the larger forces which dictate the circumstances of her life and shape its possibilities and directions. On other aspects of life also the academics and Offred are polar opposites: the academics claim to be objective, Offred presents herself as subjective; the academics distance themselves and make their subject matter into an "other" so as to study and control it, Offred looks within her self for her possibilities. Each polar perspective excludes its opposite, narrows itself further by this exclusion, and also blocks the dis covery of a third, inclusive stance. In the novel's structure, the academic conference of 2195 is a counterpoint to Offred's narration of life in Gilead, just as on some central dimensions of human living the academics' attitudes represent the (equally narrow and sterile) opposite of Offred's. To turn back to the book's "Dedication" is to discover how to respond to another American, theocratic, self-satisfied, powerful regime (the Puri tans), one that hanged witches. Atwood dedicates the novel to Mary Web ster, a witch who survived the noose because she was tough and struggled, and to Perry Miller, who was thoughtful about the Puritans. By warning of the dystopia of Gilead and showing its links to the Puritans, to the present, and to 2195, and by making her mother the feminist and Offred the post feminist who assumes rather than fights for improvements in the treatment of women, Atwood shows her readers that the gains are not permanent but can be easily lost, and so the world we live in requires our questions and our feelings, our thoughtful judgements and our actions. AUTONOMY OF BODIES - DIGNITY AND CHOICE IN THE NOVEL Identity and the individual - A systematic stripping away of the self The novel examines our sense of self, or identity, and the challenges that can be brought to bear on the self by the state. The Gileadean state dictates the systematic stripping of identity from women – under its strict rule, women’s names are removed and they are reduced instead to gender roles: Handmaid, Econowife, and so on. Those who identify as feminist or are found to be infertile are reduced even further to the sub-human status of Unwoman. On page 94 Offred says, ‘My name isn’t Offred, I have another name’. We cannot be sure of Offred’s identity, but it is clear from her narrative that the story is focused on the story of one woman – it is The Handmaid’s Tale. Offred’s real name is very important to her and she does not reveal it to the reader. The Gilead label ‘Of-fred’ assigned to her indicates that she is owned by a man, a fact that she resists in her inner dialogue. - Concealed thoughts and emotions Offred’s account of her present existence often skims the surface of feeling. The opaque descriptions of the house she inhabits are devoid of emotion: ‘Mutely the varied surfaces present themselves’ (p. 89). But in the sections entitled ‘Night’, where she tells us that ‘The night is mine’ (p. 47), she explores her inner identity in personal memory. Her deprived and limited existence seems to have erased her identity so completely that even in private dialogue with herself, Offred’s emotions resist capture. Where do we find them? Her most private thoughts and feelings are concealed from us; they lie in the gaps between the text, in the literal white space on the page: ‘Why fight? That will never do’ (p. 237). Offred’s raw core of self exists in the unwritten word – she is not allowed to write. But we can read her grief and pain into these spaces; they make up the core of extreme emotion which threatens to make her lose all hope yet drives her to go on living. Here she is not Offred, but an individual human being with a past and a present self. The totalitarian state has erased women’s identities so efficiently and completely that the Commander is able to say jokingly about women: ‘For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four’ (p. 195). His simple equation evokes a chilling response: in Gilead, for women, the numbers do not make four, or even, as Offred anticipates, ‘five or three’. They add up to ‘Just one and one and one and one’. Women exist as a ‘disconnect’; they are not allowed to complete. - Men’s identities also erased It is not only the identity of women that the Gileadean state strips away: men, too, are reduced and objectified, as is evident in the bodies of victims that Offred and Ofglen see hanging on the Wall. The heads of these men are covered to hide their identity, and Offred says, ‘Their heads are zeros’ (p. 42). She compares them to dolls, scarecrows and stuffed sacks – imagery that disturbs. Offred sees that blood has seeped through the white cloth on one of these faceless, hanging shapes, to form ‘another mouth, a small red one’ (p. 42); ‘a smile of blood’. In this moment of bizarre irony we are reminded of the red, lipsticked mouth of a woman, but these are – were – men. The hanging is the ultimate reduction of person to inanimate object. Yet Offred resists, refusing to deny these men their identity. She begins to replace their selves: ‘You can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth’ (p. 42). Others, too, have the right to be seen as an individual. - Uniform The Republic of Gilead tries to erase identity in other ways. The rigid hierarchy eliminates the individual – all are in uniform, colour-coded to indicate their status or role. Offred and Ofglen are indistinguishable in their Handmaid clothing, just as the Commander wears black. Nick’s only claim to an identity beyond his role as chauffeur and gardener is the way he wears his hat to one side. The white wings of Offred’s outfit keep her face hidden; her red clothing, a‘red shroud’ (p. 31), covers her body completely. Her only means of communicating herself as an individual is with her eyes, as when she meets a Guardian: ‘he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes’ (p. 31). Ironically, the sinister spies of the regime are known as ‘Eyes’. Large control systems such as governments or prisons seek to institutionalise – a process of capitulation, or loss, of the individual; the institutionalised subject conforms. Notice how characters in The Handmaid’s Tale who refuse to capitulate may suddenly come into full focus, such as Of glen on page 176: ‘Her face is oval, pink, plump but not fat, her eyes roundish.’ Contrast this with Janine, who is fully institutionalised; on the Birth Day she remains indeterminate, reduced to the level of an animal as she ‘breathes in and out. Caresses her swollen breasts. Thinks of nothing’ (p. 125). Moira and Offred’s mother are also vividly depicted, while institutionalised groups such as Commanders’ Wives remain amorphous. - Dead daffodil Offred creeps downstairs in darkness to steal a dead daffodil. This small gesture of defiance allows her to remind herself ‘of what I once could do’ (p. 108). She is intent on pressing the flower and leaving it for whoever comes after her, just as the previous occupant of her room left her scratched words in the closet. These are the ways in which the women of Gilead rediscover precious fragments of identity in the ‘tiny peepholes’ of possibility (p. 31) that exist in the oppressive regime. For Atwood, being recognised as an individual, a fully acknowledged self, is vital; she has aptly summed this up in her poem ‘This is a photograph of me’ (published in her first poetry collection, The Circle Game, 1998), where she at first appears to be describing a landscape, but then tells us that, if we look closely enough, we will be able to see her. She may be cocooned in the uniform that defines her role as Handmaid, but underneath her layers, Offred’s body is her own space. She resists the way Gilead reduces her physically to a breeder. She tells the story of her sensations, emotions and desires. She has the power to tell a different story from the one already scripted for her: in the language she uses to describe her own physiology, Offred finds freedom. She talks about her body as a wilderness. Her womb is a dark, cosmic space with the moon gliding across it every month. Her laughter, which wells up from her body, is volcanic. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363185385_The_Obliteration_of_Individuality_in_The _Handmaid's_Tale#pf7 The state is operating tactically on an individual's identity so as to implant a collectivist behaviourism frame of mindset. The fragmentation of identity occurs when the fundamentalist state imposes certain-strict conventional norms upon society; hence individuality gets obliterated. In this research, we explore the destruction of identity via the exploration of Offred, Serena Joy, Moira, Janine, and aunts’ characters. A few of them are tolerating, a few are defiant, a few are mediated to the regime. The women are victims of a totalitarian system and they, themselves, are involved in degrading other women. The aim of the government Gilead is to grasp every move related to one’s individuality as well as limiting individual’s desires, hopes, dreams, language, and beliefs. Furthermore, color-coded outfits, religion, sexual violence/repression, and language are implements that are utilized to attain their objective. By interfering in every aspect that each person characterises himself/herself by, Gilead attempts to circulate each individual with a set of habitual norms so as their oneness slowly begins to fade away. Language is a primary tool for ingraining these norms in-order achieve their aim. Formal old-fashioned Greetings are being used, and as its stated in the novel, the kind of touch they like are “folk art, archaic” (Atwood 13). Biblical and religious values became part of society’s daily greetings/conversations such as when Offred and Ofglen meet for their daily walk; the greeting proceeds as “blessed be the fruit” which in this context is the accepted greeting among them, and the other party may reply with “may the lord open” which is the accepted response (Atwood