The tradition of utopian fiction in our Western culture goes back
to the Ancient Greeks with Plato's Republic, written about 35011C. Writers
have always invented imaginary good societies (utopias) and imaginary bad
societies (anti-utopias or dystopias) in order to comment on distinctive
features and trends of their own societies. Utopias and anti-utopias are
not merely fantasy worlds, but, as Krishan Kumar describes them in his
book Utopianism (1991), they are imaginary places 'and accordingly
futile to seek out, that nevertheless exist tantalisingly (or frighteningly)
on the edge of possibility, somewhere just beyond the boundary of the real'
(p. 1). These fictions always have a kind of mirror relation to the writer's
own world. They may offer models for the future, or more frequently they
may make satiric attacks on present society and deliver strong warnings
against the consequences of particular kinds of political and social behaviour.
Margaret Atwood said in a review of Marge Piercy's Woman on
the Edge of Time (1976), 'Utopias are products of the moral rather
than the literary sense', and as political or social commentary they have
a strongly didactic element. They need to be read with some knowledge of
the context of their own time to enable the reader to see the particularities
of the society in which they were produced. Sir Thomas More's Utopia
(1516) is concerned with the possibilities for a better society that were
being opened up by the discovery of the New World of America, whereas nearly
500 years later The Handmaids Tale is warning against threats of
environmental pollution, religious fundamentalism and state surveillance
in that same New World which has become the United States of America.
Margaret Atwood's negative vision of tyranny, women's enslavement and
ecological disaster belongs to a long line of anti-utopian fictions which
goes back to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.(1726) and includes
some remarkable twentieth-century novels such as Aldous Huxley's Brave
New
World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Women have also written utopian and anti-utopian fictions, or, more frequently,
fictions that mix the two. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
Herland (1915),
Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman
on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975)
all combine negative social criticism with visions of a better future.
The Handmaid's Tale is an exposure of power politics at their most
basic - 'Who can do what to whom', as Offred says. Indeed, it is women
who are worst off, for in Gilead women and nature are relentlessly exploited
as 'national resources'. Atwood's Gilead is her strong warning against
the policies and assumptions of late twentieth-century Western technological
society. As she also makes plain in the 'Historical Notes', Gilead turns
out to have been an unworkable social experiment. She told an interviewer
in 1987, 'I'm an optimist. I like to show that the Third Reich, the Fourth
Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever' (Conversations, p. 223), and
she compares her 'Historical Notes' with Orwell's note on Newspeak at the
end of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Many of the themes of The Handmaids Tale are to be found in
Nineteen
Eighty-four. It offers a similar warning against threats of totalitarianism
in the not too distant future, and delineates the ways in which any totalitarian
state tries to control not only the lives but also the thoughts of its
subjects. There are similar efforts to silence opposition at any price,
and both novels warn against the dangers of propaganda and censorship.
Atwood pays particular attention to the abuses of language in Gilead where
the meanings of words are changed to their opposites, as in Orwell's Newspeak,
in an effort to restructure the way people are allowed to think about their
world. For example, the Gileadean rhetoric of 'Aunts', 'Angels', 'Salvagings'
takes words with reassuring emotional connotations and distorts them into
euphemisms for the instruments of oppression. There is, however, one major
difference between The Handmaids Tale and
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Atwood's novel is told from the point of view of an 'ignorant peripherally
involved woman'. (Incidentally, this is the same point of view that she
adopted in her previous novel, Bodily Harm.) Offred is not Orwell's Winston
Smith and she does not come to love Big Brother (or in her case, the Commander)
in the end. Instead she escapes and tells her story as a narrative of resistance.
The novel is set in the United States, because, as Atwood has said,
'The States are more extreme in everything ... Everyone watches the States
to see what the country is doing and might be doing ten or fifteen years
from now' (Conversations, p. 217). This is a futuristic scenario
but close enough to our time, for the protagonist herself has grown up
in the permissive society of the 1970s and 1980s and is at the time of
telling her story only thirty-three years old. Some of the features of
Gilead could apply to any late twentieth-century state with advanced technology
and pollution problems. It is, however, specifically an American location,
as we learn not only from the 'Historical Notes', but also from details
within Offred's narrative, as, for example, from the Gileadean take-over
'when they shot the President and machine-gunned the Congress' (Chapter
28), Moira's escape along Mass Avenue (Chapter 38), and 4 July, the former
Independence Day (Chapter 31). Atwood signals the particular historical,
social and political context in her 'What if statement (see Introduction).
There is also a strong sense of American Puritan history here, establishing
connections between seventeenth-century New England's witch hunts and late
twentieth-century Gilead, with its New Right ideology and its religious
fanaticism.
Not only is it a 'Back to the Future' scenario but it is also a period
of crisis, for the novel deals with the new anti-utopian society at its
moment of transition. Offred herself is facing both ways, but so is Gilead,
with all its citizens and its leaders remembering the capitalist era and
its culture. Gilead is a bizarre mixture of fundamentalist principles,
late twentiethcentury technology and a Hollywood-style propaganda machine.
It also has the whole of human history upon which to draw, for 'there was
little that was truly original with or indigenous to Gilead: its genius
was synthesis' ('Historical Notes'). The novel ends as a strong warning
to learn from history in order to avoid a nightmare like Gilead for our
own future.
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The Handmaid's Tale provides a brief history and critique
of the North American feminist movement since the 1960s, for as Offred
reminds us, 'Context is all'. As Atwood remarked, in 1982, 'Feminist
is now one of the all-purpose words. It really can mean anything from people
who think men should be pushed off cliffs to people who think it's O.K.
for women to read and write. All those could be called feminist positions.
Thinking that if s O.K. for women to read and write would be a radically
feminist position in Afghanistan. So what do you mean?' (Conversations,
p. 140). With her deep distrust of ideological hardlines, Atwood refuses
to simplify the gender debate or to swallow slogans whole. Instead, she
shows how slogans always run the risk of being taken over as instruments
of oppression, like the 1970s' feminist catch phrases 'a women's culture'
or 'The Personal is Political', which Gilead has appropriated. All the
women in the novel are survivors of 'the time before' and their voices
represent a range of feminine and feminist positions dating back to the
Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s. Offred's mother belongs
to this early activist group with its campaigns for women's sexual freedom,
its pro-abortion rallies and pornographic book burnings. The heroines of
this era were Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. The
feminist movement rapidly gained strength in the United States, winning
Congressional endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and the
Supreme Court decision to make abortion legal in 1973, despite opposition
by fundamentalist Christians and Pro-Life campaigners. The opponents to
feminism are represented in the novel by the Commander's Wife and the Aunts,
who show they are more than willing to collaborate with Gilead's regime
to re-educate women back into traditional gender roles. Among the Handmaids,
younger women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, positions are equally
varied, from those who accept the female victim role (like Janine), to
radicals like the lesbian feminist Moira, to Offred herself, whose story
highlights the paradoxes and dilemmas within contemporary feminism.
Just as there are many different kinds of women, so there is
no simple division between masculine and feminine qualities: if men are
capable of violence, then so are women - think of Aunt Lydia or the Particicution.
The Handmaids Tale may be a critique of certain feminist positions though
it is clear where its sympathies lie, and Offred's double vision allows
her to evaluate both Gilead and her own lost late twentieth-century America:
that was not entirely good, but Gilead is undoubtedly worse. Atwood insists
that women have never marched under a single banner: 'As for Woman, capital
W, we got stuck with that for centuries. Eternal woman. But really, 'Woman"
is the sum total of women. It doesn't exist apart from that, except as
an abstracted idea' (Conversations, p. 201). It is Offred, the witty, sceptical
woman who cares about men, about mother-daughter relationships and about
her female friends, who survives to tell her story.
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The Handmaids Tale is a woman's autobiographical narrative
that challenges the absolute authority of Gilead, highlighting the significance
of storytelling as an act of resistance against oppression, thereby making
a particular kind of individual political statement. We might approach
Offred's narrative through Atwood's own comments as a writer who is also
an active member of Amnesty International:
I'm an artist ... and in any monolithic regime I would be shot. They always do that to artists. Why? Because the artists are messy. They don't fit. They make squawking noises. They protest. They insist on some kind of standard of humanity which any such regime is going to violate. They will violate it saying that it's for the good of all, or the good of the many, or the better this or better that. And the artists will always protest and they'll always get shot. Or go into exile. (Conversations, p. 183)
and
The writer ... retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination, in the many forms it may take, the power to communicate, and hope. ('Amnesty International: An Address', 1981, in Second Words).
These statements on the writer's role provide a gloss on Offred's
position as teller of this tale, for she insists on voicing her own point
of view when the regime demands total silence. But Offred's freedom is
very circumscribed and she cannot tell her story within the Gileadean context.
She can only tell it after she has escaped. We learn at the end that what
we have read is a transcript of a jumble of cassette recordings that have
been found on an archaeological site. What we have is a later reconstruction
of Offred's reconstruction told after her escape, and by the time of our
reading Offred herself has disappeared. Yet storytelling is the only possible
gesture against the silences of death and of history.
The emphasis throughout is on process and reconstruction, where
,truth' is only a matter of the teller's perspective, as Offred often reminds
us. Her narrative is a discontinuous one, with its frequent time shifts,
short scenes, and its unfinished ending. As Margaret Atwood has said,
[Offred] was boxed in. How do you tell a narrative from the point of view of that person? The more limited -and boxed in you are, the more important details become ... Details, episodes separate themselves from the flow of time in which they’re embedded. (Conversations, p. 216)
One of the first things we notice is the way the story shifts abruptly
from one scene to another and from present time to the past, so that the
narrator's present situation and her past history are only gradually revealed.
Reading is an exercise of reconstruction as we piece together present details
with fragments of remembered experience, revealed by flashbacks. At the
beginning there are few flashbacks, for we, like the narrator, are trapped
in present time. The first flashback occurs in Chapter 3 and there are
brief references to Luke in Chapters 2 and 5. However, it is in the 'Night'
sections that the flashback technique is most obvious and most sustained,
for this is Offred's 'time out' when she is free to wander back into her
remembered past. It is here that we gain a sense of Offred as a powerful
personal presence with a history.
It is a good idea when reading the novel to make a brief summary
of every chapter, for this will enable you to see how inner psychological
details and particulars of the external world are recorded. You will also
be able to use this evidence to trace the mosaic method used in structuring
the novel out of scenic units.
We come to understand Offred's condition of double vision, for
she continually sees and judges the present through her memories of the
past. As she says, 'You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past,
and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've
left or been forced to leave behind me' (Chapter 35). The narrative represents
the complex ways that memory works, where the present moment is never self-contained
but pervaded by traces of other times and events.
Offred is not fixed in the past; indeed she is also, like Pamela
(in Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela of 1742), writing of the
present, and her record of daily life is presented with scrupulous attention
to realistic detail. She records the unexciting monotony of her daily life
as a Handmaid, as well as its crises, both public and personal. There are
the public meetings like the Birth Day, the Prayvaganza and the terrible
Salvaging; there is of course the monthly Ceremony as a semi-public event;
there are her own significant private events, like her secret meetings
with the Commander and their outing to Jezebel's. However ambivalent her
feelings for the Commander may be, Offred recognises that it is through
these meetings in his study where she can talk and read that she is enabled
to return to a lively sense of herself as an individual. Most crucial for
her is her love affair with Nick (Chapters 40 and 41), which has all the
conventional features of a romantic love story and possibly even a happy
ending. Yet in the circumstances it is the most unlikely plot that could
have been devised, and Offred tells it with a kind of dazzled disbelief
in its reality.
Offred tells the stories of many other women as well as her own.
Some of these are fixed in the past and some end even while she is telling
her own. The story of her feminist mother belongs to the past and is recaptured
only in memory and on film (Chapters 7 and 39). Moira's story, like her
mother's, is one of female heroism but, unlike her mother's, Moira's story
extends into the present, for she too becomes an inmate at the Rachel and
Leah Centre, and Offred recalls with delight Moira's courage and outrageousness
in Chapters 13, 15 and 22. Offred finds Moira again at Jezebel's in Chapter
37 and tells the story of her life as a rebel in Chapter 38. Hers is one
of the unfinished stories embedded in this narrative, for Offred never
sees Moira again after that night.
There are also shorter story fragments about other Handmaids,
an of them rebels or victims or both, which form a sad subtext to Offred's
survival narrative and incidentally imply a moral judgement on the social
engineering policies of Gilead. There is the story of her unnamed predecessor
at the Commander's house, of whom all she knows is the scribbled secret
message (Chapter 9) and scraps of information about how she hanged herself
(Chapter 29). For Offred, that woman 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' (Chapter 46).
The motif of doubles recurs in the story of Ofglen: 'Doubled,
I walk the street' (Chapter 5). 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), to her last
frightening appearance as madwoman after the Particicution, holding a dump
of bloodstained hair (Chapter 43).
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. In a curious way, though it could not be seen as an example of
female bonding, Offred's account presents Serena Joy as another of her
own doubles, trapped like herself by Gileadean ideology. In one of her
odder anecdotes, Offred is even 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
which contradict Gilead's claims to absolute mastery and its myth of female
submissiveness. From a wide historical perspective, she can be seen as
writing against the Old Testament dismissal of the Handmaids of the Patriarchs,
and she is writing on behalf of all those women then and now with no rights
of representation. In this way her narrative is exemplary and symbolic.
(It could even be compared with those eighteenth-century American slave
narratives which Margaret Atwood recalls in her oblique reference to the
'Underground Railroad' for slaves escaping from the United States to Canada.)
There is yet another dimension to Offred's complex narrative,
which signals the postmodern contemporary nature of Margaret Atwood's storytelling
technique. Offred is continually drawing our attention to her storytelling
process, commenting on the way that the act of telling shapes and changes
real experience, and giving reasons why she needs to tell her story at
all (see Chapters 7, 23, 40 and 41). For Offred, storytelling is both eye-witness
account and substitute for dialogue. It is also the only message she can
hope to send to the outside world from her imprisonment, and she has to
struggle to tell it, trusting that one day her message will be delivered:
'A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name
... You can mean thousands' (Chapter 7).
Offred's own story ends when she climbs up into the black truck,
but the novel does not end here. There is a supplement in the 'Historical
Notes', told by a different narrator, in a different place, at a different
time, projecting a second vision of the future set not in America but in
Canada. (Atwood never forgets that she is a Canadian, and from one perspective
this novel might be read as an example of Canadian-American dialogue.)
Paradoxically, this shift works to convince us of the immediacy of Offred's
narrative. It is very likely that we will reject the professor's dismissal
of Offred as a figure belonging to the vanished past, and given his own
sexist attitudes, we might assume that Offred's story about patriarchal
attitudes does not belong exclusively to the past but threatens the future
as wen. Offred's message has been delivered 200 years later. So it is given
over to us, the readers, and we are left to puzzle out the answers to all
the questions she has raised.
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The 'Historical Notes' are not part of Offred's narrative,
but they are part of the novel and they function as a necessary supplement
to her story, helping us to put one woman's autobiographical record into
historical perspective. Told by a male narrator, Professor Pieixoto from
the University of Cambridge, England, at an academic conference 200 years
after Offred tells her story, these 'Notes' introduce another futuristic
scenario which is different from the story of Gilead.
At the University of Denay, Nunavit, up in Arctic Canada, women
and Native peoples obviously have some status, for the Chair is a woman
professor, Maryann Crescent Moon, and the conference participants go on
nature walks and eat fish from the sea (Arctic Char), which suggests an
unpolluted environment very different from Gilead. However, Professor Pieixoto's
jokes about 'tails' and 'frailroads' suggest that the old sexist attitudes
have not changed very much in 200 years. His masculinist view leads him
to reconstruct the social theory of Gilead and to compare its system with
many other examples of tyranny: 'As I have said elsewhere, there was little
that was truly original with or indigenous to Gilead: its genius was synthesis.'
He establishes a historical context for Offred's narrative, just as he
gives a detailed account of how her story was recovered from old cassette
tapes made between the 1960s and the 1980s, but for all his mass of social
data, he is not concerned with Offred as an individual. He is interested
in establishing the authenticity of her tale and its value as objective
historical evidence, while side stepping the critical moral issues raised
by her account: 'Our job is not to censure but to understand.’ He does
not seem to be as interested in finding out her identity as he is in establishing
the identity of her Commander. He offers two possible identifications:
Waterford, who 'possessed a background in market research', or the more
sinister figure of Judd, who was involved with the CIA. Offred has already
told us that her Commander was in 'market research' (Chapter 29), but Professor
Pieixoto does not seem to regard her testimony as reliable. His reconstruction
makes a radical shift from 'her story' to 'history' as he tries to discredit
Offred's narrative by accusing her of not paying attention to important
things. He does not take notice of what she has chosen to tell, a tale
of the suffering and oppression of all women and most men in Gilead. As
a result, the reader may feel that it is the professor who is paying attention
to the wrong things. His account obliterates Offred as a person; he never
tells what happened to her because he does not know and apparently is not
interested. Ironically, he does exactly what Offred predicted would happen
to the story of the Handmaids: 'From the point of view of future history,
we'll be invisible.' He is abusing Offred as Gilead abused her, removing
her authority over her own life story and renaming it in a gesture similar
to Gilead's suppression of a woman's identity in the Handmaid's role. The
change in voice from Offred's personal, subjective account to Professor
Pieixoto's generalised academic discourse forces us to take up a moral
position on what we have just read, to become engaged readers. The novel
ends on a question which invites us to enter the debate, having heard two
opposite perspectives on the story. This is the point at which Atwood's
novel assumes the didactic tone which is a distinctive mark of anti-utopian
(dystopian) fiction, as it moves beyond the confines of an imagined world
to become a warning to us of a future to be avoided in real life.
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The allusions to Western cultural history in The Handmaid's
Tale are extremely wide-ranging, stretching from the Bible to late twentieth
century feminism and environmental issues. There are also references to
seventeenth-century American Puritanism, the slave trade, Nazism and pornographic
films, as well as motifs from fairytales, quotations from Shakespeare,
John Milton, Ren6 Descartes, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sigmund Freud and Karl
Marx. The 'Historical Notes' add another layer of reference in an effort
to set Gilead within an international history of totalitarianism and various
forms of institutional oppression. This formidable range of references
is part of Margaret Atwood's strategy for constructing her modern anti-utopia,
and it is also a mark of her own high level of cultural literacy. But the
novel is not at all daunting, for it uses allusions very wittily, one of
its functions being to mesh together social details with which we are all
familiar in order to show us how they might be shaped into a pattern for
a future which we would choose to avoid.
It is Offred's narrative voice transcribed into text which situates
her as an individual woman grounded in place and time, whose identity transcends
that of her Handmaid's role. Through the language she uses, rather than
the events of the story she tells, Offred convinces us of her resistance
to Gilead's values. Offred's outer life is very constricted and drained
of emotion, but her inner life has an energy and lyricism which enable
her to survive emotionally as well as physically in the stony soil of Gilead.
There is a marked difference between the language she uses to record her
muted everyday life, and the language of her real life of feeling and memory,
which is expressed through a richly worked vocabulary of images. These
register her entirely different perception of herself and her world from
the one imposed by Gilead.
You will have noticed that there are a small number of recurrent
images which form patterns or 'image clusters' throughout her narrative.
They derive from the human body (hands, feet, faces, eyes, blood, wombs),
also from non-human nature (flowers, gardens, changing seasons, colour
and light - especially moonlight). Offred's images, all related to nature
and organic processes, constitute a 'feminine' language that works in opposition
to Gilead's polluted technological nightmare and its accompanying rhetoric.
Gilead's official language with its texture of biblical allusions
and deceit is likely to cause most problems for contemporary readers. Many
of these allusions are annotated in the glossaries found in the Detailed
Summaries, so here attention will be concentrated on the biblical references
and their significance. Gilead's social principles are based on the Old
Testament, where patriarchal authority is justified as the law of God.
There are far more references to the Old than to the New Testament, a common
feature of more extreme sects where the archaic language of patriarchy
is used as a mechanism for social control. The patriarch Jacob is the state
hero, and the name Gilead is closely associated with Jacob, for that was
the place where he set up his heap of stones as witness to God and where
heestablished his household, his lineage and his flocks and herds (see
the note on Gilead in the detailed summary of Chapter 5).
The first quotation in the epigraph directs our attention to
Genesis 30:1-3, which is the beginning of the story about Jacob and his
two wives Rachel and Leah and their two handmaids who are required to produce
children for them. As the basis of the novel it is reiterated many times
in the text, most notably in the family Bible reading before the monthly
Ceremony, and there are echoes of it in the name of the Rachel and Leah
Center and in Offred's remark that 'Give me children, or else I die' can
have more than one meaning for her as a Handmaid (Chapter 11). As already
mentioned, the New Testament is less in evidence, though there is one long
passage quoted (I Timothy 2:9-15) which is used at the mass marriage ceremony
in Chapter 34 as part of Gilead's propaganda about male domination and
female submission.
In such a society biblical references pervade every level of
discourse. Gilead's leaders understand very well the importance of language
as the main instrument of ideological control, and indeed it is just as
repressive an instrument as the army and the police, and a great deal more
insidious because rituals of naming determine the way we think about our
lives. The law enforcers themselves are named after Old Testament figures,
whether they are 'Guardian Angels' or the 'Eyes of the Lord'.
On the domestic level, women's roles are given biblical significance,
as in the case of the Handmaids, of course, but also in that of the female
servants who become 'Marthas' after the woman who served Christ. (There
is an amusing break in the rhetoric with the references to the 'Econowives',
whose naming seems more influenced by late twentieth-century advertising
than by Scripture.) With 'Jezebel's' as the name of the state-run brothel,
however, Gilead's misogyny is made plain, for Jezebel's name suggests the
scandal of female sexuality which Gilead can neither condone nor ignore.
In a country where God is treated as a 'national resource', biblical names
filter into the commercial world. The car brand names available are 'Behemoth',
Whirlwind' or 'Chariot' (instead of 'Tigra' or 'Cobra', for example?) and
shops have been renamed with pictorial signs which pick up biblical texts
like 'Lilies of the Field' and 'All Flesh'. It is an ironic comment on
the fact that such naming is only the most superficial sanctification of
shopping by coupons, for everything is rationed in Gilead.
Perhaps the funniest misappropriation is Aunt Lydia's exhortation
to the Handmaids, which she claims is from St Paul: 'From each according
to her ability, to each according to his needs' (Chapter 20). These words
are not in the Bible at all; they are a garbled version of Karl Marx's
description of systems of production, though they do make the point that
Aunt Lydia wished to stress about service roles. In a similar way the Freudian
reference to 'Pen Is Envy' (Chapter 29) and the Miltonic reference, 'They
also serve (Chapter 4) also emphasise women's subservience to men.
We may conclude that Gilead uses biblical references to underwrite
patriarchal interests, but it uses them very selectively and sometimes
inaccurately. The Word is in the mouths of men only, just as the Bible
is kept locked up and only Commanders are allowed to read it. Even the
hymns are edited, and Moira's dissenting version of 'There is a Balm in
Gilead' (Chapter 34) is muffled in the massed choir of the Handmaids. Offred
prays quite often in her own private way, saying her version of the Lord's
Prayer (Chapter 30) or crying out to God in despair (Chapter 45), but again
her voice is muted. Gilead's official discourse is a hybridised rhetoric
which combines biblical language with traces of American capitalist phrases
('In God We Truse is the motto on the dollar bill), Marxism and feminism.
It uses and abuses the Bible in the same way as it uses the slogans of
the liberal ideology it has overthrown. One hostile Old Testament reference
which Gilead chooses not to use occurs in Hosea 6:8: 'Gilead is a city
of wicked men, stained with footprints of blood.'
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