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This anti-utopian fable about the future is one woman's story
of her life as a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. As a Handmaid in the
Old Testament sense, whose body is at the service of the patriarchs, Offred
the narrator has been deprived of her own name and legal rights. Assigned
to a particular Commander for reproductive purposes, she is a virtual prisoner
in his household, under constant surveillance from his Wife and the female
servants. She is also forbidden to read and write or to form any close
personal friendships. Her only outings are daily shopping expeditions with
another Handmaid and compulsory attendance at public events such as Prayvaganzas,
Birth Days and Salvagings. Once a month, she has to undergo the grotesque
impregnation Ceremony with the Commander in the presence of his Wife. She
continually lives in fear of being sent to the Colonies as an Unwoman if
she does not conceive a child.
Trapped in such a circumscribed existence, what kind of freedom
could a woman possibly have? Offred chooses the freedom of refusal: she
refuses to believe in Gileadean doctrines, she refuses to forget her past
life, and crucially she refuses to be silenced.
Reading the novel induces a kind of double vision, for Offred
is always facing both ways as she tells her story, shifting constantly
between the present and the past. We learn about the Commander and their
'out of hours' relationship where they play Scrabble and she is allowed
to read, and we learn about her illicit love affair with Nick, the Commander's
chauffeur. It is through that relationship that Offred expresses her hopes
for a future life beyond Gilead. Looking backward, Offred tells us about
her lost husband Luke and their daughter and about her mother and her college
friend Moira.
In the face of tyranny and persecution in public life, Offred
manages to tell a witty dissident tale of private lives and personal relationships,
which also includes the secret stories of other women. There is the story
of Moira, the rebel who manages to escape the power of the Aunts and who
later reappears working at Jezebel's, the high-class brothel for army officers
and foreign businessmen; there is the story fragment of Offred's nameless
predecessor at the Commander's house who leaves a hidden message on the
wall and then hangs herself from the light fitting. There are also stories
about the Commander's Wife who used to be a television personality on a
gospel show, as well as bits of gossip from the female servants and the
other Wives. Offred creates a mosaic of alternative female worlds which
deny patriarchal myths of women's submissiveness and silence. If women
are marginal to the masculine world of public power struggles, men are
shown to exist only on the periphery of this 'women's culture'. There are
soldiers and guardians, there are the dead bodies of male dissidents hanging
on the Wall, and there are occasional more intimate nighttime encounters,
but this is a story focused on women's bodies and their domestic lives.
At the end, Offred makes her exit from the Commander's house
in the black van kept to cart dissidents away. Her escape seems to have
been arranged by Nick and the underground resistance movement, but Offred
does not know whether she will manage to escape over the border to Canada
or whether she will be taken to prison. Her voice stops when she climbs
up into the truck, so we never hear the end of her story, just as she never
hears the end of Moira's or her mother's or Luke's story. This novel is
full of Missing Persons.
There is an epilogue to Offred's story in the 'Historical Notes'.
This is presented as the transcription of an academic paper delivered at
a Symposium on Gileadean Studies in the year 2195. Atwood adopts a 'fast
forward' technique here, leaping 200 years ahead into a future beyond Gilead.
By that time, of course, Offred is dead and Gilead itself has fallen.