THE HANDMAIDS TALE - Characters: - Main character: Offred (she is Fr...

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

Characters:

- Main character: Offred (she is Fred’s handmaid ‘of Fred’)- June

• Fred (commander)
• Serena Joy (commander’s wife)
• Luke (June’s husband)
• Hannah (June’s daughter)
• Ofglen (handmaid that walks with June to shops)
• Aunt Lydia (trained June to become a handmaid in the red centre)
• Nick (driver)
• Moira (handmaid)
• Janine (handmaid)= Ofwarren (gives birth)
• Alma (handmaid)
• Dolores (handmaid)
• Rita (Martha)
• Cora (Martha)

Themes:

• Control and resistance
• Survival
• Responsibility
• Fertility
• Power
• Women’s roles
• Religion
• The individual
• Guilt
• History
• Love

About:

• Gilead takes over North America
• Christian government
• Most women are infertile as there has been a war and the radiation has made women sterile
• Every woman married to a commander that cannot have a baby is assigned a handmaid
• The handmaid is raped once a month by the commander
• A handmaids job is to provide children for the commander and his wife

Narrative techniques:

• Emphasis on process and reconstruction where the truth is only a matter of the teller’s

perspective. Her narrative is a discontinuous one, with frequent time shifts, short scenes and unfinished ending.

• Abrupt shifts from one scene to another and from present to past so that her present

situations and past are only gradually revealed.

• Offred also tells the story of other women, like her own mother, Moira, Janine and even her

predecessor at the commander’s house

• Offred tells the story of other Handmaids, all of them rebels or victims or both, which form a

sad subtext to Offred’s narrative.

To sum up…

• Discontinuous narrative 1 / 2

• Time shifts
• Fragments and flashbacks
• Subtext

Representation of male and female roles:

• Names and connotations
• Power positions
• Control
• Unwomen (gay and infertile) and unbabies (anything wrong)

Symbols:

• Look for similarities between Gilead and our world today
• Red= colour of blood and menstruation (fertility)
• Flowers= fertility

Quotes:

• “This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long

parenthesis of nothing.”

• “They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to”
• “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.”
• “Women were not protected then.”
• “There must have been needles, pills, something like that.”
• “Was he in my room? I called it mine.”
• “Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit. Shoulders, legs.”
• “I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I feel. What I

feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.”

• “There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore”
• “It’s the choice that terrifies me, a way out.”
• “This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long

parenthesis of nothing.”

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