Featured Reading Guide
Margaret Atwood
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She has only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire – neither Offred’s nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
Delicious
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Margaret Atwood is Canada s most eminent novelist, poet and critic. Her books include The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Alias Grace, Cat s Eye , which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and The Handmaid s Tale , which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and the Governor-General s Award, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a major film. She lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson and their daughter.
topAbout the Book
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She has only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire – neither Offred’s nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
topMargaret Atwood interview/review
www.mojones.com August 1997
- How does your political involvement inform your creative process?
A: I have no idea. People talking about politics usually start from the ass end backwards in that they think you have a political agenda, and then you make your work fit that cookie cutter. It’s the other way around. One works by simple observation, looking into things. It’s usually called insight and out of that comes your view — not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I’m talking about staying out of the Procrustean bed. You know the myth: Everybody had to fit into Procrustes’ bed and if they didn’t, he either stretched them or cut off their feet. I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
- So, do your political self and your creative self communicate at all?
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist. I don’t mean there’s never any overlap. You learn things in one area and bring them into another area. But giving a speech against racism is not the same as writing a novel. The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.
When I was young I believed that “nonfiction” meant “true.” But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they’re very different. There may not be one Truth — there may be several truths — but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.
When I wrote Alias Grace, for example, about Canada’s famous 19th-century convicted murderer Grace Marks, I knew there were some things that weren’t true about this historical figure. After all my research, I still do not know who killed Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Someone killed them. To say that we don’t know exactly who did it is not to say that nobody killed them. There is a truth in their deaths, but some other truths — such as who really did the killing — are not knowable.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Offred speaks to us in the present tense and the book reads very much like a diary because of this. Why do you think Margaret Atwood used this narrative device for the novel?
- Consider the use of ownership and language in the book and how it defines Offred’s behaviour. How much of the ownership in the book is about gender?
- Real sensations are described as a threat to order in Gilead and therefore only ‘available’, albeit illegally, to the privileged few.Why do you think the elite who run Gilead see sensation as a threat to the running of their totalitarian society?
- Religion and ceremony are rife in the novel. Although used as another form of control, do they in fact offer some kind of strange comfort to the inhabitants of Gilead?
- Do you attribute blame in the book, and does your perception of responsibility change as the book progresses?Similarly, do your sympathies alter, and if so, towards whom in particular?
- Even though women are uniformly inferior there is little or no camaraderie between any of them. Consider the hierarchy that works within the women, why has this been set up and what is its effect?
- As a reader we are privy to life before Gilead and affiliate ourselves with the ‘sightseers’ who visit Gilead rather than the residents of Gilead. Why does Atwood allow us to see this other life away from Gilead and how does it make us feel as a reader to experience both sides of Offred’s lives?
Other Books by Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg And Other …
A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming palel, more silent and…
Bodily Harm
Rennie Wilford, a young jounalist running from her life, takes an assignment…
Dancing Girls
Pregnant women, students and journalists; farmers and birdwatchers, ex-wives,…
Life Before Man
Elizabeth, monstrous yet pitiable, Nate, her husand, a patchwork man, gentle,…
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed . If she d…
Suggested Further Reading
- 1984 ~ George Orwell
- Animal Farm ~ George Orwell
- The Passion of New Eve ~ Angela Carter
- Gulliver’s Travels ~ Jonathan Swift
- The Scarlet Letter ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne