The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood (1985)
“Written in 1984 by a woman who said she didn't put in anything that hadn't already happened somewhere. That detail never stops being terrifying.”
Language Register
Intimate and colloquial in the present tense; lyrical and elegiac in memory; flat and clinical in the Ceremony sequences; parodically academic in the Historical Notes
Syntax Profile
Offred's sentences are characteristically long and circling in reflection, then abruptly short in the present. She uses dashes and parentheses extensively — hedging, qualifying, second-guessing her own narration. This syntactic hesitation is not weakness; it is epistemic honesty. She does not know what she knows. The sentence structures perform the uncertainty.
Figurative Language
High but restrained — metaphors are domestic and physical (tulips, red skirts, eggs), not romantic. Atwood grounds the figurative in the material world of a woman who has been reduced to her body. The imagery is not decorative; it is diagnostic.
Era-Specific Language
Mandatory Gileadean greeting; reduces women to reproductive function
A child born with defects — the Gileadean word that makes the death acceptable
Women who are resistant, infertile, or otherwise non-compliant — sent to the Colonies
Public execution of women by women — the word 'salvage' perverted to mean ritual murder
Portmanteau of 'participate' and 'execution' — forced participation in killing
Wife of a lower-status man, must perform all female functions (wife, domestic, potential reproductive)
The ritualized monthly rape, framed in Biblical language to strip it of what it is
Secret police — surveillance apparatus; the name weaponizes the act of watching
The resistance network — a distress call rendered as a name; also 'm'aidez,' French for 'help me'
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Offred
Educated, literary, ironic interior voice; flat, compliant performed speech. The gap between inner and outer language IS her character.
She was a middle-class professional (worked in a library, had a daughter, a marriage, a name). Gilead has suppressed but not erased her education — it persists as the subversive interior voice the reader hears.
The Commander
Formal, patriarchal, self-assured. Speaks to Offred as a generous superior condescending to a subordinate. Uses inclusive 'we' to describe policies that harm her.
Upper-tier Gilead's ruling class: men who designed a system they personally exempt themselves from whenever inconvenient. The nightly Scrabble games reveal a man who wants the benefits of patriarchy and the intimacy patriarchy prevents.
Serena Joy
Cold, clipped, resentful. Speaks to Offred in minimal, commanding phrases. Was once a public speaker of warmth and rhetoric; now reduced to domestic management.
The ultimate irony of conservative femininity: the woman who publicly argued for female subjugation is now herself subjected. Her bitterness is authentic — she did not expect to be included in the oppression she advocated.
Moira
Casual, irreverent, profane — the only character who speaks in pre-Gilead registers without performance. Her language is the sound of the before.
She refuses to adopt Gileadean language even when it would be safer. This linguistic resistance is both her power and, ultimately, what makes her impossible to fully integrate into Gilead. They had to break her differently.
Nick
Spare, careful, minimal — he says almost nothing, and what he says cannot be trusted at face value. His silences are as meaningful as his speech.
Working-class male in Gilead: low enough in the hierarchy to be assigned as a driver, potentially connected to Mayday. His ambiguity is structural: he could be spy or savior. The novel refuses to resolve this, and the refusal is itself an argument about who gets to be trustworthy.
Ofglen
Pious-seeming on the surface; her real voice emerges only in whispers when the surveillance gaps allow. Her linguistic performance of Gileadean compliance is flawless.
The resistance, when it exists, speaks in the master's language to avoid detection. Ofglen is proof that compliance and subversion can share the same words — that language is never simply what it appears to mean.
Narrator's Voice
Offred: present-tense, fragmented, unreliable by her own admission. She tells us she is reconstructing, rearranging, possibly lying. 'This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction.' The unreliability is not a flaw — it is the honest acknowledgment that memory under trauma is not archives. She is doing what she can with what she has.
Tone Progression
Sections I–V
Observational, wary, darkly ironic
Offred learns her world by cataloguing it. The tone is an educated woman applying intelligence to her own imprisonment.
Sections VI–XII
Cautiously hopeful, increasingly fractured
The Commander's study and Nick offer warmth. But each warmth costs something. The hope is real and the dread underneath it is realer.
Sections XIII–XVI
Grim, stripped, increasingly desperate
Moira's fate, the Salvaging, Ofglen's suicide. The tone approaches silence. Language begins to fail.
Historical Notes
Satirically academic, coldly ironic
Atwood's own voice breaks through the academic ventriloquism. The contrast between Pieixoto's breezy scholarship and everything we've just read is designed to produce fury.
Stylistic Comparisons
- George Orwell's 1984 — same dystopian structure, but Atwood centers gender where Orwell centers politics; Winston Smith survives slightly longer than Offred before breaking
- Toni Morrison's Beloved — both novels about women whose bodies are owned by the state/system; both use fragmented, non-linear narration to represent trauma that cannot be told in sequence
- Octavia Butler's Kindred — another woman owned by a system she must survive within; Butler uses slavery directly where Atwood uses theocracy as analogy
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions