NovelContemporary · 1985Study guide · no full textSteady

The Handmaid's Tale

Atwood's rule was to use nothing that had not happened somewhere. The horror is administrative: forms, greetings, uniforms. Notice what the narrator cannot bring herself to say.

Gender Power Freedom Language

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

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Power — how other works handle it →Freedom — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Offred

Handmaid, and narrator

The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood

Wants: To survive long enough to leave, and to remember who she was.
Undone by: She is honest about her compromises, which makes her hard to judge comfortably.

Serena Joy

Commander's wife, and a former believer

The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood

Wants: The child that would make her position mean something.
Undone by: She helped build the world that has made her powerless.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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