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| Categories | Genre Fiction |
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| Publisher | Vintage; Media tie-in edition (April 18, 2017) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 336 pages |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.14 x 0.68 x 8.06 inches |
I. Book introduction
Now a Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. The Handmaid’s Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times)
The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men in its population.
The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment’s calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid’s Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.
“Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions . . . An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking . . . Read it while it’s still allowed.” –Houston Chronicle
Plot summary
After staging an attack killing the president of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the “Sons of Jacob” uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution. The Constitution is suspended, newspapers are censored, and the United States of America is reformed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime quickly consolidates its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including Christian denominations.
The regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious fanaticism among its newly created social classes. One of the most significant changes is the limitation of women’s rights. Women become the lowest-ranking class and are not allowed to own money or property, or to read and write. Most significantly, women are deprived of control over their own reproductive functions. Though the regime controls most of the country, various rebel groups remain active.
The story is told in first-person narration by a woman named Offred, a criminal guilty of trying to escape to Canada with a forged passport alongside her husband and 5-year-old daughter; she is also considered an adulterer for being married to a divorced man. Her marriage was forcibly dissolved, and her daughter was taken from her. Instead of being sentenced under the Republic of Gilead’s draconian criminal justice system, Offred accepted training to become a “Handmaid” at the Rachel and Leah Centre, an alternative only available to fertile women: environmental pollution and radiation have drastically affected fertility, and she is one of the few remaining women who can conceive. She has been assigned to produce children for the “Commanders”, the ruling class of men, and is made a Handmaid, a role based on the biblical story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah.
Women are classed socially and follow a strict dress code, ranked highest to lowest: the Commanders’ Wives in sky blue, their unmarried daughters in white, the Handmaids in red with highly visible large white bonnets, the Aunts (who train and indoctrinate the Handmaids) in brown, the Marthas (cooks and maids, possibly unmarried sterile women past child-bearing years) in green, Econowives (the wives of lower-ranking men who handle everything in the domestic sphere) in blue, red and green stripes, and widows in black.
Offred details her life starting with her third assignment as a Handmaid to a Commander. Interspersing narratives of her present-day experiences are flashbacks of her life before and during the beginning of the revolution, including her failed escape, indoctrination by the Aunts, and her friend Moira’s escape from the indoctrination facility. At her new home, she is treated poorly by the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, a former Christian media personality who supported women’s domesticity and subordinate role well before Gilead was established.
To Offred’s surprise, the Commander asks to see her outside of the “Ceremony”, ritualized rape conducted during the Handmaids’ likely fertile period each month, with the wives present, intended to result in conception. His request to see her in the library is illegal in Gilead, but they meet nevertheless. They mostly play Scrabble and Offred is allowed to ask favors of him, such as information or material items. He asks Offred to kiss him as if she meant it and tells her about his strained relationship with his wife. Finally, he gives her lingerie and takes her to a covert, government-run brothel using Jezebels, women forced into sanctioned sex slavery. Offred unexpectedly encounters an emotionally-broken Moira there, who tells her that those found breaking the law are sent to the “Colonies” to clean up toxic waste or are allowed to work as Jezebels as punishment.
In the days between her visits to the Commander, Offred also learns her shopping partner, a woman called Ofglen, is with the Mayday resistance, an underground network working to overthrow Gilead’s government. Not knowing of Offred’s criminal acts with her husband, Serena begins to suspect that he is infertile, so she arranges for Offred to have sex with Nick, the Commander’s personal servant, who had attempted to talk to her before and shown interest. Serena offers Offred information about her daughter in exchange. She later brings her a photograph of Offred’s daughter which leaves Offred feeling dejected believing she has been erased from her daughter’s life.
After their initial sexual encounter, Offred and Nick begin to meet on their own initiative as well; she discovers that she enjoys these intimate moments despite memories of her husband, and shares potentially dangerous information about her past with him. Offred later tells Nick that she thinks she is pregnant.
Offred hears from a new walking partner that Ofglen has disappeared (reported as a suicide). She contemplates suicide when Serena finds evidence of the illegal relationship with the Commander. Shortly afterward, men arrive at the house wearing uniforms of the secret police, known as the Eyes of God or simply “Eyes”, to take her away. As she is led to a waiting van, Nick tells her to trust him and go with the men. Offred is unsure if Nick or the men are Eyes or secretly members of Mayday, or if they are here to capture her or aid in her escape; she ultimately enters the van. Her future is left uncertain while Serena and the Commander are left bereft in their house, each thinking about the repercussions of Offred’s capture on their lives.
The novel concludes with a metafictional epilogue, described as a partial transcript of an international historical association conference taking place in the year 2195. The male keynote speaker explains that Offred’s narrative was originally recorded on a set of audio cassettes, a technology roughly 200 years out of date at that time, and later transcribed by historians. The speaker appears to be very dismissive of the misogyny of Gilead and interprets the story’s title as a sexist joke. He also comments on the difficulty of authenticating the account, due to how few records have survived from the early years of Gilead’s existence, and speculates on the eventual fates of Offred and her acquaintances.
About the Author (Margaret Atwood)
Margaret Atwood (Margaret Eleanor Atwood, born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General’s Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
Atwood’s works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and “power politics”. Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age.
Margaret Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers’ Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. She is the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.
II. Reviewer: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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1. TATIANA reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
What a perfect time to be scared to death by this novel. It doesn’t feel dated or far-fetched at all, thanks to President Trump.
Claire Danes is a pretty good match for this narrative.
Original review
Imagine the near future where power is overtaken by the religious right under the guise of protection from Islamic terrorism. Imagine the future where the roles of the women reduced to those assigned to them in Old Testament – they are no longer allowed to read, work, own property, or handle money. Imagine that due to the pollution and man-created viruses, the fertility rates are so low that the few fertile women (the Handmaids) are now a communal property and are moved from house to house to be inseminated by men of power under the watchful eye of their wives. Imagine the future where women can only be the Wives, domestics (the Marthas), sexual toys (the Jezebels), female prison guards (the Aunts), wombs (the Handmaids), or, if they are unsuited for any of these roles, Unwomen who are sent off to the Colonies where they harvest cotton if they are lucky or clean out radioactive waste if they aren’t.
Well, after you’ve imagined that, you can imagine very easily how much I was terrified by this book. As a modern woman, I am horrified by the notion that at some point in time I can become nothing more than a servant, a toy, a reproductive organ. The world created by Atwood seems too much of a stretch of imagination at a first glance, but if the current climate, how implausible this feminist dystopia really is?
To say I am impressed by this novel is to say nothing, really. This book is one of those that stays in your brain and you keep coming back to it over and over again.
Having said that, I have to note, that this is definitely not an easy read. Offred (the protagonist Handmaid) is in many ways a frustrating narrator: she is broken, she is passive, she is desperate and her only goal is to make it through another day. The ending is ambiguous. The narration is complex with constant switching from present to past and back. But it all worked perfectly for me. For me, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a powerful novel that is in my mind next to Saramago’s “Blindness,” another book that left me sleepless.
2. MARIA reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
4.8/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
What can I even say about this masterpiece of a book? What can I even say that hasn’t already been said? I’m awed to my core, this book is a prediction, a revelation, a hymn. This book is so fucking old, yet so fucking relatable and ahead of its time… it reads like 1984. The events in this dystopian book seem like such a close reality which scares me for the future of humanity.
I wanted to read this book for such a long time… but the tv show made me do it, at last. I’m so fascinated by stories like this, dystopian stories that hold truth to them, and I wanted to dive into this book with everything I had. And it happened. This book consumed me, I wanted to know everything, all the little excruciating details of this brand new world, all the thoughts in June’s head, everything.
The writing was fascinating and yet sometimes I kinda lost track, especially at the dialogue parts which weren’t really dialogue. The pace was a little slow, but I’m so used to YA quick pacing so I don’t hold that against it. But this book was never boring or dull, it was everything it should be.
I saw some major differences with the show, the show took some characters and situations and created multiple things that didn’t exist in the book. And I commend them on that. The TV show and and the book are two sides of the same coin, what lacked in the former the latter had and the opposite. One thing that let me down about the book is that we didn’t see Serena and her relationship with June flourish at all. Their relationship is such a strong dynamic in the show, it is so fascinating to watch. At least we got to see it develop in the show.
I’m so irrevocably happy this story is going to continue, and so soon I’ve heard. We all know that came to be because of the success of the TV show, but I can’t hold that against anyone because the story we are going to follow in the sequel is so much more different than season 2 of the TV show. I can’t wait to again devour the next book, and I hope for many nexts. This is my first time reading a book from this author, and I don’t think it will be my last.
To sum it all up, read this book. It tackles so many important issues about feminism and liberty of speech and it’s even more important to read it if you’re a woman. Just do it. You won’t regret it. And till the next time, K BYE!!!
3. FABIAN reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
A true dystopian classic. This is incredibly well written, & I think that that is why it’s fan base is so enormous & faithful. It made Entertainment Weekly’s “Top 25 Best Books of the Last 25 Years” several years ago.
The account reminds me of, and is probably written trying to somehow emulate, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” This new vision of the future is one devoid the female mystique, with only one sex becoming triumphant &) dominating the other. This is misogyny to the nth degree. It is a holocaust that mirrors the treatment of women in the Middle East. It is multifaceted & wondrous. But also terrible.
I must say that reading the last stretch of novel, I drifted & when the conclusion arrived, it hit me. It’s impact waking me full tilt. What?!?!? It ends in a very Coen Brothers fashion! That it is tight, then unravels in plot is efficient… then chaotic. It belongs in the same shelf as “We,” obviously, and I did not find anything funny about it, only pathos and ironic melancholy. Again, kinda like ’em Coens.
4. CHRISTOPHER DOUGHERTY reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
Quite The Rollercoaster Reading Experience
A masterpiece by Atwood, no doubt. The writing style, whether intentional or unintentional, pushes and pulls the reader as they follow the constantly moving emotions of the narrator.
It’s a swift change as you begin to settle in to one current state of affairs, and are instantly dragged into a retelling of a memory.
The ending felt abrupt and a bit rushed, otherwise this would’ve been five stars.
Highly recommend, as this is a quick read, and one I think everyone should run through once.
5. THERESA reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
daunting and riveting
It’s a dark story about June who is basically a slave to a religious society who overthrew the government in hopes to force women to bear children for those that cannot and that’s a oversimplification. It’s worth a read it’s so good and every woman should read this book especially with the times we’re living in.
6. MOLLY reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
Return to White Male Supremacy
This book as written in 1986. The US has become known as “Gilead” after the security for the US Congress is infiltrated, leading to an uprising and attack that resulted in the elimination of the US Congress and the assassination of the President. The new theocracy is concerned with the dwindling birth rate of Caucasians and the proper status of “girls.” The wealthy and powerful white men whose wives couldn’t get pregnant for whatever reason were given a series of “handmaids,” dressed in red, whom they tried to get pregnant so they could have children. All of this was done in the name of religion. Any woman had been married more than once and had a child already and was still young enough would be made a handmaid and sent from house to house in order to produce a child for the rich guy and his wife. The story is told through a stream of consciousness of a handmaid named Offred. The story is told through flashbacks as well as current action. The story has a slow start, but if you stick with it, you’ll get a bang at the end. It is a brilliant book and I’m glad I read it. It’s a relatively short book: presented as 300 pages but with all the blank pages, it turns out to be more like 250 pages. By the end it is clear how the plodding in the beginning was necessary and it all makes sense. Of course, the correlation to today’s politics is obvious and scary. The things JD Vance is saying about the important of women having children could have come straight out of this book. Today’s GOP platform promoting a return to the way things used to be — white male supremacy — is a fulfillment of the horror written in this book.
7. DONNA ROSE reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
A Chilling and Timely Classic!
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a gripping dystopian masterpiece that stays with you long after the last page. The haunting world of Gilead and Offred’s powerful, heartbreaking story make this a must-read. Atwood’s writing is sharp, poetic, and thought-provoking, tackling themes of power, freedom, and identity with chilling relevance. If you’re looking for a novel that’s both captivating and deeply meaningful, this is it!
8. LYN reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a brilliant, endearing, scary as hell book.
Told with simplistic prose and stark attention to detail, Atwood describes life in the not too distant future where the United States has been transformed through military coup into a totalitarian theocracy. This dystopian horror story is made all the more real by the bridge Atwood has created between the world we know now and the world that could be – the story’s protagonist remembers the time before the change. This is, to my knowledge, a unique element in the dystopian genre, whereas in many others the setting is some time in the far future and there seems little hope for change or revolution.
More than that, the heroine, Offred (not her real name but the proprietary title she is given) is an approachable, likable character that brings the reader dangerously close to the action. Drawing an obvious correlation between far right conservative Christian movements and Muslim Sharia law authoritarian theocratic ideologies, Atwood has created a disturbing vision.
As the reader experiences the story from the perspective of a mother, this story has the added complexity of nurturing relationships turned horribly askew. This is not as terrible as Elie Wiesel’s Night, still in my mind the scariest nightmare I’ve ever even thought about reading, but Atwood’s talent has summoned a specter almost as dark.
9. CINDY reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
I have no idea how I should rate this book. I was enraptured by the story and looked forward to reading it each time I picked it up, because the writing style and moodiness had a way of immersing me into the universe. I was very intrigued with discovering how the main character and her society ended up in these circumstances. The stale atmosphere, motonous daily life, and characters’ hopeless complacence all felt very real. But I’m also dissatisfied by how much is left to the imagination due to the ambiguous ending and incomplete world building. I wanted answers to how there could be such a dramatic cultural shift in a short amount of time in one of the most liberal countries in the world — getting these answers would have helped the story be more believable and immersive. I also wish we got to follow more character development, relationship building, plot structure, or pretty much anything other than just atmospheric writing and a haunting concept. I keep juggling between rating this 3 or 4 stars, but for now I’m going to lean towards 4 stars since the book still had me more captivated compared to other novels of its time and genre, and mostly succeeded with its message and writing. I’m looking forward to checking out the TV adaptation so that I have more story to chew with.
10. MATTHEW reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale
An interesting book to read right now for a couple of reasons. One, I just finished 1984 and it was very much a world like the one in 1984. Two, the storyline closely reflects the fears of the current political climate in America.
It is hard to say that a story like this is “great” as that has a positive connotation. I was very enthralling, but terrifying at the same time. As a man, I don’t think this story has as deep of an impact on me as it would if I was a woman.
If you like dystopian, you must check this book out. If you are fired up by the recent election, you may want to hold off a bit . . . it will only make it worse.
III. The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes by Margaret Atwood
The best book quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
“Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
“I am not your justification for existence.”
“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
“If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending…
But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.”“You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”
“I feel like the word shatter.”
“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”
“Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion…Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
Excerpted from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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