Question

Your response to this Discussion Board is due Wednesday, April 4. Your response should reflect the extent to which you have read of The Handmaid's Tale.  Before you post, I recommend reviewing the materials on Canvas under Modules/Unit 2.

PART 1:  Identify a significant theme that interests you from The Handmaid's Tale (you may return to the theme that you identified from your last DB post). Consider this as preparatory work for your Project 2 Literary Argument essay. In your response, posit a claim on how this theme functions in the book. Then, include three (3) pieces of evidence from the text to explore this theme. For each piece of evidence, type out the passage (you may use the ellipses) and cite the page number. Then, analyze each passage in lieu of your theme.

PART 2: Find one secondary source that helps you to further explore your theme from Part 1. See the secondary sources that I have posted under Modules/Unit 2 or do an educated Library or Google search. In your response here, include a link to the secondary source and explain how it helps you to explore this theme within the book. What insight does this secondary source provide to help you shed insight into this theme and your working argument on how this theme functions in the book?  

Answer 1

Margaret Atwood’s novel, ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ builds an intricate network of isolated, paranoid lives in a dystopia. Through its many characters and time periods, the story explores the themes of state power, sexuality and feminism and encourages the readers to question to their own taken for granted assumptions about social comfort, morality, compromise and control versus rebellion and subversion. In my analysis, I would like to highlight on the power of language and sexuality as a central theme of the book.

Offred lies in her bed, thinking about the limited freedom that nighttime allows her. She idly thinks about the difference between to "lie" and to "lay", and the ramifications of these differences. She considers what she should imagine. Transported by memory, Offred recalls one night during her college years when she was trying to finish a paper, books scattered around her room, and Moira was trying to get her to go out for a beer. Next, she remembers going to a park with her mother, and then discovering that they were really there because her mother wanted to join some female friends of hers who were making a bonfire of pornographic magazines. Suddenly, without meaning to, Offred remembers waking up to find her daughter gone, and seeing a picture of her with another woman and knowing that she would not be returned. Offred thinks about how much easier her life would be if it were just a story. It's not a story, but at the same time it is - a story she is telling in her head, because she is not allowed to write. She decides she will tell her story only to "you" because "you" is safe, "you" can mean anyone...even if she knows that "you" really means no one. ( Atwood, III: Night, pg.

in the given passage, we find the protagonist Offred amidst her uncontrollable state of utter loneliness because of her. Social position firstly, as a woman and secondly as a handmaid.

Offred's case this solitude is even more profound as is found remembering everything from some point in the future. what is striking to note is that her loneliness is heightened by the sheer lack and even deprivation of language from her life. In the Gildean society, women are abstained from having access to the written word. Here Writing appears to symbolise the right to critical thought itself as language is built as a powerful tool that creates an experience of one’s self identity. In the absence of language however, Offred appears to suggest a fear of losing her own sense of self and thereby succumbing to the regime’s ideology of controlling individuality. It is under such circumstances that she begins to explore her memory of the past as a powerful language in itself and she addresses these vivid imagery to a mythic ‘you’, which indicates her desperate attempt at survival by creating the identity of a listener, thereby instituting he4 place in a monologue and attaining a complete circle in the taboo phenomenon of language through a listener.

Another interesting use of language is found to be under operation when Offred thinks of words and analyzes them, using them to distract her from her own reality and to help her survive. For example, her secret games of Scrabble with the  Commander show not only how she uses the search for words to distract herself from her fear and bemusement about those in power like the Commander, but also how she uses it as survival strategy to ‘remember’ and practice language in itself and with the very propagators of the state regime that denied her and other women to produce language. Thus, Offred reveals how language especially women’s writings and expressions can be imbued with a highly potent sexual energy as it relates to their experience of ‘flesh’ itself rather than the banal abstract, and executionary tone of an asexualised regime.

Thus Atwood writes:

Offred begins visiting the Commander two or three nights a week, going to his rooms whenever Nick wears his cap askew to signal her that her presence is desired. It is understood that they must be very careful not to let Serena Joy catch on. Offred begins to think that his desires are not clear to her because they are not clear to him. The second time she visits the Commander they play Scrabble again, and Offred realizes that it is he who is letting her win. After they finish, he gives her a magazine, Vogue, to read. He seems proud to be showing it to her, since publications of this nature are supposed to have been destroyed. She realizes that he is getting pleasure out of watching her read. She asks him why he doesn't show the magazine to Serena Joy, and he tells her that his Wife wouldn't understand.

( Atwood, IX: Night)