1. The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood

2. The Handmaid’s Tale Title is an allusion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – a collection of stories told by various figures on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Each tale is titled with its teller: “The Miller’s Tale”, “The Prioress’ Tale”, etc. ◦ But these titles equate the narrating characters with their social function. ◦ Similarly, what we are reading is not “Offred’s Tale”, but “The Handmaid’s Tale” – her individuality is subordinated to her social role. Also: the handmaid’s tale represents a narrative issued by a voice silenced in Chaucer’s text.

3. Names Handmaids’ names are derived from their respective commanders: ◦ Offred, Ofwarren, Ofglen, etc. ◦ Same applies to wives: “Wife of Warren”. ◦ Logical extension of patronymic naming. We aren’t given her name until p104, and even then it is somewhat oblique: “My name isn’t Offred.” Real name is kept hidden: “I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden” (104) – a hidden treasure only revealed to a few characters (and not the reader). ◦ Still we can deduce her name is June: in the first chapter Offred gives us a list of names exchanged in silence: “Alma, Janine, Dolores, Moira, June” (4). ◦ All the other names except for June are accounted for in the text.

4. Names All names in the text are problematic. ◦ The Gileadean Research Association presumes that most of the names have been changed by Offred. ◦ Raises problems in the epilogue when the scholars try to match the characters in the books with “historical” persons. Names are dangerous: “Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what your chances are out there, of survival, yours?” (50). ◦ A name gives us a concrete, specific subjectivity; it makes us subject to social structures: “Ideology … ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects … by that very precise operation I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” (Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”).

5. Voices The lack of names parallels another lack: that of voice. ◦ Real names are exchanged in silence (4). ◦ Offred sings, but only in her head (67). Serena Joy, a former singer, is also rendered silent: “And sometimes from the front sitting room there will be the thin sound of Serena’s voice from a disc made long ago and played now with the volume low, so she won’t be caught listening as she sits there knitting, remembering her own former and now amputated glory” (67-68) ◦ This former glory is “amputated” – like a form of castration. ◦ What remains is “thin” – the voice has been disembodied: a crude representation of itself. In the Unwoman documentary Offred sees at the Training Center, she sees images of liberated, professional women, but there is no sound: these women are not allowed to be heard.

6. Voices With no communication possible, personal histories (narratives) or other women are marginalized and repressed. Offred tries to figure out (the first) Ofglen’s back story, but it’s inaccessible and indeterminate. ◦ Offred doesn’t know if Ofglen’s pious exterior is a front or genuine and she herself is subject to the same indeterminancy: “But this is what I must look like to her, as well” (39-40). Self can only emerge in solitary silence: “The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet” (47). Resistance movement communicates through a secret language of codewords – “Mayday”. ◦ “Passwords, things that cannot be told, people with secret identities, dark linkages: this does not seem as if it ought to be the true shape of the world” (253).

7. Écriture Féminine Term coined by French feminist critic Hélène Cixous in her 1975 work, “The Laugh Of The Medusa” to describe specifically female writing. “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement” (2039). Écriture Féminine described as privileging non-linear, cyclical writing.

8. Écriture Féminine Language is seen as a male domain: what Jacques Derrida refers to as phallogocentrism. Nelly Furman: “It is through the medium of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allow us to comprehend the world around us. Male- centered categorizations predominate in American English and subtly shape our understanding and perception of reality; this is why attention is increasingly directed to the inherently oppressive aspects for women of a male-constructed language system” (qtd. in Showalter 190). In order to enter into language, women have to write as men.

9. Écriture Féminine Women need to develop their own linguistic system, their own writing. Women’s writing exists in secrecy – hidden behind patriarchal literary order – transmitted in folklore and myth (oral tradition). Gerda Lerner: women exist in two worlds – that of the dominant (male) culture and, simultaneously, their own female culture – “Thus, women live a duality – as members of the general culture and as partakers of women’s culture” (qtd. in Showalter 199). Both men and women have areas of experience inaccessible to each other, but the male area is made accessible to or structure by language: male is dominant, female is muted.

10. Writing The Handmaid’s Tale is intensely metafictional: it’s not about Offred and her story so much as it’s about her writing that story. Self is constructed through narrative: we are our own stories. ◦ “My self is a thing I must compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (82). ◦ Offred is acting a part: becoming a narrative, a narrative over which she has no control. ◦ By composing this story, she is exercising control over her narrative; reinscribing a new one – symbolized in her (presumed) escape at the end of the novel.

11. Writing Women are denied access into the phallogocentric world of writing; their literature is oral. ◦ “Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden” (50). ◦ “nothing to write with” = lack of phallus: “Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal” (234). ◦ Offred wants to gain entry into the (masculine) world of writing.

12. Writing Reading is similarly constrained. Bible is kept locked up: “It is an incendiary device” (108). Reading is controlled partly because the Bible has been altered (like in Nineteen Eighty-Four). ◦ One of the altered verses tells us that “Blessed are the silent” – “I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking” (110-111). Fred is seduced by the forbidden image of a woman reading and watches Offred reading a magazine: “a curiously sexual act” (231). ◦ Similarly, their illicit affair is not (literally) a sexual one: it’s the innocent playing of Scrabble. ◦ Game of language – eroticization of words.

13. Writing Offred’s story is not written down, but dictated on to cassette tapes. ◦ Tape player associated with Offred’s mother (67). ◦ Tape recording enables oral communication to be “written”. Women’s narratives are associated with oral tradition. ◦ Moira’s escape story is passed around by word of mouth. ◦ The later story of Moira (after her escape) is reconstructed by Offred from Moira’s own telling.  But it is a reconstruction from two different conversations – spliced together as if of tape (306).  Offred deconstructs her own reconstruction.

14. Writing Similarly, the story – as we have it – is a reconstruction by the Gileadean Research Association. ◦ Indeterminacy of the text: they are unsure if it is a forgery (375). Constructing the narrative gives Offred control: “If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending” (50). ◦ Offred’s authorial voice intrudes upon the narrative, making us unsure of the “reality” of what’s being told. ◦ She points out how she herself is an unreliable narrator. ◦ In Chapter 40, we are given two different versions of her fist night with Nick – “I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly” (330).

15. Writing Female writing has to be hidden, marginalized, repressed. Hidden away, on the floor of the cupboard in her room, Offred finds a piece of writing from her predecessor: “Nolite te bastardes carborundum” (65). Yet this communicative act cannot be deciphered by Offred. She requires a male translator – Commander Fred. Offred’s story on the tapes is a similar means of subversive, hidden communication: “But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place.... Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are” (334).

16. The Eye Like many of the other dystopias we have looked at, Gilead has an extensive surveillance regime: The Eyes. Reference to God as the ultimate panopticon: “Under His Eye” (55). Eyes conjure up the image of the Male Gaze. Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes how Hollywood films look at women as passive objects subordinated to the male gaze. Transforming women into an object to be looked at is an act of control that gives the (male) spectator a “satisfying sense of omnipotence”.

17. The Eye When Offred and Ofglen encounter the Japanese tourists, they must take care not to be seen in the face. ◦ “Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” (36). ◦ To the Japanese tourists, the handmaids present the lure of the veiled lady – hidden face is something to be discovered through the penetration of the eye: ◦ “We are secret, forbidden, we excite them” (37).

18. The Eye Image of penetration demonstrated during Offred’s visit to the doctor. ◦ He is authorized to look at her, but only her body – separated from her head by a sheet that “intersects me so that the doctor will never see my face. He deals with a torso only” (74). ◦ Veiled face de-individualizes Offred, reduces her to a body, a body mutilated, cut up, by the sheet. ◦ This examination also entails a literal penetration of the body. ◦ Accompanied by vaguely flirtatious language – “Any pain, honey” (74) – and a proposition for sex.

19. The Eye Soldiers at the checkpoint – one looks into Offred’s face: a subversive gesture. The power dynamic of looking is somewhat reversed in this scene. ◦ “As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach. … I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there” (28). ◦ Offred illustrates the men’s (boys’) powerlessness: she awakens their desire, but this desire can never (yet) be fulfilled.

20. The Eye Male gaze is also reverse in the sex scene between Fred, Serena, and Offred. Fred is being watched by a large group of women: “To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange” (109). Nonetheless, Fred’s penis is described as an Eye: “To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward” (109). Male gaze is also reversed in the final scene when Offred is revealed to have power over the Commander. “The Commander put his hand to his head. What have I been saying, and to whom, and which one of his enemies has found out? Possibly he will be a security risk. I am above him, looking down; he is shrinking” (367).

21. The Eye The veils the handmaids wear (blinders, “wings”) serve not only to disrupt the male gaze, but also to limit the sight of the handmaids themselves. Represents their limited view of society as a whole. “Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps” (38). Though they can (briefly) break out of the blinders with these furtive “gasps”, the wings act like Plato’s Cave – prevent the ability of the handmaids to break out of the illusions of their society.