Summary At the bell’s summons, Offred descends to the sitting room and kneels. Cora, Rita, Nick, and Serena arrive, waiting for the Commander, who will complete the “household.” As in earlier scenes, Offred disengages her mind and returns to a crucial flashback of her family’s attempt to escape oppression. By […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 6 – HouseholdSummary and Analysis Chapter 5 – Nap
Summary In a single chapter, Offred’s tenuous, tedious existence is summarized as she waits for the ceremony. She recalls how Handmaid’s training prepared her for periods of nothingness and wonders if she were drugged or merely overwhelmed by the enormity of the change in her life. While she practices labor […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 5 – NapSummary and Analysis Chapter 4 – Waiting Room
Summary In May, Offred again joins Ofglen to walk by the Wall; they turn away from an executed trio — a priest and two homosexuals. As three Econowives pass by in mourning for a stillborn fetus, Offred and Ofglen place hands over their hearts in a gesture of sympathy. The […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 4 – Waiting RoomSummary and Analysis Chapter 3 – Night
Summary Escaping her chaste confinement through word gymnastics and mental excursions, Offred recalls a college dormitory scene, depicting her friendship with Moira. She also remembers a childhood Saturday in a park, where Offred’s mother joined a militant feminist gathering organized to burn pornographic magazines. The scene then shifts to Offred’s […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 3 – NightSummary and Analysis Chapter 2 – Shopping
Summary In spring, settled in a sedate, suicide-proof chamber, Offred, who is conditioned to accept her lot as a Handmaid as though it were a commission in the army, endures a prissy, overly feminized environment run by women. Her red habit, matched with stockings and gloves and topped with white […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 2 – ShoppingSummary and Analysis Chapter 1 – Night
Summary Chapter 1, the lone segment of Section I, introduces a gymnasium scene in which Alma, Janine, Dolores, Moira, June, and other Handmaids-in-training sleep in a barracks arrangement beneath flannel sheets and army blankets and contemplate their yearnings for freedom. Like girls at a restrictive camp, they reach out to […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 1 – NightSummary and Analysis Epigraphs
Summary To set the tone of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood opens with three disparate epigraphs, or introductory quotations. The first, from Genesis 30:1-3, cites the crux of the scriptural love story of Jacob and Rachel. Having promised to work seven years in exchange for marriage to his uncle Laban’s daughter […]
Read more Summary and Analysis EpigraphsCharacter List
Offred This unidentified, faithful wife of Luke, mother of a daughter, and successful clerk or computer operator working in the discing room of an office or possibly a library among eight or ten other female employees, bears the state-contrived label of “Offred,” a term that identifies her as a handmaid […]
Read more Character ListAbout The Handmaid’s Tale
Introduction In an interview for The Progressive, Margaret Atwood explains how she came to write The Handmaid’s Tale, which is often labeled speculative fiction because it appears to predict or warn of a triumph of totalitarianism or what one reviewer calls a “Western Hemisphere Iran.” Having absorbed the New England […]
Read more About The Handmaid’s TaleBook Summary
In the mid-1980s near Boston, Massachusetts, a cabal of rightwing fundamentalists murders the U.S. President and members of Congress, disenfranchises women by impounding their credit cards and denying them jobs and education, and sets up Gilead, a repressively conservative state bent on annihilating homosexuals, abortionists, and religious sects other than […]
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