Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “The Handmaid's Tale” by Margaret Atwood

A red dress, a white bonnet, a silence that isn’t absence but compression. The Handmaid’s Tale is not about dystopia — or, at least, not only. It is about something more domestic, more textured, something that grows like mildew in the creases of history. It is a diary carved with a fingernail into the wall of a prison cell that pretends to be a home. And, paradoxically, it is also a love story. (Yes, I know. But we’ll come back to that.)

Let’s begin — or, perhaps, unbegin — with the simple premise that Margaret Atwood’s Gilead is not a world other than ours. It is our world under a heat lamp. It’s America in drag, with Bible verses stuffed into its bra, quoting Leviticus with a trembling lip and a baton behind its back. To call it speculative fiction is like calling a slap a metaphor. Atwood herself insists that everything in Gilead has precedent in real life. She's not imagining. She's collaging.

There is no clean thread in this novel — no tidy allegory, no heroic arc. Offred, the not-quite-protagonist, is not trying to overthrow the regime. She’s just trying to stay human — which, under fascism, might be the only rebellion worth the name. Her desire is not revolution, but recollection. (And here comes the irony: even remembering becomes a political act.) And Offred, unreliable in that all-too-human way, doesn’t offer certainty. Her narrative is stitched with doubt. “This is a reconstruction.” A phrase that circles back like a nervous tic. Which, in postmodern fashion, raises the question — whose story is this really?

Let’s pause here. Not to clarify, but to tangle. What if The Handmaid’s Tale is not so much a story about oppression as it is a study of complicity? Offred is not pure. She does not refuse everything. She complies, selectively. She plays along when she must. She flirts with the Commander, wears the butter as lotion, sneaks off to Jezebel’s in red lipstick. Is this survival? Or seduction? Or both — blurred until the categories implode? (I know. It’s uncomfortable.)

There’s an exquisite cruelty in Gilead's choreography — the way it weaponizes ritual. Every act is a script. The Ceremony, with its grotesque pantomime of religious rape; the Salvagings, where death is turned into theatre; the “Blessed be the fruit” exchanges, hollow as supermarket greetings. But here’s the thing — and this is where Atwood’s genius slices deepest — the rituals don’t just enforce the ideology. They are the ideology. They train the body to forget its boundaries. To internalize surveillance until the gaze is not from outside but within. Foucault, if he were a seamstress, would nod grimly.

(Incidentally, did anyone else notice how the Aunts — the women who enforce all this — are the most fervent disciples of patriarchy? I've always found that detail quietly horrifying. And familiar.)

Atwood plays a dangerous game with genre. She borrows from sci-fi, but also from Gothic novels — the forbidden rooms, the whispered secrets, the sense that terror resides not just in politics but in intimacy. Gilead isn’t merely a state. It’s a mood. A texture. Even the air feels rehearsed. The syntax itself collapses into something breathless, broken. "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" — a fake Latin phrase that becomes a mantra, an incantation, a way of not giving up. Language, here, is both leash and lifeline.

Oh, language. Let’s talk about the Commander. A man who quotes the Bible while playing Scrabble in secret with his Handmaid. He’s not a monster — not exactly. More like a bureaucrat of sentiment. He wants Offred to like him. He gives her lotion and lets her read fashion magazines — but never power. His kindness is violence in disguise, like a wolf apologizing for its teeth. And she — she responds, ambivalently. She wants. She despises her wanting. She wants him to want her. And all this is — well — not romantic. But it is real. And in Atwood’s world, realness is what makes things dangerous.

Offred’s name, let’s not forget, is a patronymic. Of-Fred. She is of him. Defined by him. A body on lease. (This is, by the way, how Gilead avoids mass murder. It doesn’t kill all the women — it just renames them.) Identity here is erased not with bullets but with grammar. And yet — she remembers. Her mother. Moira. Luke. The daughter. The cat. The egg she cracks into a bowl. These flashes of specificity — the untheorizable texture of life — become her resistance. I almost wrote "soul," but I’m tired of that word.

There’s a theory (I forget who said it — maybe nobody) that trauma is not what happens to you, but what you can’t narrate. And so Offred’s act of narration — fragmented, halting, unreliable — is a reclamation. Not of truth, exactly, but of voice. The voice is what Gilead fears. (Notice how women are forbidden to read — not just because reading is power, but because reading teaches you that there are other ways to think. Reading creates escape hatches.)

Let me shift — ungracefully — to gender. Because this novel is often described as feminist, and rightly so, but not always in the way we expect. Atwood doesn’t give us utopia. Her women are not saints. Moira is brave but also stubborn. Serena Joy, the Wife, is both victim and collaborator — and more interesting for being both. Even Offred’s mother, the fiery second-wave feminist, is a reminder that idealism has limits. No one here gets to be purely good. (Real feminism is messy.)

And the men? Either drunk on power or broken by it. Nick, the maybe-lover, maybe-eye, maybe-traitor, is a cipher. He exists because Offred needs him to. Or thinks she does. Love, in Gilead, is either illegal or useless. Or both.

But wait — can I say something odd? This novel is surprisingly funny. Darkly, dryly, surgically funny. Offred’s voice, despite the horror, is laced with irony. She notices absurdity. She jokes (quietly, bitterly) about her own situation. This humor is not escape — it’s defiance. Laughter as blade. I sometimes think it’s the most rebellious thing in the book.

There’s also a curious sensuality in the way Atwood describes objects. Butter, flowers, soap. The body is not erased in Gilead — it’s heightened. Controlled, yes. Restricted. But also watched, curated, even aestheticized. Which makes it all the more tragic. This is not a novel of abstinence. It’s a novel of enforced purity. And nothing is more erotic than what is forbidden.

And here’s a stray thought — why do so few readers talk about the ending? That metafictional twist where we learn that Offred’s story is being analyzed, centuries later, by male academics at a conference. Her voice, once raw and trembling, is now an object of study. They joke about her. Question her accuracy. Decide whether she is "plausible." It’s a gut-punch. The final violence. Even in the future, the female voice is filtered through male authority. We escape Gilead — only to land in a lecture hall.

(Also, can we take a moment to hate the phrase “The Historical Notes”? Cold as linoleum.)

So where are we? We’re nowhere tidy. We’re in a text that resists neat readings. That pretends to be a diary, but is also a trap. That exposes ideology not by preaching, but by performing. You want closure? Go read propaganda. Atwood doesn’t give you comfort. She gives you a mirror — cracked, angled, fogged by breath. But still — you see.

And I wonder — I do — what would happen if we read The Handmaid’s Tale not as a warning, but as a description? Not of what will come, but what always hovers — waiting — at the edges of the present? Gilead is not built from monsters. It is built from small choices. Reasonable compromises. Good intentions paved and repaved until they look like law.

(I’m rambling now. But one last thing.)

There’s a scene where Offred lies in her assigned bed, thinking about the woman who slept there before her. Who scratched Latin into the wood. Who lost hope. That gesture — the carving, the defiance — is, perhaps, the truest moment of resistance in the novel. It’s not dramatic. It’s not even visible. But it’s there. Like a whisper in the dark. Like a ghost that refuses to vanish.

So no — this isn’t a dystopia. It’s a footnote to history that somehow swallowed the text. It's a love letter written from captivity. It's a joke with no punchline. It’s trauma that talks back.

And maybe — just maybe — that’s enough.