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The
Handmaid’s
Tale:
Revision
Notes

CONTENT

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themes

context

di erent interpretations

massolit

sparknotes

litcharts

english and media centre

quizlet

ways of comparison

physics and math tutor

biography of the authors, things about the
author that is relevant to the text

quotes

audiobooks


PLOT SUMMARY
Section I - Night - Chapter 1
• The rst person narrator, O red, starts by describing the old school
gymnasium where she has been sleeping along with other women on
army-style cots

• The women are supervised by “Aunts”, Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Sara,
who wear electric cattle prods

• There are male guards, picked from the “Angels”, who have guns but
who are not allowed to interact with the women

• O red and the other women are not allowed to speak or have any
contact with each other, but at night they stretch out their arms to
touch hands and lip-read each other’s names

Section II - Shopping - Chapters 2-6
• The location shifts to a plain bedroom in a large, Victorian house,
which O red describes as having nothing which a person could use
to harm themselves

• She enters the kitchen where Rita, a Martha (a domestic servant)
dressed in green, is kneading bread
...
Her name is
Ofwarren, but O red recognises her from the Red Centre as Janine

• O red and Ofglen walk back past the Wall, from where the hooded
dead bodies of dissidents are hung from hooks
...
She recalls seeing a photograph of her
wearing a long, white dress


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Section IV - Waiting Room - Chapters 8-12
• O red and Ofglen return from another shopping trip, in which they
saw three new bodies hung from the Wall 

• Ofglen mentions that it is a beautiful “May day”, and O red considers
the use of the word “mayday” for asking for help

• On the way back, they pass a funeral procession of Econowives, the
wives of poorer men, mourning deceased babies

• Back at the Commander’s house, O red passes Nick, who again
breaks the rules by speaking to her

• Inside, O red discovers the Commander breaking the rules by
standing outside her room, looking in, invading the only space she
gets to call her own

• She recalls how she explored the room carefully when she arrived,
and on the third day discovered a Latin phrase scratched into the
oor of the closet: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum


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Themes:
• Rebellion
• Memory
————————————————————————————————
- Rebellion: The totalitarian regime of Gilead promotes a society
conventional to traditional gender roles
...


- Another form of rebellion can be seen when Serena Joy smokes
her cigarette, which is illegal in Gilead, and how even though she
seems to uphold the standards of the state in terms of Handmaids,
even she cannot resist rebelling for pleasure
...
She uses the past
before Gilead to persevere, imagining the lives of sexualised
teenagers, magazines, what she used to wear, how she used to live
etc
...


- O red can be seen confusing memories and subjective
impressions with reality
...



• It is revealed that the Handmaid’s visit the doctor once a month for
tests to assess their tness to conceive

• During this visit, the doctor abuses his position and o ers to
impregnate O red, telling her that he has done it before and that most
of the Commanders are either too old or sterile
...
Radical feminists from her
childhood advocated censorship and destruction of reading
materials, which parallels Gilead’s actions
...


- O red also remembers that Serena Joy became and advocate for
more traditional conservative family values, and now that it has
come to pass in the reality of Gilead, she has lost her freedom and
is trapped in the house
...
The scene
also shows how Gilead cleverly caused divisions that make women
hate each other
...


- Rebellion: Despite most music being forbidden in Gilead, O red
sings Amazing Grace
...


- The number tattoo on O er’s ankle links Gilead to the Holocaust
...


Section V - Nap - Chapter 13
• During her lengthy periods of boredom, O red recalls seeing Moira for
the rst time at the Red Centre

• She thinks about her body, her memories and her daughter during
their failed attempt to escape


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Section VI - Household - Chapters 14-17

• It is time for the Ceremony, during which all of the household rst
assemble for family prayers
...

He and O red embrace, sexually attracted to each other, before Nick
informs O red that the Commander sent him to tell her to see him in
his o ce the next day

Section VII - Night - Chapter 18
• O red lies in bed, thinking of Luke and her family

Section VIII - Birth Day - Chapters 19-23
• At breakfast, a siren announces the arrival of a Birthmobile, which
takes O red and the other Handmaids to Commander Warren’s
house, as O warren has gone into labour

• Ofwarren gives birth to a baby girl, who is immediately handed to the
Wife as hers

• After dinner, she visits the Commander in her study, where they play
Scrabble

Section IX - Night - Chapter 24
• O red decides she must live in the present and work within its rules
to her advantage

• She realises that the Commander’s unusual behaviour may be able to
be exploited somehow


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Section X - Soul Scrolls - Chapters 25-29
• The Commander and O red play Scrabble, and one night he allows
her to look at an old copy of Vogue magazine

• At the next Ceremony, something has changed
...
He asks her what would make her life better, and she
replies knowledge about what is going on


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Section XI - Night - Chapter 30
• Sitting in her room looking out of the window, O red sees Nick in the
garden and their look at each other is charged with sexual desire

•
•
Section XII - Jezebel’s - Chapters 31-39
• On a shopping trip, Ofglen tells O red of the password “Mayday”, but
warns her not to use it unless she has to

• O red is stopped by Serena Joy in the garden, and she suggests that
the Commander might not be able to have children and that they
should consider another man

• She o ers to help with this, and suggests Nick as the safest
possibility

• She tells O red that she will let her see a picture of her daughter if
she agrees, which lls O red with anger as she realises that Serena
Joy has known of her daughter’s whereabouts all along

• The Handmaids attend a Prayvaganza with the other women of their
district - this is a mass wedding ceremony for the Wives’ daughters,
in which girls as young as fourteen are wed

• Ofglen reveals to O red that she and others know of the secret visits
to the Commander’s study - she asks O red to nd out what she can

• Serena Joy brings O red her meal, along with a photograph of her
daughter

• That night, when she visits the Commander, he gives her a dress and
instructs her to put on make-up, as he is taking her out

• Nick drives them to a club the Commander has clearly been to before,
where women work as prostitutes

• O red sees Moira there, and they meet in the bathroom where Moira
tells O red of her escape attempt and how she ended up at the
brothel

• The Commander takes O red to a private room to have sex, and she
doesn’t see Moira again


Section XIII - Night - Chapter 40
• That night, back at the house, Serena Joy collects O red and
instructs her to go to Nick

• They have sex for the rst time and, because she enjoys it and has
feelings for Nick, she feels as though she has betrayed her husband

Section XIV - Salvaging - Chapters 41-45
• O red reveals things to Nick, including her real name, and realises
that she wants to stay in Gilead with him

• The women are summoned to a Salvaging, where two Handmaids
and one Wife are publicly hanged

• It is followed by a Particicution, where a man accused of rape is torn
to pieces by the mob of outraged Handmaids - Ofglen is at the
forefront of this

• When O red questions her about this, she reveals that he was not a
rapist but a dissenter, and she knocked him out rst to put him out of
his misery

• At the next shopping trip, O red is met by a di erent Ofglen, who
reveals that the old Ofglen hanged herself when she saw the Eyes
coming for her

• Serena Joy also reveals that she knows about the Commander and
O red’s trip to Jezebel’s

Section XV - Night - Chapter 46
• O red hears a black van approach, and Nick enters her room telling
her that it’s actually Mayday and to go with them

• O red is taken away, to Serena Joy and the Commander’s apparent
surprise and dismay


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Historical Notes
• It is the year 2195, and O red’s tale has been discovered on tapes
and is being presented at an academic conference

• Gilead no longer exists, and O red’s fate is ultimately unknown


Themes
- Women’s Bodies As Political Instruments

Because Gilead was formed in response to the crisis caused by
dramatically decreased birthrates, the state’s entire structure, with its
religious trappings and rigid political hierarchy, is built around a single
goal: control of reproduction
...
Women cannot vote, hold property or jobs, read, or do
anything else that might allow them to become subversive or
independent and thereby undermine their husbands or the state
...
They are reduced to
their fertility, treated as nothing more than a set of ovaries and a womb
...
Gilead seeks to deprive
women of their individuality in order to make them docile carriers of the
next generation
...
Having made it
illegal for women to hold jobs, Gilead creates a system of titles
...
Stripping
them of permanent individual names strips them of their individuality, or
tries to
...
” Black people and
Jewish people are de ned by biblical terms (“Children of Ham” and
“Sons of Jacob,” respectively) that set them apart from the rest of
society, making their persecution easier
...
Specially created terms de ne the
rituals of Gilead, such as “Prayvaganzas,” “Salvagings,” and
“Particicutions
...
Gilead maintains its control over women’s
bodies by maintaining control over names
...
O red remembers her mother saying that it is “truly amazing,
what people can get used to, as long as there are a few
compensations
...
Her situation
restricts her horribly compared to the freedom her former life allowed,
but her relationship with Nick allows her to reclaim the tiniest fragment
of her former existence
...

O red seems suddenly so content that she does not say yes when
Ofglen asks her to gather information about the Commander
...
While a woman like Serena Joy has
no power in the world of men, she exercises authority within her own
household and seems to delight in her tyranny over O red
...
In a
similar way, the women known as Aunts, especially Aunt Lydia, act as
willing agents of the Gileadean state
...
Atwood’s message is bleak
...
In Gilead, the tiny rebellions or resistances do
not necessarily matter
...



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- Complicity
The Handmaid’s Tale explores the ways in which ordinary people
become complicit in the appalling acts of a totalitarian regime
...
Serena Joy is
miserable and has very little freedom, but she enjoys and exploits the
power she wields over O red
...
O red’s
place on the spectrum of complicity is ambiguous
...
Being true to her own
beliefs would require her to rebel, but she does not
...
Even in her own head, she refuses
to call the Ceremony “rape,” because “nothing is going on here that I
haven’t signed up for” (Chapter 16)
...


- Seeing
The Handmaid’s Tale draws on the feminist idea that in a maledominated society, the way men look at women is a form of control and
even violence
...
Meanwhile, she constantly feels observed—and
threatened—by eyes
...
The secret police of the Gileadean regime are
known as the “Eyes,” and their emblem, a winged eye, is painted
everywhere
...
However,
while the novel endorses a feminist concept of the way men look at
women, it also warns that feminist concepts alone don’t o er protection
from male domination
...
“'To be seen—to be seen—is to be'—her voice trembled
—'penetrated
...
5)
...



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Reproduction
The Handmaid’s Tale argues that legally controlling women’s
reproductive freedom is morally and politically wrong
...
Certain details link
Gilead’s goal of controlling women’s reproductive function with the
political goals of the 20th century U
...
religious right
...
At the
same time, one of the causes of the sharply declining birthrate in Gilead
is the number of women who have chosen to become infertile
...



Context
Literary Context
When considering a novel’s literary context, it is important to explore
the form and genre it is written in, as well as anything the novel might
do that de es the expectations of a particular genre
...
The sections below will explore each of these
literary contexts in relation to the novel in more detail
...
Atwood’s in uences include
politics and religion in the US and feminism
...



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Politics and religion

At the time of writing, in the 1980s, religious right-wing fundamentalist
groups were growing in in uence in America:

• These groups were generally characterised by a strong backing for
President Reagan and the Republican Party, who valued
conservatism and “family values”

• “Family values” equated to traditional, heterosexual nuclear families

• He appealed to white, working-class Americans who felt racist
resentment against the advances black people had made during the
civil rights movement

• Reagan also appealed to religious groups such as the Moral Majority,
who pushed for a return to traditional ideas such as the role of women
as housewives and no sex outside of marriage

• They also resisted abortion and LGBTQ rights

• Today’s readers might receive the novel in the context of more recent
President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his vice-president’s
anti-abortion beliefs

• In addition, in June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the
constitutionally protected right to access abortion in the US, leaving
the question of how to regulate abortion to individual states:

• Millions of women and girls now live in US states where access to
abortion is either heavily restricted or totally inaccessible

• The rst cases of HIV and AIDS in the US were reported in 1980:

• At the time Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the prognosis for
AIDS was death within a year of diagnosis

• Public fears about AIDS fed into Christian right propaganda that
opposed sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality

• This propaganda likely inspired the political backdrop of Gilead


• In the Historical Notes, the reader learns that the reduced fertility rate
in Gilead was as a result of a sexually transmitted disease


Feminism

Feminism is the term for anything concerning the rights of women and
gender equality

The Western feminist movement is generally seen to be divided into
four waves:

• The First Wave started with the su rage movement in the mid-19th to
early 20th centuries

• The Second Wave, during the mid-20th century, was characterised by
advocacy for women’s rights in the workplace, in marriage and in
society more generally

• More feminist organisations were founded, and abortion was legalised
in the US (via the Roe vs
...
Below you will nd some
comments about historical context relevant to the key themes and
ideas in the novel
...


• It can be argued that the lives of the Commanders’ Wives parody
that of the stereotypical submissive wife in Coventry Patmore’s,
‘Angel of the House’
...
Beran “O red’s power is in language”

• Coral Ann Howells - Howells explores the idea of the Historical Notes
representing a shift back from ‘herstory’ to ‘history’, as O red’s
narrations are viewed through a male academic lens:

• The reader does not nd out what happened to O red, and Professor
Pieixoto does not know and is not interested - he is only interested in
the authenticity of the reports


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• “In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s pessimism comes to the fore as
she attempts to frighten us into an awareness of our destiny before
it’s too late” (Globe and Mail, 1985)


• The lives of the Handmaids and Gilead could be a satirical re ection
of traditional Amish settlers
...
It’s lack of love we
die from
...
To beg for it is a
power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest
...
Truly amazing, what people can get used
to, as long as there are a few compensations
...
When women have appeared in
them, they have either been sexless automatons or rebels who have
defied the sex rules of the regime”

Connections to 1984

- In 1984, some members of the Party, like Syme, suddenly disappear,

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never to be heard of again and no one questions their disappearance
or acknowledges their existence
...



- Like Newspeak used to control levels of thought, speech between
-

Handmaids is controlled as they are only allowed to speak about the
a airs of Gilead, often with biblical verses
...


The symbolic transmutation of Harvard University, whose Latin motto
is ‘Veritas’ which means truth, into a venue of public torture mirrors
the oxymoronic mottos by the Party
...


- Agent Orange

- The Milgram experiment; Hitler




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