The Handmaid's Tale: Interpretations (OCR A Level English Literature)

The Handmaid’s Tale: Interpretations

AO5 assesses your ability to understand different ways of reading and interpreting texts. Those different readings can take different forms, from interpretations by critics to watching and analysing different productions of a text.

There are numerous ways to explore different interpretations in order to meet the AO5 assessment criteria, and you must explore a range of secondary reading and perspectives to supplement your understanding of the text. These can include:

• Exploring critics

• Interpretations over time

• Dramatisations

Exploring critics

Different critics will offеr variеd insights and intеrprеtations of The Handmaid’s Tale, and citations will lеnd crеdibility and authority to your analysis. Rеfеrеncing well-known critics demonstrates that your interpretation is groundеd in literary criticism. It will also еnhance thе validity of your argumеnt. By citing multiple critics, you can prеsеnt a morе comprehensive and balanced analysis and demonstrate the different range of perspectives and interpretations surrounding the novel.

Below are two notable critics who have commented on The Handmaid’s Tale:

Carol L. Beran: “Images of Women’s Power in Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Women” (1990)

Carol L. Beran is a Canadian writer and literary critic, who has written specifically about Atwood’s works.

• She explored the idea of Offred as a victim, yet still having “some kind of special power”

• In Gilead, Offred is victimised by a system that reduces women to instruments of procreation

• However, Offred’s mind and its ability to remember and use language becomes a “symbol of her power over the powerful male; she extracts gifts and favours in return for playing the crossword game”

• One of Beran’s most famous quotes about The Handmaid’s Tale is: “Offred’s power is in language”:

  • By this she means that although almost all of Offred’s freedoms, choices and power were stripped away from her, she was still able to record her story via the cassettes referred to in the Historical Notes

  • Her voice and her story continue long after Gilead has fallen

  • This is contrasted with Professor Piexioto, who lacks the ability to verbalise with any sense of emotion, because to him Offred is an object of scientific study

• Beran believes that “in finding power in words, in speaking, Offred has moved from being a victim”

• In Offred, Atwood gives the reader a model of a woman who exemplifies a “creative non-victim”, which is needed in order for Offred to become a heroine:

  • “The power to feel and to create feeling is for Atwood’s heroines woman’s true power; artistic creation becomes the symbol of woman’s greatest power”

Coral Ann Howells: “Science Fiction in the Feminine: The Handmaid’s Tale” (1996)

Coral Ann Howells has lectured and published widely on Canadian literature, including about Atwood’s works. She has written about the presentation of female self-identity and Offred’s resistance to patriarchal authority in The Handmaid’s Tale. She argues that Atwood’s choice of a female narrator subverts the traditionally masculine dystopian genre.

• Howells acknowledges that The Handmaid’s Tale is emblematic of a woman’s survival narrative told within the confines of a patriarchal system, as represented by Gilead:

  • In a world in which women are restricted to private domestic spaces and have their individual identities stripped, Offred still asserts the right to tell her story

  • “Her treasonable act of speaking out in a society where women are forbidden to read or write or to speak freely effects a significant shift from ‘history’ to ‘herstory’”

• However, Howells agrees with Atwood’s assertion that the novel does not fit into the science fiction genre:

  • In fact, she believes that The Handmaid’s Tale resists classification, “just as Offred’s storytelling allows her to escape the prescriptive definitions of Gilead”

• She suggests that the novel is not just concerned with female oppression, but gender politics in a broader sense, as Gilead not only represses its female citizens, but also its male citizens, controlling even the most basic human desires for intimacy and love

• Howells asserts that there is no simple gender division between masculine and feminine qualities in The Handmaid’s Tale:

  • If men are capable of violence then so are women

• Offred herself represents the complicated nature of feminism and political activism, which can be flawed and inconsistent:

  • This is demonstrated via Offred being a witty woman who cares about men, as well as about her female friends

  • In refusing to be silenced, she speaks as a late 20th-century feminist resisting the cultural identity imposed on her - she aims to reclaim her own identity via her memories and refusal to give up hope

  • But Offred is not revolutionary, as she refuses to join the Mayday resistance, and offers up to Nick the one thing she still owns for herself: her name

• Howells believes that Offred’s position is much closer to the “traditionally feminine role of woman as social mediator”:

  • “Though she resists the brutal imposition of male power in Gilead, she also remembers the delights of heterosexual love and yearns to fall in love again”

• The novel can also be viewed as having elements of a traditional love story with feminine ideals of romance and romantic fantasies with Nick:

  • However, Offred’s clear assertion that the fact she continued her affair with Nick of her own free will and for her needs alone offers a female perspective often missing from love stories told from a male perspective

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

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

Interpretations over time

While Atwood only published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, society and thinking has changed greatly in the years since publication. Below are some examples of critical reactions which have evolved in relation to the key themes and ideas in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Reactions on publication

• The critical reception to the book on publication was varied, especially depending on the location of the critic

• The general reaction of Canadian media was a nervous one, treating the book as a work of social realism:

  • “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)

• In America, reviewers appeared to find the novel particularly unsettling:

  • “The Handmaid’s Tale provides a compelling lesson in power politics and in reasonable intentions gone hysteric” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1986)

• Some critics looked beyond the obvious gender politics in the novel:

  • “Atwood’s book is suffused by life - the heroine’s irrepressible vitality and the author’s lovely subversive hymn to our ordinary life, as lived, amid perils and pollution, now” (The New Yorker, 1986)

Reactions by the author

• Atwood has called her novel “one of the most allusion-studded things I’ve done”, explaining the link between the novel’s title to Chaucer and the Bible

• Atwood has asserted that she was not writing a “feminist” novel, but a dystopian novel from the female point of view:

  • She argues that the majority of dystopias have been written from the male point of view

  • She has said she believes the novel is seen as feminist by those who think women shouldn’t have a voice

• Atwood believes that the novel resists classification, but does not view her work as a piece of science fiction, which she believes is defined by “monsters and spaceships”:

  • Instead, she considers her work to be a piece of “speculative fiction”, in that it could really happen with not much of a leap of imagination

  • She therefore believes that the novel exemplifies one of the things science fiction does, which is to “extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a new future that’s half-prediction, half satire” (The Guardian, 2011)

• This interest in our planet and its future continues for Atwood today:

  • In an interview with The Guardian in 2010, she stated that “the threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet - it’s a threat to us.”

More recent reactions

• With the 2017 television adaptation, The Handmaid’s Tale has reached new audiences

• Of the series, Atwood said that she has “influence but no power” and that the fact that the series has continued beyond the original novel is complicated for her, as she questions how some of the characters survive for as long as they do (Vanity Fair, 2019)

• However, also in 2019, she said that she believes the topics in the book are still with us today

• In 2018, a BBC article suggested that “Atwood’s novel has an eerie way of always feeling of the moment”, implying that it is as relevant today as it has ever been

• The same critic (Jennifer Keishin Armstrong) believes that the two main film adaptations of the book were not successful:

  • She cites especially the 1990 film version as an “obvious misinterpretation of the original material”

  • However, the updated television adaptation “feels more vital than ever” as the cultural landscape has shifted further, for example with the #MeToo movement taking hold

Dramatisations

Examining various productions on stage and screen of The Handmaid’s Tale will enable you to appreciate different interpretations of the characters and themes, and also how they may have evolved over time, reflecting shifts in society and culture.

Hulu television adaptation (2017)

The recent popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale has extended the social and political discussions beyond what was started in the novel. While the novel itself was published in 1985, it drew on real-life politics that still resonate today. Atwood herself conceived the novel as “speculative fiction”: a work that imagines a future that could conceivably happen without any advances in technology from the present. In other words, it could really happen. The white, wide-brimmed bonnet and red cloak have become synonymous with women’s oppression, and the TV adaptation did not deviate from the symbolism of the specific costumes of the novel.

• The 2017 Hulu television series has been the most popular adaptation of the novel on stage or screen to date, winning numerous awards and critical acclaim

• The show’s producers changed details to update it to the present day, such as including references to Uber and Tinder in Offred’s memories of pre-Gilead life

• The release of the series coincided with the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of movements and laws to limit women’s reproductive freedom:

  • Women began to wear outfits inspired by the television series at protests against these measures

• Offred’s story remains the most prominent, and she is the only character given a voice through interior monologue via voiceover narration:

  • This technique serves to personalise her voice and her story

• However, there is more representation in the television series, including more people of colour and characters who identify as LGBTQ+:

  • This is designed to make the show more relatable to modern audiences, so as to better reflect modern society

  • For example, in the original book, Moira is white, but in the television adaptation she is played by an African American actress

  • Given Moira’s open resistance to oppression, her different portrayal here signifies how society has changed to incorporate race as an important piece of one’s identity

• The show also sometimes follows other characters and their perspectives:

  • This gives the audience a broader understanding of the world of Gilead, and how the repressive regime affects a wider range of people

• The series also uses colour as symbolic beyond the confines of the written novel:

  • For example, the handmaid’s uniforms are a typical deep blood red, but they are also often foregrounded in otherwise colourless scenes

  • Gilead scenes are filtered through a sepia/yellow tone, while pre-Gilead is represented as brighter and has a colder/bluer tone

• The series chooses to reveal Offred’s real name to the audience in episode 1:

  • This is a significant departure from the book, perhaps representing June/Offred’s dual narrative which is interwoven throughout not only the book but also the series

  • This helps to personalise her more for the audience, in a world where she is so obviously de-personalised

  • It also establishes the character as less passive than Offred in the book; externally, she is obedient, but internally, she rages, indignant at what is happening to her and to others

• The viewer therefore should be aware that the narrative here is not only being told by the character of Offred, but is also being re-told via the deliberate construction of the television series

• In the book, the narrative is re-framed at the end with the Historical Notes, in which it is revealed that the book is a transcription of a series of cassettes recording Offred’s account:

  • This framing is referenced in the series, as after the opening sequence of episode 1, there is a quiet but audible click of an audio cassette recorder just before Offred begins her first voiceover

  • However, as the television adaptation continues beyond the book, the use of the epilogue is deliberately omitted

• In the series, Offred’s face is often shown very close to camera, allowing the audience a greater emotional connection to the character:

  • This close focus on the character’s face also narrows the visual field, mirroring Offred’s limited perspective in Gilead

  • This is in contrast to the book, in which we as the reader have very little physical description of Offred to go on, as though to represent her individuality fading

• Serena Joy is also represented as much younger in the television adaptation, and more of a contemporary of Offred:

  • This makes a more complex dynamic between the two characters, as Serena Joy’s bitterness and resentment towards Offred is complicated further by the fact that Offred is there to do something that should rightfully be done by Serena

• The fact that the television series has continued beyond the story told in the novel means that it intends to explore the world beyond the confines of Offred’s room