How Does Margaret Atwood Create Tension In The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary tale about a future that abandons technology for more primitive ways of living; but adding in things the reader cannot imagine, The book touches on many different controversial topics, a few being feminism, the loss of literacy, religion, class, environmental issues, and politics. This book should be added to Literature in English II, because it contains literary elements that have been covered in class, add diversity to the course, demonstrate postmodern era characteristics, and stress the importance of reading and writing.
The Handmaid’s Tale starts off with a women being held in a high school gym with many other women (it can be assumed that there are at least

one hundred). The reader has no context of what is going on, but we find out that this woman is called a “handmaid” and she is sent to work for “the Commander” and his wife, Serena Joy. As the book goes on, the reader finds out that the setting of the story takes place in Gilead, which was formerly the United States (particularly Cambridge, Massachusetts.) This new country is formed because the president and several members of Congress have been shot, causing the Constitution to be thrown out and a Christian theocracy being put into place. Before Gilead was established, the main character worked at the library with several other women. After the formation of the Christian theocracy, her boss breaks that news to her and all of her female co-workers that they are being fired, because the government issued that all women are forbidden from working and having access to money. All of the women are awestruck, and they think he is out of his mind. When they see the armed guards outside of the building, they realize that he is being completely serious. Not only have women been banned from their jobs, but they have also been stripped of their rights and not able to spend money. The main character learns this the hard way when she tries to buy cigarettes at her regular convenience store and her card gets denied. After women lose all of their rights, the main character tries to run away with her husband and young daughter, but they are not successful. The reader only sees things from her perspective, so the whereabouts of her husband and daughter are unknown after this. During this time, due to birth control, abortion, radiation, and pollution in the air, there is a shortage of children, and many women are unable to even carry children. It is because of this that the main character (who is fertile) is sent to a place called the Women’s’ Center, which is where all of the fertile women are sent, and they are called “handmaids.” The not so fortunate infertile women are sent to “the Colonies”, which sounds like a concentration camp from the Holocaust. At the Women’s Center, what is left of the women’s rights, voice, and identity are stripped from them, including their names. She begins her new life under her new name, Offred. She is given this name because her Commander’s name is Fred, therefore she is “of Fred.” She is miserable at the Center, until eventually her friend from her previous life, Moira, is sent to the center. Moira ends up escaping, leaving Offred alone again. After her time at the Women’s center, she is sent to work for different men, but her long-term job is at the Commander and Serena Joy’s house.

While she is there, her duty is to have emotionless, un-erotic intercourse with the Commander, with Serena Joy sitting right behind her while it is happening. This ritual is called “The Ceremony” and they go on until the handmaid can conceive a child for the Commander. For obvious reasons, tension exists between Serena Joy and Offred. At the beginning, Offred’s relationship with both the Commander and his wife is strictly business. This relationship changes when the Commander summons Offred to his office one night. Expecting the worst, Offred nervously goes to his office, only to find out that all he wants to do with her is play Scrabble, but eventually their relationship turns sexual. This is a surprise to Offred, because women are not even permitted to read, let alone have a personal relationship with their bosses. While all of this is going on, Offred’s thoughts become more and more resistant to the ideas of her society. She finds a friend in her shopping partner, Offglen, who is part of a resistance group. After Offred thinks she has found an ally in this crazy world, one day she discovers she is assigned a new shopping partner; she later finds out that the old Offglen has committed suicide. Simultaneously, Serena

Joy convinces Offred to have sex and conceive a child with Nick (who works for the Commander) because she fears that her husband is sterile. After these events, everything seems to go downhill for the narrator. Serena Joy finds out about the relationship between the Commander and Offred, and she scolds her. Serena Joy knows too much about her, and it can be assumed that she had something to do with a mysterious black van coming to pick her up. Nick tells her it is the resistance, but Offred thinks she is about to be killed or punished. The reader is unsure of what actually ends up happening to our narrator.
One reason that this book should be added to Literature in English II is that it is written in a way that the reader is given an unreliable narrator.

According to Nownovel.com, an unreliable narrator is “a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value” (nownovel.com). Much like Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, our narrator is unreliable simply because she is ignorant of what is going on. She is isolated at the Women’s Center and at the Commander’s house, so she has no idea of what is going on in the outside world. After she gets captured, she has no knowledge of the whereabouts of her husband and daughter, so therefore the reader will not know this either. By using an unreliable narrator, Atwood creates a sense of mystery and suspense, because the reader never knows exactly what is going on outside of the Commander’s house, other than Offred’s previous knowledge of the world of Gilead. One of the most stirring lines in the book is: “Maybe I really don’t want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge” (195). Not only is the reader left in the dark about things going on in the country of Gilead, they are also unsure of who the narrator even is. The reader is only shown the story in the present, with glimpses of the past in the form of flashbacks. In the Historical Notes at the end, the future historians that were studying her story said: “Our author, then was one

of many, and must be seen within the broad outlines of the moment of history of which she was a part. But what else do we know about her, apart from her age, some physical characteristics that could be anyone’s, and her place of residence? Not very much”(305). Atwood may have added in the historical notes to let the reader that they are not alone in the uncertainty of the story; but also to provide the reader with additional details about the nation of Gilead that the narrator may not have provided. In addition to not knowing the true identity of the narrator and what is going on in the outside world, it is also unknown what the fate of the narrator is at the end. A black van appears, and everyone knows that it means the government is coming to remove a person from their residence and most likely kill them. Nick tells her “’ It’s all right. It’s Mayday. Go with them”(293). She cannot be sure that this is the truth, and because she is an unreliable narrator; neither can the reader. She says: “My suspicion hovers in the air above him, a dark angel warning me away… ‘Trust me’ he says; which in itself has never been a talisman, carries no guarantee. But I snatch at it, this offer. It’s all I’m left with”(294). From these lines, the reader can tell that Offred does not fully trust Nick, but it is all she has to hold onto. Since the narrator cannot trust Nick, neither can the reader, so it is impossible to tell what happens to our narrator. The last line from the narrator is: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (295). So, something must have happened to the narrator for her to stop telling the story. The Historical Notes at the end suggest that she was able to make it to a safe house after being picked up by the black van, but after that even the historians that have thoroughly studied the tapes are puzzled by the outcome of her story. It really depends on the attitude of the reader that determines the interpretation of the ending; pessimists will argue that the odds were against the narrator, so she was most likely killed and optimists would say that our narrator was a strong woman and was able to survive.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a staple in Women’s Literature courses around the world, and this is because of prominence of feminist themes that appear throughout the book. In the course, so far, there have not been many, if any; pieces assigned that contain feminist elements. By reading a feminist novel, this will allow the course to have more diversity and to see things from a different perspective. This novel was written in 1986, and even though women had more rights than ever in civilized countries, this was not the case all over the world. In a scholarly article by Shirley Neuman called: “’Just A Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale,” says:
By 1984, Ayatollah Khomeini had forced women out of Iranian universities, out of their jobs, and back into their burqas and their homes. Iranian prison refugees reported torture including the use of electric prods and frayed steel cables in beatings, and such a report by one woman found its way into Atwood's file. (859)
This sounds eerily similar to the narrator and all of her female co-workers being forced to leave their jobs. Much like Iran, Gilead was progressive with the rights of women at one time, and then they reverted back to the old ways after the government was taken over by religious figures