Red In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale from Margaret Atwood is the tale of a woman named Offred who now serves the purpose of only bearing children. Her story has a lot of different kinds of symbolism and archetypes that serves to the reader how a simple object or thing is different in Offred’s eyes now that her life has changed. .
The color red appears constantly in the novel. Red is the color of the Handmaids, a color associated both with shame and fertility. Offred expands the color’s symbol by using it to describe blood, sometimes as the life force that courses through her body, and sometimes as a marker of violence and death, like the blood on the executed women. One of the most common uses of the color is to describe the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden.

The flowers are sex organs, but their flourishing will be futile, since Serena Joy snips them off.
The Wives wear blue, a color associated with Mary and symbolizes their ultimate role as mothers.

Offred seems envious of the color of Serena Joy’s clothes by saying, “Her dress is crisp cool cotton. For her it’s blue, watercolour, not this red of mine that sucks in heat and blazes with it at the same time.” She’s also jealous, of Serena Joy’s additional freedoms and her higher place in the hierarchy of women, noting that Serena Joy could, at any moment, have her reassigned. Occasionally Offred refers to the blue of the sky as protective perhaps a reference to the protection offered by the Wives because of the signs of their status. Serena Joy’s flowers, also reflect the contrast of blue and red; “Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light

mauve,”
Here, the irises are blue, cool and frozen, symbolic of Serena Joy’s status with her lack of fertility, in contrast with the red tulips that are overflowing with seed pods, being destroyed by Serena Joy’s shears, a representation of Serena’s feelings towards Offred.
The novel is filled with eyes, which represent key topics like paranoia, surveillance, and Gilead’s authority. The Eyes are the terrifying, violent and secretive enforcers of Gilead’s laws. As Offred worries that anyone she meets, from the doctor to Ofglen, might be an Eye, she also sees eyes everywhere, from a tour guide’s badge to her own ankle tattoo. The most complex eye in the book is the plastered-over light socket in Offred’s room, which Offred imagines as a blinded eye. Later she learns that the previous Handmaid hanged herself from the light fixture that used to be there, so that blinded eye comes to signify death and freedom as well.
Makeup contains many contradictions relating to power and sexuality.

In chapter 36 Offred thinks the following; “For a moment I think i won’t remember how to do any of this, and my first try with the eyeliner leaves me with a smudged black lid as if i’ve been in a fight,” It signifies femininity, the past, and Offred’s lost freedom to control her appearance. But others, like the Commander, think that the lack of makeup is actually a source of freedom, since women now don’t have to use their appearances to compete for men. Still, the Commander enjoys going to Jezebel’s, where every woman wears makeup with the hopes of attracting business. Handmaids shouldn’t attempt to be beautiful, as it would add another layer of difficulty for the Wives and Commanders they serve. Yet Offred does her best to maintain her appearance, carefully saving her butter as moisturizing lotion and later the lotion given to her by the commander, even using it in a house with no

mirrors.