The Handmaid's Tale Essay

Margaret Atwood's futuristic “The Handmaid's Tale” refuses categorization into a single style, or genre. To me it blends a few approaches away from a predictable sci-fi or thriller fiction. Throughout the novel their were a few determinants or factors that decisively affect the nature or outcomes of certain events and how people behave or interact with one another.
For example, like when Offred clings to her sanity through enjoyment of simple pleasures such as: smoothing lotion on her dry skin and smoking cigarettes with Moira and her lesbian sisterhood in the washroom at Jezebel’s. Or lets say the memories she has of the better times with her mother, husband, and daughter, even the veiled snipings between Luke and his mother-in-law. Her fashions, eye makeup etc allowed her a sort of moderate hope for some relief of her present “misery”, although Offred never gives away to a fantasy of rescue. This is an example of Existential Apologia approach (learned about this in my hs AP Literature class) and this is sort of like a

celebration of desperate coping mechanisms used by endangered women who have survived things on the level of potential death sentences or sure death situations.
One question I want to have answered and I will ask in class is where does Offred realize the Latin phrase carved in her room was learned? Like, what does this cause her to realize about the after-hours times she is spending with the commander? (Chapter 27-30)
Another question I have is for when the Commander, instead of playing Scrabble, what does he want to do with Offred the night that she visits him? Why does she say she will just go along with it? (chapter 35-36)
Another approach that I picked up from the reading is that of confession.

Confession as used in the novel as a way of psychological release from guilt and blame through rationalization. Offred frequently reprimands herself for trying to maintain her humanity and to cherish her morals and beliefs in a social environment that crushes dissent or the way of expressing opinion that are at variance with the previously expressed. During some of the night scenes throughout the novel Offred gas through shatterproof glass into the night sky in an effort to shore up her flagging soul, her debates with herself reflect the thin edge that separates her endurance from the crazed panic. Hell, by the end she had gone through so much that the likelihood total mental, spiritual, and familial reclamation was slim to non. The most she could hope for was like a physical escape from the terrors and the healing inherent in telling her story to future

generations.