Erin Lovelace
AP English
Sutter
11 December 2012
Outside Reading
1. Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1984, 392
2. Offred was taken away from her previous life with her husband and daughter to become a handmaid. She now serves to bear children for the upper class.
Nick is a guardian, a type of officer, for the commander. He is involved in a sexual affair with Offred in an attempt to try to get her pregnant.
The Commander is in charge of the household and who Offred is supposed to have a child with. The relationship the two have is strictly to have a child but he almost treats Offred as a friend.
3. Serena Joy is the wife of the commander who used to be an anti-feminist. Now she is unhappy with her life because she is completely under the power of men.
Moira was Offred’s best friend in her pre-handmaid life. She is rebellious against becoming a handmaid and tries to escape from that life only to succumb to it later on.
Ofglen was the shopping partner of Offred. She was also apart of Mayday, which ultimately leads her to kill herself rather than betraying her people.
4. The Red Center is like a military boot camp. It serves as a brainwashing facility to infiltrate the minds of the handmaids and make them succumb to new beliefs and ideas.
The Republic of Gilead is where Offred now lives. It is a typical, perfect, cookie cutter neighborhood.
5. The story begins with Offred in a boot camp, called The Red Center to train for her life as a handmaid. She soon moves into her commander’s home and begins her life of oppression as a handmaid. She is given simple jobs of grocery shopping but other than that she is isolated to herself because of her status in the household. Throughout the course of her stay at the Commander’s household she is unable to become pregnant so she begins a sexual affair with another low level officer in order to get her pregnant, at consent of the Serena Joy, the wife of the household. During the course of the novel we follow Offred and see the changes of her life before and after becoming a handmaid.
6. I think the Republic of Gilead itself is a symbol because its similarity to the story of Jacob and his wives in the Bible.
The color Red that the handmaid’s wear symbolizes their status in life and shows the adultery like side of them. It also shows their sacrafice, red meaning the blood that they sacrafice to give these upper class citizens children.
7. Magaret Atwood doesn’t use punctuation in the novel so the reader is forced to try to distinguish who is speaking and whether they are in the past or present. I think Atwood does this to blur the lines of life before and during Gilead.
8. One major theme is the oppression of women and even though this story is set in the future society has gone back to the old ways where women were only seen as objects. It shows that the time period and setting doesn’t matter when it comes to oppression as long as someone has the means to convince a large group of peopl that their beliefs are right.
9. “We yearned for the future.” - Offred. This quotation is ironic because she is living in the future and she should be hoping for the past because that’s when she was happy.
“She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.” - Aunt Lydia. She is referring to the next generation of handmaids and their indoctrination and how they will be more willing than the current generation they will not know any differently.
“And so I step up, into the darkness within, or else the light.” - Offred. She is reffering to the life that she is living and how she can either view it as the darkness or the light.
10. Atwood uses simile’s to show the contrast between Offred’s past and present life. While Atwood uses similes for that matter she also uses an undistinguishable dialogue to blur the lines of past and present that causes the reader to think about and see the differences between the past and present.
