Plot analysis

Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, is a highly confrontational feminist fiction novel that observes the culture of female identity. The novel portrays the oppression of women on physical and physiological level. The story takes place in the Republic of Gilead (the old United States): a republic with a totalitarian regime. This regime portrays women as being childbearing, voiceless creatures. People living under this manipulative regime are becoming less human-like every step of the way.

Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, is a handmaid to the powerful commander. Offred role in the Commander’s house is being the childbearing, voiceless creature to be made pregnant. The Commander wants to ‘enjoy’ his time with Offred and wants to take her to the Jezebels (the whorehouse). The Commander is married so he and Offred are not supposed to have that kind of fun because of the complications it would cause in the Commander marriage. This conflict shows how men have little to no respect for women including their own wife.

Another conflict occurs when the commander’s wife wants to have a baby that Offred needs to bear with the commander because she is supposedly infertile, which the wife probably wasn’t but the commander was. Although infertility can of course only be caused by women, not by men in the Republic of Gilead. The wife tells Offred to have sex with Nick, the chauffer and get pregnant. Without telling the commander she is having sex with someone else. Offred’s life is becoming based on lies more and more. It almost seems as if with every person Offred knows, she has a different, secret private arrangement. 

Though these secrets will get her pregnant, and pregnancy is the ticket to freedom. But, suspenseful as the story is, another conflict pops up: Offred falls in love with Nick and this will get her into a lot of trouble if anyone finds out. Breaking the rules is unacceptable and Offred and her friend Ofglen are harshly reminded of this when they have to watch an execution. Later Ofglen vanishes after she had stood up for another woman.  The women in Gilead are constantly reminded of their duty to follow rules and that by not obeying those rules, you will get punished. 

The further you get into the story, the more bad things and the more lies lie down the path of Offred’s life. Her constant waiting for punishments and another bad stuff ends when Offred is arrested by the Eyes. What happened to Offred next, we’ll never find out but her memoires are used in the present and what we can conclude from the last part of the novel is that the totalitarian regime of Gilead is over and women are no longer inferior. This shows us that from mistakes made in the past, we learn and we correct them in the present.