Book Discussion: Handmaids Tale

Interesting article from 2018 NRP about US birth rate statistics and the fact that we are now not reproducing at a rate which would replace us.

Discussion Questions:

What do you make of the 3 quotes in the beginning of the book?

Gilead's society is obviously quite sexist and repressive, yet do any aspects of it seem to be an improvement over our contemporary society?

• The misogynist and violent sexual treatment of women. Women are held in such esteem that rape is a capital crime. As one of the Aunts tells the Handmaids, "There is more than one kind of freedom….Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it" (emphasis added, p. 24)
• No longer do citizens suffer from confusion in interpersonal relations, nor over one's role, position, and purpose -- these things are settled for them.
• No longer must women suffer the "indignity" of singles' bars, blind dates, and personal ads; no longer must they worry about being beaten by a husband, or being left with children to feed on a measly paycheck. 
•  banned pornography and prostitution
•  sexual objectification -- they no longer have to wear makeup, oil themselves for tanning "like roast meat on a spit" (p. 55), dress in certain ways, or starve themselves and/or have surgery to obtain the right figure (as all bodies are cloaked in uniform, figure-disguising robes).

Though Gilead is a blatantly patriarchal society, do the men really have it better than the women do?

• Some guardians are not even allowed wives. "They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that's a sacrilege. There are no more magazines, no more films, no more substitutes; only me and my shadow [Ofglen], walking away from the two men, who stand at attention, stiffly, by a roadblock, watching our retreating shapes (p. 22)."
• Nor is it much easier for more powerful men. At the ritual Bible reading prior to the Ceremony, Offred sympathizes with the Commander: "to be a man, watched by women….To have them putting him on, trying him out, trying him out…We're all watching him. It's the one thing we can really do, and it is not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of us?…[It] must be hell, to be a man, like that…It must be very silent. (pp. 87-88)"
• The women in a way have a name more personalized in the novel. She is Offred meaning of Freds and he is only known to us as the commander.

Who is in power in Gilead? Where does power ultimately reside?

What do you think the colonies are?

Why Scrabble?

• Language is power

What do you think motivates the Commander to risk his life by having a taboo relationship with Offred?

• Moira's speech actually offers two motives: first, his need for the excitement and stimulation of breaking rules; and second, his need to exercise personal power.
• Earlier, the Commander told Offred that men created Gilead partly out of boredom. "There was nothing for them to do…. There was nothing for them to do with women…. [Sex] was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for….You know what [men] were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage." (p. 210)

What do you think of Offred's relationship with Nick?

• With a man, she no longer needs to fight society; with a man, she can survive, can in fact surrender. Is this the womanist perspective Atwood sanctions? Once Offred has decided to surrender to Gilead with Nick, it does not take long for her to decide to surrender altogether, with or without him: "Dear God, I think I will do anything you like. Now that you've let me off, I'll obliterate myself, if that's what you really want; I'll empty myself, truly, become a chalice. I'll give up Nick, I'll forget about the others, I'll stop complaining. I'll accept my lot. I'll sacrifice. I'll repent. I'll abdicate. I'll renounce….I don't want pain….I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. (p. 286)"

What does Moira symbolize in the novel?

• In Jezebels she wears a tattered bunny costume. Submissive and caged animal. 

Why did Attwood make Harvard the "hall of the eyes?"

Do you care for the open-ended ending? Why do you think Atwood chose to do it?

• Did she leave it open in order to not silence our minds and imagination? To give the reader the power. 

How do the last lines of the Historical Notes section connect with the last line of the novel? "As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of out own day." The end of the novel is" Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, becasue it can't be helped. And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.

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How does the "Historical Notes" section affect your understanding of the novel?

What do you think happens to Offred in the end?