CHAPTER FIVE

The Handmaid's Tale: Offred's Political Journey

"Nothing happens unless first a dream.'

Carl Sandburg I. The Exploited Female: Isolation, Alienation and Fragmentation of Body and Self landscape, mirrors, fragmented consciousness, curtains, body fragments, names, gardens and flowers

II. Dystopias and Utopias: Sterility versus Fertility and the Tension Between Nature and Civilisation nature, gardens, ceremonies and rituals, colours, death

III. The Pyramid Structure: Gender Roles, Sexuality and Power Struggles clothing, domestic chores, dolls, birds, language, and machines

IV. Discovering the Female Space: A Room of One's Own Rooms, insides-outsides, games, blood, wall, maze, sponge and enclosures

V. A Politics of Survival: Restructuring and Restoring Human Relationships for Personal Identity Windows and doors, roads, inner cycles and rhythms, fire, seasons, babies, trees, moon, sunlight, water, human relationships

275 Margaret Atwood's sixth novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1986) is the most political of her novels, and as has been pointed out by several critics, it follows the tradition of

George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Jonathan Swift's A

Modest Proposal.

The novel is told in a framed perspective: a woman forced to stay in the "Republic of

Gilead'" was keeping a taped journal from which a transcript has been made and published in a time after the Republic of Gilead has passed away. The afterword sets up the framework of a historical society discussing this manuscript and commenting on the

Gileadean period in history. The protagonist is an ordinary woman—raised by a single mother (a feminist activist who saw warning signs of anti-woman trends in society), married to a divorced man, and mother of one child, a daughter. She is literally captured when she tries to escape the country with her child and husband. Atwood weaves many elements into the novel: hatred of feminism, religious bigotry, racism, contempt towards older women, environmental destruction, and religious patriarchal control of women's bodies which are part of the background of the novel. And thus, the novel is a kaleidoscope of our literary and social/political landscape of the last decades.'

The Handmaid's Tale is a fictional narrative attempting to imagine what kind of values might evolve if environmental pollution rendered most of the human race sterile. The novel strikes the reader with its unmistakable voice, its incantory first person enunciation,

Biblical overtones and dazzling metaphors.

In this chapter, the task of the researcher will be to examine the major themes of the novel, through patterns and clusters of images. The major concerns that will be discussed

276 in detail are: Alienation and isolation of the exploited female which results in the fragmentation of the body and self, Tension between nature and civilisation—Utopias and Dystopias, Gender roles, sexuality and power struggles, Discovering the female space—A room of one's own, and Atwood's Politics for survival that is based on building and restoring human relationships which are crucial to finding personal identity.

The predominant images which convey these concerns are: landscape, mirrors, rooms, curtains, body fragments, gardens and flowers, light and darkness, food, colours, clothing, birds, games, machines, language, circles and spheres, seasons, windows, doors and pathways, characters and relationships. Though at first glance these images presented in the novel may appear to be a heterogeneous collection of fragments, it actually turns out to be a single, composite whole for elucidating the themes. The theme of alienation and the division of body and mind resulting in identity crisis, again a central concern in

Atwood's writing, is studied in depth. Many images of imprisonment and fragmentation explicate this theme. The protagonist's political journey through the stages of alienation- awareness-survival is traced through these images.

Each of the main concerns in the novel is accurate enough to serve as the starting point for a discussion of the theme of The Handmaid's Tale, but it must be recognised that each of these ideas emphasises only one aspect of the content of the novel while ignoring Or diminishing the importance of other aspects. A full examination of the themafic concerns of this novel would include all the ideas listed above, as well as, other ideas which are related to them.

The novel begins with the presentation of the narrator's circumstances as a handmaid and what life was for both her and other handmaids in the Republic of Gilead. The basic idea

277 that it presents is the exploitation of human beings in political structures, which is clearly evident in the man-woman and woman-woman relationships.

The three allusions used in the epigraph of The Handmaid's Tale are controlling ideas which function as metaphors for its themes. The Biblical reference to the practice of having handmaids in the Judeo-Christian tradition in Genesis, with special reference to

Jacob and Rachel story, for producing off-spring; Jonathan Swift's satire proposing human beings, children in particular, to be sold as commodity, and the Sufi proverb: "In the desert, there is no sign that says. Thou shalt not eat stones", which suggests confidence and freedom, are very intelligently used by Atwood. She uses these allusions to develop the protagonist's role and predicament as a handmaid, and the loss of her

female identity and her potential for survival.

Like the contemporary novelist Doris Lessing, Atwood may also be attracted to Sufi traditions for their celebration of female strength and leadership. And one cannot dismiss the possibility that Atwood the trickster enjoys the prospect of baffling literary critics with an enigmatic epigraph outside their comfortably familiar Judeo-Christian range of references.^ Offred's physical, mental, emotional, and ethical struggles in Gilead, and her paradoxical survival at the end of the novel, is expounded through these allusions.

Further, these three allusions also provide structure to the novel in the narrator's political journey from fear to faith Images and symbols in the novel function as guidelines for the

reader and are indicators of the character's beliefs and feelings. And the prevalence of symbolism in the novel has tempted some readers and critics to seek allegorical meanings.

278 Offred, the protagonist of The Handmaid's Tale, is the most alienated and isolated characters in the four novels analysed in this thesis. She is trapped in a repressive and regressive society run by a group of madmen. And as a handmaid, she fills a pivotal role in this society performing the most important function of reproduction in a sterile world.

The handmaids, "reproductive vessels", are women who were unmarried or whose marriage was considered void at the time of the coup. They are assigned to male officials whose wives have failed to bear children, on the assumption that it is always the woman who is barren. If they are successful in having a healthy child within three assignments, they are saved; if they fail, they are sent to the Colonies to die gruesomely handling toxic wastes. The specific problem of this novel deals with the difficulty of maintaining an individual personality—in this case, a feminine personality—within the confines of a stereotyped social role in The Republic of Gilead.

The novel introduces the 'breaking images' right in the first chapter. Isolated from her family and country, the protagonist is provided an almost bare room, special clothing (red robe and white veil), and is given a new name: "Offred". Her freedom to move in society is limited and by the nature of her situation, she is very circumscribed; she cannot communicate freely with people; it is too dangerous. Offred is boxed in, jailed and segregated. Displacement, an important theme in Atwood's writing is evident.

The entire landscape of Gilead and its descriptions are significantly pictured to represent both the physical and mental fragmentation of the protagonist which is seen in the description of the room she sleeps in:

279 We slept in what had once been the gymnasium... the pungent smell of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume...there was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation of something without a shape or name (p. 3).

The very first sentence of the novel tells us something of the period and society. People generally slept in gymnasiums only in emergencies after disasters. But this "once had been a gymnasium", implies that it was converted to its present use a long time ago.

Some major change has taken place, probably not for the good. A 'palimpset' was created when a medieval scribe tried to scrape clean a parchment in order to re-use it.

The gymnasium is a place for exercising and playing games, and this is what happens in the novel—the game of politics, which controls the lives of these handmaids. The room is described through negative images, and there are several missing things in the room:

"...nets gone, the pungent scent of sweat... music which is a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue paper, cardboard devils" (p. 3). "The chandelier in the centre of it a blank space like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out" (p. 9). The larger landscape of the Republic of Gilead is described as follows:

There are no children. This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except on television where the edges aren't sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counter-attacks... (p. 31).

The description of Serena Joy's, the Commander's Wife's, sitting room is as:

The kind with a spider and flies, subdivided, symmetrical. It is one of the shapes money takes when it freezes, underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms...paintings of women...their backs and mouths stiff, their breasts constricted, their faces pinched, their caps starched, their skin greyish, white guarding the room with their narrowed eyes (102).

280 The images of the spider and flies show the victim-victimiser situation: of imprisonment,

danger and death; the paintings of women with 'stiff backs and mouths, starched caps,

greyish skin, guarding the room" reveal the nature and role of the Wives in the Republic

of Gilead who controlled the lives of the handmaids.

Handmaids are defined by the invisible interior space of their reproductive organs, for

which the rest of their bodies function only as a support. Offred thinks of the space

inside her body as a dangerous natural environment, as she says:

A swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future (p. 83).

What happens in this internal territory (pregnancy being the most important event here),

is literally a matter of life and death. Offred describes her body as another place, a

"swamp" which is separated from her sense of self, and which may be the cause of her

exile from life itself Under such drastically changed circumstances in Gilead, Offred experiences her body as separate from herself and not as within her control. However,

she is more conscious of it in Gilead, than she was in pre-Gilead times when her body

was lithe, solid and one with her. But in Gilead, rather than an instrument fitted to carry out her wishes, her body is a dangerous static place determined by others' will, and the only value her body has depends on what happens inside her womb. Her sense of self is

a fragile and nebulous entity in comparison to the reality of the bounded and concrete

space of her reproductive organs,'' as we read:

I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am, and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside a space, huge as the sky at night....(p. 84). While Offred considers her body to be an internal territory out of her control, male organs

are described as external objects, which are similarly alien, existing independently of their possessor. She considers a Handmaid's ritual penetration by the Commander to be visual and tactile invasion of the woman's dark interior space, as we read in the following passage:

His extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate stalked slug's eye, which extrudes, expands, wines, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, travelling forward as if on a leaf, into them, avid for vision (p. 98).

Her body is territory probed by an alien and bestial invader, but the Commander's right to do this is given by virtue only of the social roles allocated to each of them by Gilead's theocratic power structure. Her only identity is by her reproductive organs and the social

and political position to which they consign her. The same social space had been occupied in the past by at least one other handmaid who would have been named Offred.

And thus, Offred is the name of a position in Gilead's social and religious territory.

Offred is unable to see her physical body as being beautiful, because her body had been exploited and made use of In fact, her senses are dulled and she is dead to her own

feelings, as she writes: "Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat like a piece of toast" (p.

125), and:

1 stroke myself, under the dry white sheet, hard, granular; it is like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it is like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted (p. 132).

This division of self is seen in the way Offred sees her body as she goes to bathe: "My

nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated..." (p. 82). She looks at her

282 naked body and does not believe diat she once wore bathing suits at the beach, "without

caring that my legs, arms, my highs and back were on display, could seem shameful,

immodest" (p. 82). Images of touch and sight appropriate reveal her situation. Offred's

identity as a Handmaid in Gilead is constructed entirely in terms of her sexuality, as she says: "blood defines us" (p. 18); when women are treated as "two-legged wombs" (p.

146); "We are containers, it's only the insides of our body that are important. The outside

can become hard and wrinkled...like the shell of nut" (p. 124); "we are for breeding

purposes" (175). She also describes herself as a carcass:

I can't think of myself, my body sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystal jagged as glass (p. 143).

Offred struggles to integrate her splintered persona, and her fractured self-image is

expounded through the mirror images. Atwood does not employ many mirror images in

this novel, a few examples are: "As in a nunnery, there are few mirrors" (p. 10); and the

mirror in the bathroom has been "taken out and replaced by an oblong of tin" (p. 81).

The mirrors in the washroom for boys, "have been replaced here too by oblong dull grey

metal..."(p. 94). These mirror images perform an important function in reflecting the

identity crisis of characters, and therefore are used in similar manner as in the other

novels.

There is a mirror at a prominent place in Rachel and Leah Centre where Offred and the

other handmaids live. It is placed on the wall in the hall, and Offred sees her 'red image'

as a 'shadow' with no clear identity as she goes up and comes down several times a day.

She describes herself and the handmaids, "We are without emotion now, almost without

283 feeling, we might be bundles of red cloth" (p. 163). She is indeed like a rag doll, as the passage below states:

There remains a mirror, on the wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, a fairy-tale figure in red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger (p.l 1).

When she goes upstairs: "I go upstairs, my face distant and white, and distorted and framed in the hall mirror which bulges out like an eye under pressure" (p. 65). These images indicate no clear, distinctive feature. And again we read:

1 go along the passage, up the stairs, hurrying. In the curved hallway mirror I flit past, a red shape, at the edge of my own field of vision, wraith of red smoke (p. 270).

Smoke, though can be seen, has no substance; it is weightless and empty and also implies its transitory nature of life, and thus refers to the brevity and meaninglessness of life, as

King David in Psalms says, "My life is like a smoke that goes up."^ There is a double loss of identity, for these reflections further distort an identity, which is totally absent in these handmaids. For instance, ihcy are:

Like Dutch milkmaids on a wallpaper, like a shelf full of period-costume ceramic salt and pepper shakers, like a tlotilla of swans or (p. 275).

All the handmaids are similar in their red robes and white wings with their faces almost covered. Offred sees Ofglen and says, "I watch her. She's like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away" (p. 59). In general, clothing robs all women of their identity, for example, when Serena, the Commander's Wife Eind Offred are coming up to the room, Offred sees their images on the hall mirror:

284 I see the two of us, a blue shape, a red shape in the brief glass eye of the mirror as we descend. Myself, obverse (p. 336).

When Offred goes to Jezebel's with the Commander, in the hotel room, she says: "I want to see myself in a mirror" (p. 303); her bad make-up is smudged with mascara, the purplish lipstick bleeds, hair is aimlessly trailing, looking like a carnival doll. The mirror helps her see her mental state:

Now, in this ample mirror under the white light, I take a look at myself. It's a good look, slow and level. I'm a wreck (p. 329).

Here Atwood employs the mirror image to symbolise her theme of self-definition, using literal mirrors to signify figurative reflection provided by a double, as these external features symbolise her loss of identity. The image of light and mirror together function to reveal her distorted self In other words, light not only illuminates her physical appearance, but also makes her aware of her fractured self and identity. The falseness of these reflections is also associated with images of false immortality of women she sees in the women's magazines that the Commander gives her to read:

What was in Ihem was a promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching one, replica after replica to the vanishing point. They suggested one adventure after another, one wardrobe after another, one improvement after another, one man after another. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless line. The real promise in them is immortality (p. 201).

The fact that life cannot be as real as these advertisements promise, is further supported by the mirror reflections; both these images cannot fathom the inner self of a person, but only provide false/superficial identities, which Offred becomes aware of.

285 Contrasted with these mirror images, are images of photographs, which also portray frozen identity in time and space. For example, in a photograph the image is fixed and does not escape like the fleeting images of reflection on mirrors, and therefore in a photograph one can look at the fixed/captured/frozen identity and then recreate other images in time and space. Gazing at a photograph of her daughter, who she believes was kidnapped while they were escaping, she realises: "She fades. 1 can't keep her here with me, she's gone now. Maybe 1 do thiiik of her as a ghost, the ghost of a dead girl, a little girl who died when she was five " (p. 83). Then her memory goes beyond to the time when her daughter was two years old:

I remember the pictures of us I once had, me holding her, standard poses, mother and baby, locked in a frame, for safety. Behind my closed eyes I can see myself as 1 am now, sitting beside an open drawer, or a trunk, in the cellar, where the baby clothes are folded away, a lock of hair, cut when she was two, in an envelope, white-blonde. It got darker later (p. 84).

What emerges out of the photograph is the buried pictures of the self. Therefore, Atwood cautions us not to be carried away by the glossy, shiny surfaces of mirrors, but to look deeper so as to enable us to see an undistorted perception of the self, which photographs provide. Mirrors are prisons; they lock the image of a person between the surfaces of glass. In these images there is a constant attempt to detain, to fix, frame, and that effort is constantly thwarted, for the "I" is no less tenuous and elusive than the rest of reality. And thus, these reflections parallel Offred's imprisonment in Gilead, in her own room and within her memory and consciousness. Atwood's characters often stop looking at the mirror and go out through a door or a window, which is an image of liberation and freedom. At the end of the novel when Offred walks out and gets into the black van:

286 "Serena Joy stands in the hallway, under the mirror looking up, incredulous" (p. 377) highlighting Serena Joy's role as a wife to the sterile commander for the rest of her life.

The juxtaposition of stagnation and movement are portrayed in the images of space and movement to indicate that she is a prisoner of both space and time. She says, "for me it's this room. I am a blank, here between parentheses between other people" (284). Again when she remembers her daughter, time is referred to:

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as though I am nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. 1 have been obliterated for her. 1 am only a shadow now, for behind the glib shining surface of this photograph. As shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become (p. 296).

Time is also seen in the images of days, weeks, months, years, era, seasons, moon and its cycle, day and night, and ceremonies that occur at intervals such as: the ritual impregnation, the birthing, the monthly check-up at the doctor's office, and the activities of the day at specified times. The narrative in Offred's journal moves back and forth in jumps occasioned by these triggers of memory or by metaphorical connections between one event and another, so that the reader is frequently shifting from one temporal frame to another, as well as, from one location to another. The effect of this textual organisation is not only to represent Offred's fragmented consciousness as characterised by displacement through the imagery of time and space, but also to indicate an enlarged vision based upon the continuity of life and circumscribed space, lending itself to a comprehensive view of the world. Just as she has been displaced from her identity as a mother, wife, lover, worker, to a handmaid, she both copes with her situation and tries to escape its reality by shifting in thought from time to time and place to place. She

287 occasionally tries to move, as she writes: "Step sideways out of my own time. Out of time. Though this is time, nor am I out of it. But the night is my time out. Where should

I go? (p. 49). Memory offers her a displacement of consciousness, which is a kind of freedom to gather up her past as a form of security and nostalgia, but it also reminds her of the very different reality she is now so painfully experiencing. The past is a different place, a territory of the mind, which can be glimpsed underneath the harsh contours of the present. The novel itself alternates between night and day—the shifting of time between present and past, in fact, the entire narrative of The Handmaid's Tale is Offred's reflection of the present and past and a yearning for the future. However, it is not the space so much as it is the time into which she plunges that throws light on her past as well as the future. For example she thinks of her body:

1 used to think of my body as an instrument of pleasure, or a means of transport, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will (p. 95).

This leads her to think of her present situation, and her alienation from her reproductive organs in particular, and her body in general, as reflected in the lines:

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I am a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am (pp. 95-96).

Another example is when she looks tlirough her window and sees the moon:

.. .on the breast of the new fallen snow. The sky is clear but hard to make out, because of the searchlights...in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a silver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful, anyway (p. 125). She immediate thinks of her husband, Luke, and yearns for the future:

288 I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not. I want to be more than valuable (p. 126).

She then goes out of her room and sees the garden, " a willow, weeping catkins... the daffodils are now fading...as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there" (p.

16), which she has often seen "looking out through my shatterproof window" (p. 16), and immediately remembers her own garden: "I once had a garden. 1 can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the lingers" (p. 17). And her hope for the future is evident in her strong belief in love, just as she had kept her faith in it, waiting long hours for Luke in the early days of her relationship. She still keeps faith in love during her days as a handmaid in

Gilead, and so keeps her skin soft with butter when she does not have face creams, which is evident in her statement: "As long as we do this...we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again in love and desire" (p. 91).

Offred's fragmented consciousness and memory parallel her physical fragmentation. The result of the presence of the past in the space of the present is for Offred to experience sudden displacements, which reveal the simultaneous similarity and difference between

Gilead and Pre-Gileadan times. She says in Chapter 35:

Now there's a space to be filled, in the too-warm air of my room, and a time also; a space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner (p. 290).

As seen, the story is woven from time to time with the narrator's discontinuous memories, ranging from her childhood to her arrest and to her stay at Rachel and Leah

Centre. This remembered past constitutes a pre-story whose function is to explain the

289 narrator's present situation, to provide the context for the story unfolding within the discourse/' And her story is lilce her, "Which is in fragments like a body caught in cross­ fire or pulled apart by force" (p. 251). Physical objects also become vehicles which link one time to another, as seen:

Dishtowels are the same as they always are. Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder like a kick (p. 58).

Different times appear to co-exist in these objects, and they cross boundary between

Offred's past and present life as a Handmaid in Gilead. The reminders of the past divide

Offred's self-perception, simultaneously presenting her an image of herself in the past and in the present. Her identities in the two times are brought suddenly together as the experience of one and the same individual subject. Her entrapment in Gilead is confined to the present time, as she says, "But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Time's a trap, I'm caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back...My name is Offred now, and here is where I live"(p. 185). However, Offred becomes intensely aware of her predicament, and she begins to develop mental resistance to overcome her situation, which helps her looking forward to a future:

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth created by a frame; the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise, there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall...Otherwise you live in the movement, which is not where I want to be (p. 185).

Her memory releases her from her present entrapment, as "the SELF in the novel consistently links herself with the images of the past, recollects it and invests it in the present in order to realise her expectation of being whole. She finds herself between the

290 landscape outside and the landscape inside."^ The peculiar position that she holds between the two offers her a binary vision, and the strength of the novel, and its considerable and compelling power, lies here, in these inter-connections which create dimensions. Thus, the inter-workings of nature are linked with this "inner and outer" dimensionality.

The fragmentation and continuity of her identity is both challenged and preserved by the shifts in her consciousness from one time to another and this is depicted through similes and personifications such as: "the winged hour-glass to remind us of the passing of mortal time...(p. 41); "there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog..." (p. 343); "the clock ticks with its pendulum, keeping time" (p. 75); "The clock in the hall downstairs strikes nine" (p. 175). However, the border between one time and another, between past and present are blurred in Offred's narrative, and time is very frequently represented in terms of the transformation of space and of objects in the physical environment. Gilead reuses slogans, films and physical objects from the previous regime as building blocks and raw materials in the erection of its new ideology, displacing these objects from their former position in pre-Gilead society and replacing them in Gilead with a different value. For example, the role of the handmaids in Biblical times was to provide an heir, but these handmaids were not exploited. Even the novel's three part accounts of Offred's past life, her present life and the future as disclosed in The

Historical Notes show the passing of time in a larger sense. Therefore, for Offred, re­ negotiating with the present means a re-constructing of the present scene, touching it up a bit. here and there, and changing it in some way. As Offred says, "this is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It is a reconstruction in my head, as I lie flat

291 on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it" (p. 173). So Offred seeks out the little chinks and gaps that the text provides to reconstruct a new scenario.

At the literal level the clock is a constant reminder of the passing of time, as the one in the Commander's house:

...the house is built for a large family. There's a grandfather clock in the hallway, which roles out time, and then a door to the motherly front sitting room, with its flesh ones and tints (p. 11). There is time to space. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for—the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound (p. 89).

However, while the clock is ticking away moving forward in time, the protagonist is unable to move; she is stagnant, unproductive and always waiting. She is in Gilead, "The centre where nothing moves" (p. 31). The only movement we see in her life is her meandering journey in consciousness (memory, daydreams and nightmares) and her purposeless movement in circles in the Rachel and Leah Centre.

These movements are constantly punctuated with waiting for things to happen in her life:

1 wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The geometrical days, which go round and round, smoothly and oiled...! wait for the arrival of the inevitable egg...(p. 259).

Waiting for her female cycle, she says: "I feel an illness, in the pit of my stomach. Not an illness, an emptiness" (p. 279). But what keeps her going through this constant

'tension of movement and stagnation' is the belief that waiting is a place, as she believes:

"Waiting is also a place; it is where you wait for me, it's this room." While others

292 measure time by the clock, Offred measures by nature, as she attests the only way she can tell tune is "by the moon. Lunar, not solar" (p. 108) the time according to the rhythm of her body, which controls her monthly cycle.

It is interesting to observe that the recurrent section titles of this novel is 'Night,' the time for private exchanges when arbitrary distinctions are dissolved. This is the time when

Offred remembers her past life; it is also the time when she regularly meets her

Commander in his study in the 'after hours' and later when she meets the Commander's chauffeur, Nick, 'time after time' on her own (p. 344). Offred is like the Roman goddess, Janus, looking forward and backward. In more than one sense, this is what The

Handmaid's Tale is all about. It looks back on life and time to the acquisition of a woman's femininity, to the construction of identity through her consciousness by the pathways taken by the protagonist in the course of her entire life's journey so far. Her movements may be forwards, backwards, sideways or blocked, but in the novel, the sequence of movement is a circular one; the re-tracing of an enormous loop of time bringing the protagonist and reader towards the point of time where the protagonist begins writing. What Offred begins writing in the novel is the novel the reader holds in his/her hand. At this point, the journey comes full circle, for reader and writer. We notice how time and event merge through symbolic images of mirror, clock, doors, darkness and light by the end of the novel when Offred is being led to the Black Van. "I can just make out the white eye, the two wings' (p. 375). She turns away from the window and go towards the door "my back is to window" (p. 376); "the lights are on..." (p. 377); "From here I can see the clock. It's no time in particular" (p. 377).

293 In her hopeless exploited situation, Offred tries to construct an identity for herself, and this is through several combined/jumbled up images of her past and present self, as she says here:

I am 36 years, I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes. I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable ovaries. I have one more chance (p. 186).

However, she is only able to define her personhood through external characteristics and her female reproductive organs, beyond that she really does not have a self in Gilead.

Another significant image in the novel is the curtain. There are many images of the curtain: the white curtain in Offred's bare room, the drawn drapes in the sitting room, the sprigged curtains in the Ceremony room, the sheet suspended from the ceiling in the doctor's office, the white drapes in the hotel room, the curtain in Commander's study, and in Nick's room. These images symbolically reinforce the fragmentary life of the narrator and divide her life in many ways, like the sheet that physically divides her body in the doctor's office during her monthly check-ups:

When I am naked, 1 lie down on the examining table at neck level there's another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so that the doctor will never see me. He deals with my torso only (p.78).

The curtains divide: present-past, conscious-unconscious, body-mind, power- powerlessness; victim-victimiser, truth-falsehood, life-death, life-story; subject-object, fertility-sterility, man-woman, day-night, fullness-emptiness, imprisonment-freedom, thus underlining the need to re-integrate herself. We notice the reference to curtains in beginning of many chapters, mainly those entitled 'Night.' The white curtains, which are

294 on the window, letting in breeze and sunlight on bright days; they also help her see the garden, people, and buildings. Her room has "A window, two white curtains ... when the window is partly open—it only opens partly—the air can come in and make the curtains move"; "Sunlight comes through the window too...(p. 9). These visual images symbolise the "window" to the narrator's mind, and the "white curtains" the separation between the conscious and unconscious mind. These curtain images constantly function to open and

shut Offred's memory.

Another example of such a function of the curtain, is seen during one of those nights

when she begins recollecting her past life: "The curtains are still wavering in the small

wind, the sun outside is shinning, though not in through the window directly" (p. 66).

And immediately after this description, Offred is thinking about the afternoon she spent

with Luke in the hotel rooms before he was divorced from his wife. And now sitting in

her room, she writes:

1 sit on the window seat, looking out through the semisheer of the curtains...The window is open as it goes, there's a breeze, hot in the sunlight, and the white cloth blows across my face...From the outside I must look like a cocoon, a spook, face enshrouded like this, only the outlines visible, of nose bandaged, mouth, blind eyes (p. 221).

She remembers her friend, Moira, her work in the library, her husband Luke and her daughter, the time of the political upheaval, and how she got her daughter from the

school that day, and says, "remembering this, I also remember my mother years before"

(p. 233) taking part in porn riots, or the abortion riots; My mother had a bruise on her

face, and a little blood" (p. 233). And then recollects her own childhood days—her

mother's album with Offred's baby pictures "the photo albums in which she had framed

295 me" (p. 234). And instantaneously, there is a shift to the present. She sees Nick coming out of the house. And she describes him in detail, as we read in the following passage:

I can see him, he's stepped out of the path on the lawn, to breathe in the humid air which stinks of flowers, of pulpy growth, of pollen thrown into the wind handfuls, like oyster spawn in the sun. I feel this prodigal breeding. He stretches in the sun. I feel the ripple of his muscles go along him, like a cat's back arching. He's in his shirt sleeves, bare arms sticking shamelessly out from the rolled cloth (pp. 234-35).

These nature images, such as: sunlight, flowers, lawn, air, and pollen, foreshadow a longing for love, touch and sexual relationship, And seeing Nick, her memory shifts to the past and to her husband:

That night after I'd lost my job, Luke wanted to make love...But I felt numbed, I could hardly even feel his hands on me (p. 236).

In Chapter 30, entitle 'Night', in her room again, the images reoccur:

Night has fallen...darkness lifting into the sky from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover...Like smoke from an unseen fire...Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes...

.. .Night has fallen. I feel it pressing down on me like a stone. No breeze. I sit by the partly open window, curtains tucked back because there's no one out there...(p. 247).

Nick sees her through the window and she sees him: "He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face...We look at each other." (p. 248, "I pull the left-hand curtain so that it falls between us, across my face...after that he walks on, into the invisibility around the corner" (p. 248). Now her memory takes her to the time when she and Luke were leaving, and how Luke got rid of their cat. And then there is a shift to the present immediately. These memories of the past occur mostly at night, but by the

296 next day they disappear and she is back to the reality of the Gileadan society. Offred deliberately makes efforts to go back to the past to remain sane and to accept the present reality, as she declares:

I try to conjure, to raise my spirit from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, 1 want to say. But they won't. (p.250).

In utter alienation and isolation with no significant events to make the passing of time and to give meaning to her life, she treasures the natural events like the rising and setting of the sun, the weather and her memory of her past life:

Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money...(p. 140).

The spatial imagery of the empty room she sits in becomes a symbol of her own empty inner space: "I am like a room where things once happened and nothing does, except the pollen of weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor" (p.

98). Therefore, Offred's resistance is necessarily to take a different form than that of active protest (which was not successful). Only that resistance which could help her to survive could be of any value because she declares, "...I intend to last", and she means not just physical, but mental and psychic survival as well.

The battle against Gilead takes place within Offred's mind. But since the resistance is presented as an act of the mind, the difference between resistance and submission is also

297 in the mind. For tlie reader, her resistance is often indistinguishable from submission, which is evident in her statement: "I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no

light without shadow"; or rather no shadow unless there is also light"(p. 99). But she questions: "What is resistance—the shadow, or the light?" So instead of struggling with secret password or scribbling Latin tags in dusty cupboards, Offred tries out another form

of resistance/survival—that of escape. But for Offred, escape is also an operation of the

mind. The physical escape routes leading out of Gilead are blocked as the other resisters

had discovered, so what remains are "the ones you can open in yourself (p. 3). Her escapes routes are into the pre-Gileadean past, in a re-structuring of the dystopian present and finally in a flight into an unknown future. As observed, these memories appear as snapshots of the past, frozen images of some event in detail that are recalled by some

sinister parallel from the present.

Sometimes, the novel does not seem like a novel, but a sequence of episode controlled only by the narrator's consciousness. They are "dream" sequences which are by-products of sleepless nights, or night dreams presented as walking dreams. That is, there is no attempt to capture the language flow of dreams, no effect to approximate the dimensions of sleeplessness in fragmented or disjointed images. Language is controlled, instead by a

lyrical and literal consciousness here: a metaphor, as it were, for sleepless nights.

Observations rove back and forth between layers of the past. Observations are disconnected, associated only by way of her ability to evoke them. Many of them are patently distorted; memories heaped upon memories. These are "memory images" and

'"hypnogogic images," respectively and thus, it is a recollection of the past experiences in

the form of pictures, occurring mid way between the state of wakefulness and sleep. It

298 also combines " hallucinatory images" which are vivid, rich and detailed, but however the consequences of a confusion of mind between reality and illusion.

The novel may be seen as a beginning in liic endeavour to conceptualise the seemingly diverse and conflicting images, realities, myths and self-portraits of women divided by class, race, occupation, and nationality. The novel's structure creates a pattern in which the memory and present reality cross paths, becomes a galvanising zone in which the acts of women in the world pass from an absence or a negation into a sense of being more durable and intelligible than the derivative otherness about which de

Beauvoir wrote some thirty years ago.

The images of windows and curtains have other meanings, as we will notice. For instance, when the protagonist is praying;

I am sitting by the window, looking out through at the empty garden...! don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness, or light (p. 251).

Here the window image serves to portray the supernatural connection one can have with

God—communication in prayer, suggesting that there may be darkness inside the soul, but light can come from above when the window of communication is open. The windows let both light and darkness inside her room: "Grains comes through the curtains, hazy bright not much sun today" (p. 140). The images of light and darkness are symbolically used.

In the last chapter of the novel, there are several images of light and darkness: "Tsit in my room, at the window, waiting. In my lap is a handful of crumpled stars" (p. 373).

299 Through the window she sees the reflection of the stars, there is nobody in the garden, and "outside, the liglit is fading. It is reddish already. Soon it will be dark. Right now it is darker" (p. 374); she sees the "mist of moonlight" (p. 375); she sees the Black Van

"blended with twilight...it appears like the clotting of the night. It turns into the driveway, stops" (p. 375); she sees the "white eye, the two wings" (p. 375); then Nick calls her by her real name, and tells her 'Trust me', the lights are on (p. 378); and finally she steps into darkness or light, which she does not know. These images also show a woman looking at the world and herself through a vast window through the white curtains of memory—the inner adventure of a search for glimpses of meaning and awareness of the self through the past and present. Night is used as a symbol for concealment, and day is a symbol for exposure. The sun is used as a symbol of untroubled, guilt-free happiness, or perhaps the approval of God and nature, it sun shines on Offred, even when she is inside the room; she seems to absorb and retain the sunshine.

It also symbolises a future place where she can be free, of a natural world governed by natural laws, as opposed to the artificial, strict community with its man-made Puritan laws.

Through these images of physical fragmentation, the author attempts to represent a woman. In such cases of dismemberment of the female body by a woman writer, the erotic component, and by extension, the fetishising impulse becomes more complex in nature. It is basically involved in a textual transaction where mutilation and fragmentation are cleverly used not to subdue the other but to portray the self These images are explorations that literally twist the female body out of shape, enumerate and celebrate a physicality that is both familiar and alien, and thus the body becomes 'other.'

300 She knows that the regime regards women as things and that she is a handmaid, with her tattooed ankles and identity pass, and is merely a valuable commodity. Offred also knows that only the insides of the Handmaid's bodies which are important for reproduction, are essential to the authorities, while arms, and legs which are seen as non essentials, are ruthlessly flayed or even chopped off for minor offences like reading.

Body fragments such as: womb, egg (ovaries), genitals, eyes, feet, hands and head are for the purpose of self-portraiture. In Gilead she suddenly discovers herself as nothing more than an "ambulatory chalice." These bare fragments are not synecdoches, in the sense that they do not allude to a whole that remains unnamed, as did the fetishised body fragments of male writers. On the contrary, they resolutely remain fragments of some larger meaning. As loose pieces, these body parts are described by the author with passionate minuteness as realms unto themselves. This fragmentation doubtless responds to the break in aesthetic perception brought about by avant-garde and subsequently it is also a reaction against the tendency to recompose fetishised fragments according to one, central interpretation, that of a woman as a vehicle of male desire.

For Atwood, just a feminine sensibility will not give a woman her identity, and so the body fragments in The Handmaid's Tale do not allude, do not evoke, do not recompose themselves into one icon, do not point to one, invariable referent, by defiantly maintaining their independent nature; they suggest a plurality of readings. Furthermore, fragmentation allows for reflection on the body of the text itself. Wandering through a woman's body, the text carefully explores a territory asking to be discovered, and establish as its grammar, and its syntax. The text is a space where the body is dismembered and the novel is constructed. Therefore, experimenting with surfaces, cuts,

301 wounds and scars, the novel incessantly inquires into poetic form as a metaphor for the

body—a body sensual or a body of texts—yearning for fixidity and at the same time yielding to a seductive flux that works against it. In narrating the happenings in Gilead, the narrator says, "It's a painful story" (p. 343); "It's a mutilated story" that she is constructing and reconstructing for the reader all the time, and of course, it is her own

story, as she also writes: "We lived in the gaps between the stories" (pp. 66-67); "I

compose myself (p. 86). But not only the body is creatively dismembered in the novel,

Offred's voice, which is hard to find, also speaks in fragments. For example, language was not allowed to be used by the Handmaids for any communication:

We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed (pp.4-5).

Thwarted communication is one of the notable themes of this novel, and the complicity

between women that these fragments evoke is particularly moving.

Atwood posits a subject in constant quest for her identity amidst fragmented voices that

never fully name her. The protagonist is not allowed to use her real name. In fact, she has no name of her own and though she tries to believe that a name, like a telephone number, is useful only to others, she knows that it does not matter. Gilead had erased her past by giving her a name that typifies her status as a thing, without core, identity or self—Offred is someone who is owned and designed for a particular function; she is

named as the property of Fred. However, she will hold on to her name, but as a secret, as an inviolable, impenetrable entity, not to be divulged even to the reader.'"

302 The theme of exploitation of the female can be traced through images of gardens and

flowers. These visual images also add beauty and life to the otherwise gloomy, dark,

sterile, nightmarish landscape of the text. However, these images are not for decoration,

but have symbolic meaning. Garden/paradise has archetypally been a realm removed

from ordinary existence and impossible to return to in the flesh. It is a condition always

placed somewhere and sometime outside normal human experience. Paradise is remote

from our experience because it was lost. The garden also symbolises the woman as

"fruitful" in biological reproduction. The symbolism is drawn from the agricultural

activity of ploughing the field, planting seeds and then waiting for the harvest at seasonal

cycles; the woman is the land which is ploughed and planted. The garden also has sexual

connotations. For example, King Solomon in the Bible calls his beloved, the "spice

garden" with her beauty and fragrance, which he wants to enter and keep for himself,

implying a desire for sexual relationship.

The garden symbolism draws attention to the many gardens owned by the Commanders'

Wives. The gardens are private places which were "something for them to order,

maintain and care for" (p. 16). We read below a description of such a garden:

...large and tidy: a lawn in the middle, a willow, weeping catkins; around the edges, the flower borders, in which the daffodils are now fading and the tulips are opening their cups, spilling out colour. The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal (p. 16).

These images of fullness and emptiness signify the fertility and barrenness.

Offred sees the "empty garden" through the window in her room, "The tulips had

303 their moment and are gone, shedding their petals one by one, like teeth" (195). Seeing this garden, Offred remembers her own fertile garden when she was with her family:

I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through fingers (p. 17)

The garden or paradise here is a way of life; it is a place of rest, pleasure, contentment, virtue, beauty, closeness to nature, youthfulness, harmony, and freedom. Once again, the reader is left to imagine the details of the paradisal way of life. The flowers: tulips, daffodils, irises, bleeding hearts add a variety of colour and fragrance to the novel, thus are images of sight and smell. The outbursts of blossoms in the Spring (bulbs and seeds) symbolise life, fertility, love and also remind us of the brevity of life. And interestingly enough, these beautiful flowers are juxtaposed with "artificial, withered, dried, decayed, smelly, plastic flowers", images which portray sterility. The Commander's Wife decorates herself in flowers, as Offred writes:

Even at her age she still feels the urge to wreathe herself in flowers...You can't use them any more, you're withered. They're genital organs of plants... (p. 105).

Her barren womb is seen in the empty tulips:

The red tulips are redder than ever, opening no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are after all empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards (pp. 59-60).

Her unproductive life is also symbolised by the 'wool people' she monotonously knits sitting in the garden among withered flowers:

304 Knitting away at her endless Angel scarves, turning out more and more yards of intricate and useless wool people; her form of procreation, it must be (p. 197).

Serena Joy's garden also symbolises her repressive sexual desires, though it "looks peaceful." Her garden has lost its flowers, and there is no harmony between nature, human desire and art. The colour, the llowers, smell, all personify Serena's life, as the passage below reads:

There's something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light (p. 196).

This sexual connotation of the garden is similar to the 'spice garden,' the fragrance of sexual passion and hunger. For instance, Offred is sitting alone by her window at night and sees Nick in the moonlight, and sexually longs for him:

The scent from the garden rises like heat from a body, there must be night blooming flowers, its so strong. I can almost see it, red radiation, wavering upwards like the shimmer above highway tarmac at noon. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger (p. 248).

By skilful treatment of the autumnal passing of the summer flowers, the author creates a fine balance between pathos and detachment. The eventual passage of beautiful things is established which is developed through these images, and we see the full sense of what is meant by the opening line, "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium...Dances could have been held here. The music lingered..." (p. 3). Here the proper object of lament is not the flowers, for they have only served as symbolic substitutes for the women in the novel—this does not come as a shocking surprise, but as an honest recognition of the inexorable bond between beauty and death. These images of flowers have dual meaning and a general truth about life. In the lingering blossom, the author

305 sees the flower as an emblem of hope, moved by the barrenness of the 'dying flowers'-- the hour of death. They cast back upon Nature itself a solemn appreciation of its dignified movement through the cycle of life and death, and the general fact of life that the Handmaids too will die as Nature dies (with hope of regeneration) has added a dimension to the experience. The flowers and their local setting (lawns) are perceived within some greater context—call it time—in which both men and natural objects move.

The imagery of flowers, the mood of early winter, the rhythms set in motion by its description restrain as tension, which is a marvellous achievement by Atwood. The effect is that of the slow rising to conscious articulation of buried, inexpressible grief and of the vast sense of relief which comes from the author's ability to objectify the experience.

Food images are significantly employed in the novel. Shopping for food is one of the monotonous daily activities of the Handmaids. The food items are mostly eggs, chicken, fruits, meat, bread, cheese, steak, milk, baked potatoes, green peas, canned pears, coffee, lea, butter, apple juice, vitamin pills, toast, fresh baked cakes and potatoes, sandwiches, pies, jelly, doughnuts and ice cream. Eggs have a significant symbolic function in the novel. There are many references to Offred and her partners buying fresh eggs on their shopping trips. There is no doubt that Atwood has used eggs to denote the female ovum.

Offred goes to the shop and gets: " Twelve eggs...Tell them fresh, for eggs..." (p. 15); she buys eggs from All Flesh: "We put them into our baskets...(p. 36). Here the twelve eggs signify the twelve months in the life of a young fertile handmaid. Chapter 19, entitled "Birth Day" has many images of eggs and the egg cup:

...and another plate with an eggcup on it, the kind that looks like a woman's torso, in a skirt. Under the skirt is the second egg, being kept warm. The eggcup is white china with a blue stripe (p. 140).

306 The "second egg under the skirt" is the ovum, which is waiting to be released soon. We also see the description of the unfertiHsed egg:

The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by sunlight, like craters on the moon. It is barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went onto (p. 141).

The egg, its description and its energy preoccupies the concerns of the handmaids: "The egg is glowing now, as if it had energy of its own" (p. 141). Offred says that the life principle of the moon may not be on the surface but inside which is true of the egg too. she also says: "to look at the egg gives me intense pleasure." In her utter 'sterile' room the presence of the egg is a promise of life and regeneration, a possibility of life and rebirth. But the futility of the handmaid's waiting for this egg 'every month' is obvious as she says, "the sun goes and the egg fades" (p. 141). She utters, "If I have an egg, what more can I want" (p. 141), because this is the identity that she is ascribed in Gilead—a woman "with viable ovaries" for breeding purposes. The images of the sun and moon symbolise the masculine and the feminine energy.

Offred longs for oranges: "1 look at the oranges, longing for one" (p. 34); "They've got oranges 1 say...there are still some left" (p. 64); and at the buffet, they have "ham, cheeses oranges—they have oranges" (p. 149). Their only greeting is "Blessed be the fruit" (p. 363). Fruit is used in the Biblical terms, "the fruit of the womb, which is a blessing from God," and thus it refers to the off-spring. For example, we read "a pregnant woman's belly is like a huge fruit" (p. 363) and Offred's body is like the ripe melon (p.

507 197). The roundness of the orange and melon represents both her desire to be whole and biologically fruitful.

As it had been discussed in previous chapters, food defines characters socially and also psychologically. Furthermore, food is used to stage the search for meaning that is carried out everywhere which reflects on the relationship among the self, the world and others.

And thus, the discourse on food inevitably becomes a discourse on pleasure and power, and in this respect, the image of food is always figurative. It is also interesting to observe that food images are fragmented just like her: the headless chicken, hung up by the neck,

"The eggs had broken on the floor, there was orange juice and shattered glass" (p. 193)

Bird and wing images are used to delineate entrapment; "The chicken lies there, headless and without feet, goose-pimpled as though shivering" (p. 63); Offred imagines the other handmaids giving birth "Behind my closed eyes!...their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds (p. 90); "I am like a dead bird" (p. 329); "The chickens strung up by the necks in a meat shop window, like birds with their wings clipped like flightless birds, wrecked angels" (p. 356). We see the merging of bird and food images.

In each of these passages we see the entrapment of these birds, for either their wings are clipped, or they are feetless. They are also lifeless. These images, which appeal to sight also represent the bodies of men and women which hang on the wall:

The three bodies hang there...their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the necks in the meat shop window (p. 356).

The handmaids' movements are restricted, they have "white wings," like angels but look like "wrecked angels." These wingless birds are used to express the desire of the

308 protagonist to transform herself into a free woman someday. Feet and hands are very appropriately used by the author and in the description of the bodies of women on the wall, we read: "Beneath the hems of the dresses the feet dangle, two pairs of red shoes, one pair of blue" (p. 356). The handmaids' feel are also bruised to restrict their movement. For example, when Moira is punished for trying to escape from Gilead:

Mer feet didn't look like feet at all. They looked like drowned feet, swollen and boneless, except for the colour. They looked like lungs (p. 118).

Empty hands symbolise an empty future, as Aunt Lydia often said:

The future is in your hands...She looked down at her own hands...but there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held out but not seen (p. 62).

The empty hand image is also symbolic of the empty 'self of these women, and thus the author is forewarning that Offred creatively engages with the world, as at the end, she must take responsibility for herself The general truth is that the only destiny we hold in our hands is our own. And only we hold our destiny. This image also functions to foreshadow the potentiality of the female to discover her true identity. Images of emptiness and hollowness which define Offred are many; for example: Offred is like a cloud, sugar candy, missing person, dead bird, a piece of toast, missing furniture, snow, dry rice, an empty room, a cradle of bones, faded and dried flowers, blank space between parentheses, eye taken out of socket, distorted shadow, headless chicken, broken-winged bird, a container. And she explains her desperate loneliness and emptiness in the following lines:

I feel that empty, again and again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on making time (pp. 95-96).

309 Her vitality is so completely emptied out that she is unable to recover her original structure as a human being. But she is also like an empty sponge; she "oozes like sponge" (p. 295) and as a sponge she can be filled. Therefore, her capacity to give and take is tremendous. This desire to be filled is observed in the prayer of the Handmaids:

•'What we prayed for was for emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies" (p. 251).

Besides being alienated from herself, Offred is also tragically alienated from those around her. Serena Joy, the wife of the Commander, is very harsh in her treatment of

Offred. She makes it very clear to Gffred that she is to treat her stay as a job, as a business transaction, and not cause trouble of any sort with her husband. Her irritation is clearly seen after the "Ceremony" when she rudely tells her to get up and get out instead of telling her to rest for ten minutes to improve her chances of conception. Serena Joy also treats Offred as a 'thing', a piece of furniture on which to support herself when trying to sit in her chair in front of the television or in the garden. And Offred, too, considers Serena Joy "a vengeful woman."

Even the relationship between Offred and her friend, Ofglen (another Handmaid), verges on friendship rooted in mutual trust before it is abruptly and mysteriously terminated.

They resemble a pair of red dolls keyed to repeat meaningless sentiments and distrust each other completely soon. However, they grow to realise that if not a bond or friendship, at least some meaningful relationship could exist between them. Atwood's greatness lies in her creation of nuanced characters as against the simple ones typical of

Utopias and dystopias as genres. For instance, not one of the characters in Gilead is so

310. cold and as terrifying as the inhuman O'Brian in Orwell's 1984. The narrator, as well as the reader, experience mixed feelings towards these fully realised human characters, who arc painfully alienated from their essential selves in some way or the other.

And thus, we have seen that Offred's alienation is both physical and psychological. Just as the room is an enclosure for her, she also shuts within herself, being cut-off from her

husband, daughter, mother and friends. In order to become whole she has to break these

physical and psychological barriers; she must not remain 'fenced' in. However, within

this enclosed situation in Gilead, she has some freedom, as she says: "A rat in a maze is

free to go anywhere as long as it stays in the maze" (p. 214). Her movement through

numerous rooms, doors, staircases, corridors, gates and checkpoints are important in

foreshadowing her escape to freedom. These images of movement are juxtaposed with

images of stagnation to show freedom within limitations. There are many passages that

show her meaningless moving in the city of Gilead, such as:

I walk along the hallway, past the sitting room door and the door that leads to the dinning room, and open the door at the end of the hall and go through into the kitchen (p. 12). I go out by the back door into the garden (p. 37) I walk along the gravel path that divides the back lawn, neatly like parting hair . . .(p. 23) I open the gate and continue, past the front lawn and towards the front gate (p. 23). I open the front gate and close it behind me. I walk and wait (p. 25). We reach the fu'st barrier, which is like barriers blocking off road works, or dug-up sewers...Behind the barrier, waiting for us at the narrow gate way, there are two men (p. 27). Double, 1 walk the street...The street is almost like museum. Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs...(p. 33). We go into All Flesh, which is marked by a large wood. A block past All Flesh, Ofglen pauses, as if hesitant about which way to go. We have a

311 choice. We could go straight back, or we could walk the long way around. We already know which way we will take, because we always take it (p. 40).

There are certain paths the handmaids always take, however, "they are not allowed to go to the river any more, or over the bridge" (p. 41). The images of the church and the wall in the city are used symbolically: "Opposite the church is the Wall" (p. 42). The church and the Wall are important buildings; they are used as contrasts in what they stand for.

The church that Offred knew in the pre-Gileadan times has been converted into a museum, thus indicating the loss of spiritual values in the present regime, and opposite this museum, there is the Wall where executions are carried out. The Wall is a symbol of cruelty, torture and death, a true picture of Gilead. Other examples of movement, freedom within imprisonment, are:

We go past the shops and come to the barrier again and we are passed through (p. 59). We walk around to the back door, open it, go in ...(p. 62). I go through the kitchen door and along the hall towards the grandfather clock. The sitting room door is closed (p. 64). I go upstairs, my face distant and white and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like an eye under pressure (p. 94). I follow the dusty-pink runner down the long upstairs hallway back to the room (p. 65).

When going into the Commander's room, she is again moving upstairs and downstairs, from room to room, and door to door through corridors, pathways and hallways:

I follow the downstairs corridor back, past the door that leads to the kitchen.. .to the next door ....(p. 176). I'go back, along the dimmed hall and up the muffled stairs, stealthily to my room (p. 185).

312 And when she goes to Jezebel's at night with the Commander: "We glide together through the darkening streets; we have to go through the gate" (p. 303); "We go along the corridors and through another flat grey door and along another corridor... (p. 304).

Offred's final movement comes as she gets into the Black Van, and she says: "I go along past the flower beds, the willow tree, aiming for the back door. 1 will go in. I'll be safe"

(p. 368). Finally, in an attempt to get rid of the imposed limitations, she wants to move out of borders and break down barriers, some of which she has set for herself and so writes "So I step up into the darkness within" (p. 378). All these are outward movements in a horizontal direction. And having exhausted the possibilities of movement and escape in space, in physical, linear journeys, the protagonist next turns to darkness, the archetypal agent of secrecy, and plays upon the antithesis of light and darkness. The structure is psychological again-following the movement of the protagonist's mind—that emotional intensity overcoming a logical and artistic pattern.

The Handmaid's Tale is about a totalitarian system and this is another major theme. The novel takes place after a military coup de'etat, in what has been the Republic of Gilead.

Because of the falling birth rate, women are conscripted by the rulers and are treated as breeding animals. They live monastic lives, in an hierarchy symbolised by the colour of their costumes. The narrator, Offred, is at the bottom of the pecking order as a

Handmaid. To regulate reproduction, the rulers try to control the activities of women, to decide who will have the power to reproduce and when. Extreme pollution has made people sterile. The novel pictures a terrifying vision of patriarchy: sterile, unable to reproduce itself; it is murderous and enslaves the young men and women under its control. In addition, the novel is intensely political as well as religious. The allegory posits an

America embodied in New England, which has gone religiously mad. Atwood focuses more directly on political madness. The religion of the novel is based on a destructive idea, Atwood's entropy, that aspect of revelation, which indicts the present in order for us to prepare for the future life, if we are fortunate enough to be reborn. The allegory fits the 1980s images. The madness of that decade was its power to move us to thoughts and actions, which often opposed our own interests.

Although the design of the novel is of strategic interest—first military coup, then the formulation of the Republic of Gilead, followed by the formulation of the cult and its effects on the women/men—the working out involves problems intrinsic to allegory. In such fiction, no person can develop; incidents or events, if any, give way to external events, which pre-empt choice and growth. Thus, Gilead is a monolithic structure and it is about 'totalitarian systems."

The novel portrays a society in continuous degeneration in which confusing identities, inhuman treatment of women, executions and punishments, sexual abuse, are all part of a disarray that allows the individual no opportunity to define herself/himself Atwood describes a dystopia not only gone sour, but also turned to hell.

Again, images are cleverly used to describe these two societies. As seen, the image of the church, which has been turned into a museum, reveals the decay of spiritual/moral/ethical values and further shows how these values have been twisted to suit the needs and desires of the Gileadan society. The converting of the church into a museum symbolises the emptiness of a world marked by the sense of its own end. The present society practises a

314 Christian religion without God, and values have now been preserved in a "museum" which are dead and rare. The contrast between pre-Gileadan and Gileadan times intensifies the tension between these types of governments. This is basically a conflict of what Frye calls the archetypes of ideal experience in the human world/community or city through images of order, unity, friendship, love, and archetypes of unideal experiences of tyranny or anarchy, isolation among people, especially the harlot, the witch and similar creatures and images of cannibalism, torture, and mutilation. And the,narrator navigates between these two worlds. At night, she dreams and thinks about her past, and remembers the Old World. During the day, she is forced to live in the New World that has been imposed on her. In the Old World, women had freedom and pleasure in being together and having friendships. It was a struggle, but one that took place in relative harmony.

The reader can see how in every chapter of the novel, the Republic of Gilead is moving away from Utopia or even a normal state of affairs, and steadily becomes more dystopian, as the men and women take more and more power into their own hands. The dystopian reality that begins with the Republic of Gilead and the Utopian that ends it are directly opposed, adding yet another dimension to the irony and the satire of the novel

In such a totalitarian system, Offred, is a victim, a woman moved around as an object, living out other's sense of her experience, not her own. This, of course, is an archetypal image of women. As is frequent in fundamentalist theocracies, women are assigned a marginal position in society and are divided into groups based on their functions, as

Offred says, "There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law." (p. 61).

315 The narrator's dehumanisation and subjection to the state's control are experienced as

spatial confinement and disorientation. But Gilead is as much a psychic territory as a

physical one, which depends on the colonisation of consciousness by indoctrination,

repression and fear, and the Aunts say: "The Republic of Gilead knows no bound.

Gilead is within you" (p. 33). The identity of Gilead, physically and ideologically

depends on the colonisation of physical space, and the subjection of the physical body

where the state's control of the body and space are metaphors for each other. Rooms,

doors, gates, insides, wall, and fenced gardens abound in the novel, and the

penetration/entering into these enclosed places, including the bodies of the handmaids,

symbolises the power of the ruling class. The Handmaids' social position is marked and

their bodily activity physically limited by the costumes over their bodies. Their head­

dresses (wings) which impose limits on their vision, and social constraints also encourage

them to look down, so that their delimited role in the society is signified physically by a

border around visual field. This simultaneously prevents them from being looked at by

others. "Modesty is invisibility," says Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. "To be seen—to be

seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated" (p. 39).

Gilead uses surveillance to enforce its power over its citizens and territory. The Eyes patrol exterior space, and the "slug's eye" of the Commander's penis invades the interior space of Offred's body. Offred's experience of life in Gilead is an experience of repeated penetration, where the interiority of her psyche and her body, and the exteriority of her body and her movement, are continually subject to control by the state and its

representatives. Suicide would be the only escape from this imprisoning spatial

confinement and entrapment of identity, and Offred describes this as a penetration, which

316 opens her bodily space, and tells: Stabbing herself is one of "those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge" (p. 18). Self-destruction is imagined as transgressive penetration of her bodily space parallel but opposite to what is already happening to her. Therefore, physical space is used as a concrete representation of social and psychological oppression, but Gilead's control of space and of psychology are similarly fissured by pockets of resistance, otherness or indeterminacy which demonstrates the impossibility of securing the borders between inside and, outside, control and freedom.

Offred is trapped by males, and is surrounded by manipulators of machines—we see this in the impregnation Ceremony:

Above me, towards the head of the bed, Serena Joy is arranged, outspread. Her legs are apart. I lie between them, my head on her stomach. Her pubic bone under the base of my skull, her thighs on either side of me. (p. 121).

Offred does not really know where Serena .loy's body ends and where her own begins— she is lost within herself. Although the organisation and the prose of the novel are deeply original, the narrative metaphors are familiar: the need for the protagonist to move outside systems, whatever they are, and to establish her forms of experience and identification. Offred struggles with and against not only her confinement in the military society, but against (and with) all forms of determinants that squeeze her physical and mental state. All such systems, whether mechanical, religious, or scientific are forms of entrapment, as well as, of experience and release. Central to Offred's dilemma is the fact that in order to discover her identity, she must escape all systems of thought and action.

Her quest, however, is impossible because systems claim all. In the novel, the clash

317 between individual, the source of anarchy, and society or community and the source of order, remain intense.

The entrapment of innocent young women in the needs and desires of others is enhanced

by a society that seems basically stable, that, however counterfeit, appears to work. Only

in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is there terrible disharmony, systematic breakdown,

and it is fitting that here the narrator begins to assert herself. Her resistance in herself is

seen in the following lines:

Everything I've resisted, comes flooding in. I don't want pain. I don't want to be a dancer, my feet in the air, my head a faceless oblong of white cloth. I don't want to be a doll upon the wall. I don't want to be a wingless angel. 1 want to keep living in any form...(p. 368).

Offred, instead of surrounding herself to her physical weakness, banks upon her potentiality, and shows full control of her physical being. And resolves to do that which is essential for her to do at the crucial moment—assert her will and potential self- meaning life and constantly shows her firm grip on reality. She is prepared to accept and overcome all the shortcomings of her body, but it is the shortcomings of a psychological nature which she cannot tolerate, as she utters: "O God, It's no joke. Oh God, Oh God.

How can I keep on living? (p. 253). However, in her hopeless, exploited situation; she holds on to her only identity: "I have viable ovaries" (p. 186).

Everything humiliating and manipulative that can occur does occur, but she has moved to a new stage of consciousness. Part of the unfolding of the novel comes in the expert use of contrast; each stage of consciousness on the narrator's part is accompanied by a new

stage of consciousness. This is evident in her persistent resistance and desire to get out.

318 So, in the process of narrating her story, she gains a greater sense of herself, and hence she says: "I need perspective." hnages of death have a crucial function in both alienating and liberating, and there are many such images, such as; "she is like a dead bird", the many executions of both men and women who are hanged on the wall and the gravestones, weathered, eroding with their skulls and cross bones...(p. 42); the "winged hourglasses to remind us of the passing of mortal time" (p. 41); "the cradle of life, made of bones...(p. 143); her own body "there's something dead about it..."(p. 132). These images of death and half-death are based upon either feeling of paranoia or actual physical death of characters. In spite of the life-denying projections in these images, Atwood finds life-affirming elements present in all sorts of images of death in nature such as: the tulips, moon, eggs, tree, daffodils, water, garden, seeds, plants, etc., showing the pulsating life these are capable of holding—impulse, instinct, spontaneity and energy. And so, while the narrator is made aware of the degenerative process reflected in the ghastly decay in the human body through these death images, she does not forget the inner radiance of the body she has had all her life and the possibility of a new life. For instance, even though many of the

Handmaids do not conceive and give birth to children because their Commanders are sterile, there are some who do become fruitful:

One of them is vastly pregnant; her belly, under her loose garment swells triumphantly, an escape of breath... our fingers itch to touch. She's a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her. She's a flag on a hilltop, showing us what can still be done: we too can be saved (p. 35).

It is the human perception, which reaches down into the unfathomable layers of life that leads one to the revelation that untimely life prevails, no matter how assertive death is. It

319 is the on-going rush of energy that runs through the various components of Nature, which are passed on to human life thai is celebrated here. By the end of the novel, Offred, herself, is pregnant:

I put his hand on my belly. It's happened, I say. I feel it has. A couple of weeks and I'll be certain (p. 348).

Margaret Atwood's concept of power struggles in relationships is highlighted in the novel. Power and powerlessness, shilling of power, and power struggles are explored in the text. It truly is a novel of relationships—characters' desire for independence and their interdependence on other characters for survival. Through the male-dominated power structure, she expresses her apprehension about the sense of order, power and control as the chief elements of social reality's systematised through man-woman relationships in the handmaids—which is the reversal of marriage and family. In this type of structure, men do not have all the power and women none. Ironically, in a true dictatorship, most men also lack power. They, too, are very regimented, very controlled. All the characters in the novel have some sort of power over other characters, and this power shifts and balances itself all the lime. It is Offred's version of story, and significantly, it is also her situation in this society (and not that of the other classes of women) that is seen as symbolic of the general situation of all women.

A basic form of expressing this power is through language for communication/information. But the handmaids are deprived of this power, as they are not allowed to talk to each other: "friendships were suspicious" in Gilead. The narrator describes the Handmaid's conversations as clipped whispers as amputated speech" (p.

211). And so their speech is limited to their only greeting, "Blessed be the Fruit. May the

320 Lord Open" (p. 25). There is no communication even between tlie Commanders and their

Wives. And so Offred is excited when she is invited by the Commander to play a game

of Scrabble at night, is able to spell words, and use language in a silent way:

My tongue felt sick with effort of spelling. It was using a language I'd once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that long passed out of the world... (pp. 199-200).

She says: "What a luxury...the letter C crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious..." (p.

180). Sight and taste imagery is used to provide a temporary release from her solitary

state by just being able to spell a word. She talks to the Commander and asks for hand

lotion, and when he explains the meaning of the words written in a foreign language in

her closet as " Don't let the bastards grind you down" (p. 242) his voice is metal-

coloured, horn-shaped" (p. 283). She sits in the Commander's room and listens like an

"almost extinct animal at the zoo" (p.201).

Atwood's concern goes beyond the confines of The Handmaid's Tale; she is essentially

expounding on a woman's use of language in a male world. This is not so because a

woman has a language of her own, for woman has thus far been silenced or has been

given a "sugary language," but rather because women are finally finding the cracks in the social structures that had so far bound and blindfolded their lives. Silence will give way

to expression, and as women act, their works will contaminate and impregnate the world

in unforeseen ways. As women find their voice, that is, the capacity to participate in the

activity of discourse, they will bring forth something whole and new. Contamination is

neither a fact of biological sexual exchange nor a metaphysical gift of the word. It is the

result of consciousness and of the experience of women first as oppressed beings and

321 later as autonomous selves. For Atwood, consciousness of the female's subordinate place, of her derivation from the historically constituted male principle, and of her lack of a world wrought in her free experience of the given, delineates the possible text of the contemporary woman writer.

The protagonist and the other Handmaids in the novel are not allowed to use their own names. Offred belongs to Fred, "of Fred"; and the only identification she has is the

"circling on her ankle, like a bracelet, the taboo.. .a cattle brand. It means ownership" (p.

329). However, she has another name she says, "My name isn't Offred. I have another name which nobody uses now because it is forbidden" (p. 105). We also learn that her partner's name is Ofglen. As the "Historical Notes" further explain, the names were taken by the Handmaids when they entered a particular household and were "relinquished by them upon leaving it" (p. 318). Their names: Ofwayne, Ofwarren, Ofcharles, for example, indicate that they have no identity other than of breeders assigned to men whose names they bear with the possessive prefix.'''

Furthermore, the very process of naming displays an instability which frustrates the reader's attempt to locate anyone system of naming. While the narrator becomes known as "Offred," her friend becomes known as "Moira," and the Aunts are called by names derived by commercial products, such as: Elizabeth and Lydia (p. 321). Another interesting explanation for the narrator's' name is illustrated by Jessie Givner, who says that the name may be divided into the possessive preposition "of and the name "Fred," and may be dismembered into another preposition "off and adjective "red" (indeed throughout the novel the adjective is extensively used) which become instrumental in the process of giving a face to a name.

322 The Commanders are powerful in terms of their control over the bodies of the

Handmaids, but as we see the Commander wants more than sex, he wants love, and companionship, which he does not get from his wife, Serena Joy. In the beginning, he like Serena Joy, starts off by regarding Offred as nothing more than his official

Handmaid, but he soon goes on to also make use of her as his unofficial scrabble partner and club companion. Unknown to his wife, he plans private meetings at night with

Offred and keeps her pleased with hand lotions, magazines, and at times even books. On one such nights he asks her to dress up in a flashy costume and makes her look like a

"whore" and takes her to his private club known as Jezebel's, thus changing her role from a Handmaid to a mistress.. Though Offred experiences mixed feelings towards him, at no stage does she feel love for him, as the Commander sees polygamy as natural and regards women as inferior beings.

Offred's Commander, though hungry for power, is pathetically human. He pries into rooms like a peeing Tom, reads the Bible reluctantly to his household and invites Offred to his room not for pawning or kinky sex, but to play Scrabble with him and even asks her for a kiss. At times the Commander looks at Offred sheepishly while at other times he appears daddy-like in his behaviour. After his secret relationship with Offred, he complains of the impregnating Ceremony as too impersonal. And slowly, there seems to be an imbalance in power structure, and there is now evidence that tyranny is shifting to both the victimiser and the victim. Offred, too has gained some power (she says that she lets him win a game of scrabble) in this illicit relationship with the Commander and the power she has over his wife, as she reveals; "Now 1 had power over her, of a kind, although she didn't know it, I enjoyed it...I enjoyed it a lot" (p. 208). A real struggle for

323 power is beginning liere, and it will soon be a short matter of time, before one dispenses

the other, and who will win this struggle is clear enough from the hints Atwood has

dropped so far.

Shifting of power is also seen in other relationships. For instance, Nick is manipulated by

Serena Joy into having sex with Offred because Serena Joy wants to get rid of her; the

Aunts exercise control and power over all the Handmaids by disciplining, teaching and

even torturing them and conducting public executions for disciplining the handmaids.

However, these tyrannical and seemingly vulnerable women also have a chink in their

armour, which is seen wlien Moira outwits them and leaves Aunt Elizabeth tied up like a

Christmas turkey in the furnace room. And "Though named after Pre-Gilead cosmetics, these toughies are Atwood's most disdainful depiction of the petty female boss.... [those

who] control, reward and punish other women"'^ Moira, Offred's friend is a lesbian who

finds that in her relationship there is a balance of power; Offred's mother is a feminist, who brought her daughter up without the aid of her husband. We see the structure of oppressors and victims in all of these relationships and roles played by both men and women.

The stereotyped gender roles of men and women in the society are symbolically suggested through clothing and colour imagery. The Commander's black uniform, and

'Eyes' grey suits and the handmaids' red robe are some examples. Offred is just a bundle

of red and a "red smoke". There is an overabundance of the use of the colour red in the

novel: red robes, shoes, umbrellas, basket, tulips, stockings, reflection, smoke, etc.

Offred's colour is scarlet, as in Hester's letter in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. In the

Hawthorne novel, scarlet symbolises sin and sexual freedom. Red also symbolises

324 violence, bloodshed, tyranny and hunger for power in the society of Gilead. It personifies the Handmaids, as Offred says: "the colour of blood defines us."; "sisterhood dipped in blood" (p. 11). The social structure in the classification of women is done with use of colours: the Wives wear blue, Marthas wear green (they clean, cook) to signify their earthiness; Aunts, the policemen of Gilead, wear khaki; wives of poor men, called

Econowives who perform diverse roles, wear red, blue and green striped skimpy robes.

The power struggles and the tension between nature and civilisation is also seen in many machine images which control human life, as we read of:

A pregnant woman, wired up to a machine, electrodes coming out of her every way so that she looked like a robot (p. 146).

There is the humiliating images of women in the film that the Handmaids watch for entertainment:

Sometimes the movie she [Aunt Lydia] showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed....That was what they thought of women, then (p. 152).

"Atwood's double recognition of the power of patriarchal structures and women's ability to evade these institutions by offering an alternative concept of power is the basis of this most subversive novel about society which is in every sense fundamentalist." Asi a nightmare scenario it speaks to contemporary dreads about nuclear pollution, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and possibility of near-universal infertility. When survival of the human race is at risk, human production becomes the centre of social

325 anxiety. In such a society women do have power, for they reproduce the species after all.

However, the status of women depends on how a culture evaluates this power of procreation, and in Gilead a sharp distinction is drawn between the importance to the state of a woman's childbearing capacity and her worth as an individual. And the power struggles between gender roles are; male with power and sexual potency versus female with reproduction and submission. Ironically, the novel present the two male characters, the Commander and Nick, at the end without power to even save Offred:

Nick is no longer with us...He may have gone down the back stairs, not wishing to be seen...(p. 377). .. .the Commander is behind her [Serena Joy], the sitting room is open. His hair is very grey. He looks worried and helpless, but already withdrawing from me, distancing himself.. .(p. 377).

Thus, The Handmaid's Tale emphasises the dangers of thinking by sexual analogy when humanness is oversimplified to the point where individual identity is erased. In a world of male/female functionality everyone is exchangeable and nobody has a value. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this dystopia is the power exercised over women, not by men (whose spy rings and terrorist activities are fairly predictable) but by one group of women over others. These Aunts are older women who have crossed their childbearing period. Their language is a shocking combination of military metaphors, gender stereotypes and some of the catchphrases of feminism and the Bible. There is a clear distinction between these Aunts and feminists like Offred's mother who believed in women's economic and emotional independence and who ended up in the unspeakable

Colonies to die of radiation disease. Yet, the existence of the Aunts is a warning that some radical feminist positions run the risk of being appropriated by the dominant power

)26 .group and then exploited as a new instrument for female oppression. Offred remembers her mother and says:

Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you wanted, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies (p. 137).

Her mother who stands for a feminist culture belongs to a group of women, which

comprises of those who intend to survive, whatever the costs. In a society like Gilead

that is inimical to women, survival itself is a form of resistance. Only the price is high, perhaps, even higher than death. For example, two other characters: Jananie and Serena

Joy are women who, like the Aunts have traded their self-respect and integrity in order to survive. The final picture of Jananie is a terrifying one. She appears at the end of the

Salvaging ritual (where the victim is kicked, clawed and hammered to death by hysterical

women) with "vacant eyed and giggling with a tuft of the victim's hair clutched in her grip" (p. 353).

Serena Joy had in her pre-Gileadan days been a lead singer in church choirs

and had appeared in TV shows giving speeches about the "sanctity of the home, and how

women should stay at home." She herself travelled the countryside appearing at shows

with her message and "presented this as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all"

(p. 47). With the founding of the patriarchal society, whose repressive views on

women's sphere she had upheld all along, she finds herself speechless, immured in the

sanctity of her home. But Gileadean society is harsh on the Wives and especially the ageing ones, as it is on the Handmaids. She is forced to take part in such humiliating

rituals as the impregnation Ceremony, and she is aware of the extra marital affairs of her

327 husband. Her repressed sexuality breaks out in her garden, where in spite of her arthritis, she grows a range of "subversive" flowers—tulips, irises and bleeding hearts, "so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out" (p. 146). Though like

Jananie and the Aunts, she had sought safety through compliance, she too is destroyed in the end like the protesters. In the postscript, Professor Piexoto hints that Offred's escape probably resulted in the "purging" of the Commander's household.

Another relevant concern of the novel is the exploration and establishment of a woman's own space in society by breaking away from the traditional space that has been imposed on her. A great deal has happened to the quest for women's liberation since Virginia

Woolf s A Room of One's Own'^ pushed open the doors of the male domain to women's writing and action in the world. The space assigned to her activity, imagination, and discourse continues to be the cultural economy of the household. Thus, women's field of action remains confined within the circle of the patriarchal. Until this century, women were confined to the hermetic space of the house, without outwardly directed activities.

When Virginia Woolf said, "How peaceful one feels down here, rooted in the centre of the world", she was alluding to the sense of fullness that woman can receive from her house. With the limitation of her vital space, she is deprived of a wide range of experiences that the society has forbidden to her, which will simultaneously deepen her experience of what is fundamental. She will appropriate for herself the pulsafing heart of what is real. Her realm is not that of political ambition, economic compefifion, power, or heroic deeds. History is the struggle for power, and women remained marginal to history.

Offred's confinement in Gilead is spatial, psychological and sexual, and the

328 possibility of escape seems remote because of her restriction at the centre of the nation's geographical space. She exists in a compound patrolled by guards, swept by searchlights, and social limits imposed on her are physically represented by these spatial limits. She is imprisoned in her room, and Gilead is enclosed by city walls, barbed wire, boundaries, fences, check-posts, barriers, and gates.

Again, the images of rooms function in yet another way: they provide private space for

Offred. They also offer an examination of the public and private spaces available to a human being in the modern world; and further stage a woman's search for an identity and meaning for her life through spatial imagery which, while often having concrete literal reference, carry psychic and social implications beyond the literal. Offred, during her stay in Gilead lives for the most part in rooms: her own, the Ceremony room, the Birthing room, the Commander's, Serena Joy's, Nick's room, and the hotel room. And these rooms are described with great precision.

The first two chapters of the novel describe in great detail Offred's impressions of her room and its contents. Each item of furniture is registered down to its smell, appearance, colour, the alternation of sunlight and darkness, as she says: "I explored the room. the framed picture with no glass, the white curtains under the window, the seat with a little cushion, the single bed, white sheets, chair, table, a lamp above, on the white ceiling, window, the small electric fan (p. 68). The synaesthetic evocation of a small room in these passages is characteristic of Atwood's method. The physical description of the room serves to create an effect of realism about the setting, and it further characterises the protagonist, and carries thematic points already established. Even the outer space

329 around the room is given detailed description: "I go out into the polished hallway" (p.

11); "I go out by the back door, into the garden, which is large and tidy" (p. 11). "I'm waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room...When I go to bed it's a bedroom" (p. 66). She misses her familiar rooms (space) with Luke in the hotel rooms, but now "it's the room themselves I miss as well" (p. 67) she tells. Her longing to have a space of her own is evident in this entering and exiting of rooms: "I go through the door into the inner room" (p. 78). She goes into the Commander's room; the washrooms and bathrooms, Nick's room, ceremony room, birthing room, she also remembers her own apartment during the pre-Gilead time, "When I got back...! wandered through the house, from room to room....(p. 229). She sees her illicit entrance into the Commander's room and later, into Nick's room at night as being "very dangerous." In the Commander's room, "My presence is illicit. It is forbidden to be alone with the Commander" (p. 176).

And entering Nick's room, she says, "This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be in... (p. 347) and yet finds it a place of love, warmth, a cave where Nick and she cuddle, while the storm goes on outside (p. 347).

Her wish every night when she goes to bed is to find her "space" in the world, as she narrates: "In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way there were" (p. 257). To create her own space and thus through this establish her female identity is observed in her statement: "My room...There has to be some space, finally that 1 claim as mine, even in this time "(p. 66). Finally, sitting in her room she describes: "I sit in my room, at the window, waiting. In my lap is a handful of crumpled stars...(p. 376); "this would be the last time I have to wait" (p. 376). And waiting in her

330 room she desires for rain, "there is nobody in the garden. I wonder if it will rain" (p.

376).

For example, the spatial imagery of rooms and houses are extensively employed in the

19"' century writing. Rooms and houses remain central figures to signify the social and psychic spaces occupied by women. The house is no longer imaged as a simple refuge or shelter from the world; it is often now a prison or cage. It is no longer a questioning of sheltering from the world's doubts and divisions, but of whether the house, the woman's

sphere, can be re-organised to provide a woman with a room of her own, or at least a room with a view, or whether indeed she must move out at as does Nora in A Doll's

House. Therefore, the slamming of the door at the end of the play suggests that for Nora to be reborn, she must move out of the space traditionally demarcated as a woman's sphere. Her exit signals the end of an era, but also inaugurates a new set of images of the home and the house. Offred, like Nora, has stepped outside her sacred space. It is not known at the end of the novel whether she has found a room of her own, as she enters the

Black Van which "waits in the drive way, its double doors stand open" (p. 378).

Her life in the room assigned to her as a Handmaid portrays a new economic position. It thus marks her downward mobility from being a wife and mother to becoming a

Handmaid. In gender terms, it is a removal from the ideal of the woman and a step towards entrapment, slavery and exploitation. In her new room, she say, "The door of the room—not my room, I refuse to say my—is not locked" (p. 11). Though she is confined to a room, it is not locked and hence suggesting the possibility of moving out and creating her own space. At the psychological/spiritual level the room provides her possible freedom and self-discovery; though the room is dark and lonely, she can see the

331 outside, sunshine and feel the breeze through the curtains and window as we had seen earlier in this analysis.

These room images provide dual meanings; they both confine and also allow the narrator freedom to claim her own space. And thus they function as a separate "territory" within the imprisoning house, in which restricted freedom is allowed to Offred, as in the

Commander's room: "Behind this particular door, taboo is dissolved" (p. 165). Here the constraining rules of Gilead are partially suspended. In the room, she is able to converse normally, to read magazines, play games, apply hand lotion and even change from her

'red robe'. The activity that she most enjoys is playing Scrabble where the board is a space on which she is allowed to manipulate language, subject to the rules of the game, and where even the constraints of the rules of the Scrabble can be suspended to create non-sense or obscene words. Her entering into illicit spaces, like Jezebel's, the

Commander's study, and Nick's room, is ultimately sanctioned by someone with authority over her, and is not a matter of choice. Even Offred's eventual departure from the Commander's house is ambiguous, since she is apparently arrested by the Eyes and put into a van.

When she enters this new confined space, its meaning is again ambiguous, like her entry into the Commander's Study or Nick's room, and could potentially lead to death:

The van waits in the driveway, its double doors stand open...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, because it can't be helped. And so I step up, into the darkness within or else the light (p. 378).

The author uses concrete images of light and darkness which are archetypal

332 symbols picture these as engaged in warfare; and describes freedom from the archetypal fear of darkness and perhaps from the nightmares of Gilead.

While the Eyes may be members of the Mayday Underground helping her to escape, the journal's final words show that the future may be either light or darkness, freedom or death. No longer looking for the light above or beyond self, she begins to explore "the strange light within her." One moment of consciousness is wider and deeper than the whole of her life. Entering the Van is the final movement from one space to another in

Offred's journal, and it maintains the same doubleness with which territory is described throughout the novel.

Images of doors, rooms, insides and outsides are a deliberate strategy designed to delay and impede the interpretative activity, so that the reader's expectations and the way he or she may construct the significance of the passage is subverted, or made problematic.

Secondly, the foregrounding of "things" or "background" does not allow the reader to see characters solely in terms of the human, other characters, or "people." But neither is he or she allowed to read the physical world of "things" merely as personifications of mood or character. Although the room is later seen as a haven or a cell, beautiful or bleak, according to Offred's projection, the facility, the "thingness" in the description of the room in the novel, serves to remind the reader of the room's material existence, that things or objects exist independently of human appetites and desires.

Another effect achieved by the technique here is to make the point that Offred is in the room, the room is in the house, and the house is in the Republic of Gilead—and indeed that Gilead is a country in a wider world.

333 The idea of 'space' and 'spaciousness' are used throughout the novel to refer to the character's aspirations, her desire for growth or self-reaUsation. Her fears of 'engulfment or confinement' on the other hand are registered as 'enclosures', 'closed doors, gates, or windows' or encroaching walls. Even the Walls, like, other spatial elements are never one thing. At defensive movements, walls may represent the safety or protectiveness; at other times, they are used as dangerous and life-threatening like the Wall which both encloses

Gilead and also where rebels are hanged. The Wall is described in the novel as:

The gates have sentries and there are ugly new flood lights mounted on metal posts above, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top (p. 42).

No one goes through these gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the wall, from inside past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible (p. 42).

Offred is resistant, a potential rebel inside the state, and her contact with other rebels demonstrates that even in "the heart" the identity of Gilead is contaminated by the enemy within. She is perpetually dreaming of being outside. Offred's is a story of an insider, and remains inside Gilead's borders, to be transmitted to the reader only by being displaced in space and in time by more than a century. Offred's story "the heart of

Gilead" can be only told when she is positioned at the geographical and ideological edge of the nation, and can only be read outside. And thus, she creates her 'own room' by narrating her story. As Nelida Pinon says;

To write a story is more than contaminate language; it is to expropriate it. It is taking back that was stolen from us, part of our body, soul and imagination.'^

i34 Rather than inventing or elaborating on a place of her own, conceived as the place of femininity, Atvvood questions the notions of dishevelled writing as a manifestation of the

'feminine.' For her, the "mutilated," non-sequential writing is yet another symptom of the marginalisation of women by the patriarchal system.

The last theme that will be discussed, is Atwood's concern for survival. The novel presents several human relationships such as: man-woman, woman-woman, man-nature, and man-self, all of which have been fractured in one way or another.

Atwood's concern for rebuilding fractured relationships for an integrated, happy life is evident in the text. There are many 'mending images', and these image patterns and clusters provide narrative unity to the themes: images of emptiness at the beginning— empty gardens, rooms, hands, wombs, clouds, self, relationships-come a full circle and conclude with images of 'fullness' which are represented through cycles of seasons:

"Spring has now been undergone. The tulips have had their movement...(p. 196) in the blossoms, fragrance, sunshine, heat and energy and rebirth. The image of the garden is used positively here; it is alive and beautiful like Tennyson's garden:

...heavy with scent, languid. Light pours from the sun, true, but also heat rises from the flowers themselves, you can feel it. It breathes in the warmth, breathing itself in...(p. 196).

These images, in the midst of utmost lifelessness, not only provide hope and life, also but foreshadow Offred's life at the end. The moon emerges as an image to signify the life principle of the woman through its rhythm, fullness, and beauty as "a goddess." The 28- day cycle of the moon parallels the menstrual cycle of a woman's fertility. The author says, "the moon is a stone, and the sky is full of hardware." Offred is like a sterile moon

335 with no feelings or desire outside, but her "biological, life-giving principle" is hidden inside her like the moon's.

Many of the images of spring are combined or contrasted with images of winter and summer. The coldness and death of winter is juxtaposed with that of Summer and Spring implying that these images can bring death, as well as rebirth. Recurrence of the nature imagery is perhaps the most discernible element of unity in the novel. The images of garden, rain, earth sun, colour, winter, frost all combine to reveal the on going process of life, death and rebirth. For example, the landscape shows signs of fertility and growth:

It has rained during the night; the grass to either side is damp, the air humid. Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips (p. 23).

The sidewalk is red brick. That is the landscape I focus on, a field of oblongs, gently undulating where the earth beneath has buckled from decade after decade of winter frost. The colour of the bricks is old, yet fresh and clear (p. 25).

Offred has changed physically, as well. The warmth, charm, and passion, which she once possessed, appear to have been replaced by coldness, severity and drabness. But she is warm inside, as she writes: "Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold rigidity...(p. 197).

Images of rain, water, and river in the novel function to signify regeneration, rebirth, growth, and life and fertility. Her desire for rain, "I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still a thunder storm, black clouds, lightening, ear splitting sound" (p. 274). Her memory of and longing for the river is very symbolic:

336 After a while we turn right...down the river...Where the wide banks are where we used to lie in the sun, where the bridges arch over (p. 276).

There is a juxtaposition of images of motion: the river flowing, with the image of stagnation, the sea and all that it contains (sea beast and water monsters). She prefers the river to the sea and she tells, "along its sinewy windings you'd reach the sea; but what could you do there?" Her desire for the river indicates her wish to be a part in the continuity of time, and also her hope of liberation.

The several references to water and bathing depict the regenerative process: "I step into the water, lie down, let it hold me. The water is soft as hands. I close my eyes.. .(pp. 81-

82); "I lie lapped by water" (p. 82). Water is an element of purification of the body and the soul, like the water in baptism. Water images also explore the descent-ascent process so familiar in Atwood's works. She wants to be cleansed by water, "I wish to be totally clean, germless, without bacteria, like the surface of the moon" (p. 84). Her wish to be clean like the moon has many meanings: She wants to be fertile, beautiful, attractive, and pure.

Images of circles, spheres, round objects and zeroes have dual meanings. These circular images signify a desire for wholeness, completeness and unity and at the same time these images are confining and enclosing. Offred's movements in Gilead is circular such as her activities, the monthly ceremonies and rituals, the seasons, alternation of day and night and her memory of the past and yearning for the future while dealing with the dark present are all like circles within circles intertwined. The other images are the "circular white egg" (p. 259) that is part of her daily meal; the repeated image of the white ceiling

337 and "in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out" (p. 9), and:

The wreath on the ceiling floating above my head like a frozen halo. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring on water where a stone's been thrown. All things white and circular (p. 253).

The images of "wreath, head, halo, hole, ripple, stone" reinforce the idea of entrapment as they are circular in shape. A ripple in water, though circular in shape, shows movement from the centre to the edges. And Offred's journey from the "The centre where nothing moves in Gildead" (p. 31) to the edges, that is out of Gildead, is significant through this image. The colour white is both symbolic of paleness and death, and it also signifies purity and holiness. Other images of circles in the novel are:

I look up at the ceiling, the round circle of plastic flowers. Draw a circle and step into it, it will protect you... (p. 274).

She is trapped, and says, "I feel buried." She is tired of constantly going round and round with the rhythm/monotony of these circular things and therefore mentally yearns to break out of these confining circular structures, as we read below:

All things white and circular. 1 wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round clock. The geometrical days, which go round and round...(p. 259).

As discussed in this study, Atwood's concept in her Circle Game, and children playing the traditional ring-around-the-rosie game functions as a symbol for what Frye calls the

"garrison mentality"; the tranced ritual of exclusion; the children are circumscribing reality, laying foundations for those garrisons of the mind that structure perceptions. The children are juxtaposed with lovers who are playing the circle game, withdrawing into a

338 private fantasy or projecting a private reality. The circle game is a game involving barriers. The players set up artificial enclosures, fortresses, to guard other worlds. And since the circle game is a game of ritual exclusion, it can be played with psychological barriers with language and with cultural myths. Offred is inescapably trapped in joyless, alienating circle games. Despite her inability to experience genuine freedom, she shares the anarchic impulses of the narrator of one of the poems in the Circle Game who cries out: "I want to break/those bones, your prisoning rhythms/ (winter Summer/ I want to break the circle." ^^ Along these images of enclosure, which represent the erased and degraded human life, as the lives of the handmaids, Atwood inserts the positive image of being zeroed as free from 'enclosures, circles and spheres.'

Breaking the circle implies a meaningful rebellion against closed rules of [thejgames or, what is popularly referred to as social order, as the Republic of Gilead. It presupposes a break with logic and with the habitual binary mode of perception. This psychological state can be achieved by responding to inner images and rhythms, which rise from one's person and collective unconscious. These circular journeys made by the protagonist leaves her more or less where she began.

Offred desires freedom from the enclosure of the society, and she gains this freedom through relationships. However, there are many reversals in her relationships by the end of the novel, and the novel's structure seems to be: order-disorder-uncertainty of the future.

"Men are sex machines," says Aunt Lydia. But Offred believes that "nobody dies because of lack of sex, but lack of love" (p. 186). So, there is a constant tension in relationships.

339 For men, sex is important, whereas tor OlTred, it is sex within a love relationship—the absence of love in Gilead is unquestionable. For example, when she enters the

Commander's room, there's "a fire place without fire" (p. 177), in the Ceremony room there is no passion (p. 122), and we also see that the illicit relationship she has with the

Commander means nothing to her, except releasing her from her utter loneliness:

I don't love the Commander or anything like it, but he's of interest to me, he occupies space, he is more than a shadow (p. 210).

And for him. To him, I'm no longer merely a usable body. To him, I'm not just a boat without cargo, a chalice with no wine in it, or an oven—to be crude—minus the bun. To him I am not merely empty (p. 211).

All these metaphors of " body, boat, chalice, oven" again demonstrate the idea of emptiness and fullness. The Commander's room without fire parallels the cold, unromantic and sterile life of not only Offred, the other handmaids and Serena Joy, but also the Commander's. Here the fire is a symbol of both the destroying lust which must be transcended and purgatorial flames which cleanse. Such dualism is inevitable of the associative method by which the image develops in the mind of the speaker/reader. Its associational basis is not individual consciousness in ideas or images alone, but in total states of a complex and individual consciousness that is always aware of multiple implications.

At its simplest meaning, fire stands for love, passion, sexual desire none of which the

Commander exhibits in his relationship with Offred. This is observed in the impregnation Ceremony that is mechanical, loveless sex, which contrasts with a night of love with Luke or Nick. The ceremony is imposed upon Offred and other handmaids, and the sexual act is impersonal, as Offred writes: "which would have been no more to

340 me than a bee is to a tlower...(p. 207). For the Commander, it was only a duty, his

"single-minded journey" and it was "like scratching himself (p. 207). In fact, the

Commander tells Offred that Gilead offered the best society for both men and women.

For example, each woman/Handmaid was provided a man. "The children were cared, and the women had no worries about household chores, or abusive husbands. This way they're protected, they can fulfil their biological destinies in peace" (p. 210). It also worked very well for men, for he tells: "All we've done is return things to Nature's norm." On the contrary, he cannot fathom this very society. And so he questions "what then had gone wrong? What did we overlook?" "Love. I said." (p. 284) However, the

Commander cannot understand this. For him, love was an "anomaly," a "fluke" and one could not build societies around it. Thus, the novel is filled with desire and hope, showing up the limits of tyranny and its costs to the oppressors as well as to the victims.

Forgiveness, love and trust are the alternative kinds of power which are offered by

Offred, as we read in her statement:

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing (p. 174).

Offred's act of adding "fire to the fire place" (p. 237) in the Commander's room tells us of her starvation of love, warmth and meaningful relationship. She does not want to be just a national resource, as she accepts earlier in her role as a Handmaid. Only in her relationship with Nick, does Offred demonstrate any of her earlier warmth and enthusiasm. She has found a new object for her emotional energies and freedom: "Being there with him was safety. It's a cave u/hich protects her from outside forces. This relationship is much more than a relationship of body to her. Her growing love for Nick also shows her recovering seli^. those inner spaces that had been colonised by Gilead.

Seeking to have a relationship with Nick would allow her to have done something that belonged to only her. She goes to Nick "time after time" (p. 340). She had been used by others for too long, and the only way to establish her identity would be by having some experience of her own, without allowing anyone to share that experience with her. She says, "I did not do it for him, but for myself entirely... (p. 348). And:

We made love each time as if we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever. And then when there is, that too is always a surprise, extra, a gift (p. 346).

Sexual relationship which was a trap for her as a handmaid, now liberates her, because it is not just an act, but a total relationship. It provides her not just political freedom, but also spiritual/emotional liberation, and she says: "The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom" (p. 348).

Offred's act is sanctified by a personal love, freely willed, which sees the other person as distinct and irreplaceable. The body becomes, in word, liberated—even while it is outwardly enchained. The body is no longer a property, and only with a notion of willed action as an important possibility is it feasible to think of the individual as both significant and free. Offred, in short ignores or overrides legal and social ordinEinces of

Gilead to fulfil her own desire and thus manifests her strength and independence.

By accepting the role of a lover, she has established her claim to share in human sexuality and thereby reclaim 'her share in human sexuality' which was lost by her daughter's disappearance, and the Commander's sterility. This also parallels the act of going deep in

342 her consciousness to integrate her psyche in the sexual experience with Nick. Conceiving and birth imagery describe a redemptive act, which reinforces the biological creativity of the woman. Love provides a purpose, relationship, future and an identity for Offred. She tells him her real name and says: "and feel therefore I am known."(p- 225).

And having found love, she says: "1 want to be here with Nick" (p. 347).

The most immediate and natural of cfeations, a child, is the privilege of woman, who

consequently would remain closer to the world of nature than to that of culture—a woman is closer to nature, intuition and instinct. The baby must come out of her own blood wrapped in her womb, nourished by her own milk. It must be a human creation, made of flesh, different from male abstraction. Therefore, she must descend to the real womb and show her secrets and labyrinths. Her feat will be to have articulated that dark world which dominates man (although he denies it) and which confirms its dominion through destructive demonstrations of its presence, of its madness. Motherhood is the final dimension to this story.

Family, home, and childhood play an important role in The Handmaid's Tale, directly or indirectly, not because they are particularly suited to "feminine" sensibility but because they function as powerful figures of bonding, which is contrary to the (predominantly male) view of woman as the stereotypical "angel in *.he house." However, for A*wood there cannot be a perception of a self as only a man or woman, for a purely masculine or feminine mind cannot create. Each side exercises power, and the capacity to hurt in love is astonishing. The novel asks for truth about our most confusing human mystery: how a man and woman tan be together and forego the power struggle? One is closer tc truth

343 when both sides of human nature are integrated. Offred insists on believing that individuals are significant. Of the men in her life, she says:

Each one remains unique. There is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. (p. 248)

She reflects about the Commander, "He was not a monster, she said. People say he wa? a monster, but he was not one" (p. 188). Atwood'^ own percept'on. of the man- woman relationship and the power balance in this relationship is very beautifully pictured in'the image of the puzzle in which love replaces power and selfishness:

Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off a trajectory of his own...(p. 293).

The reader never knows and will never know what happened to Offred after she got into the van, or if she escaped into Canada or England. As part of history, she is elusive; "She slips from our grasp and flees" (p. 393). What we have left is her story as witness and exposure of limits of Gilead's patriarchal system. By focusing on the powerful human needs which Gilead neglects, Offred's narrative demonstrates that 'the human heart remains a factor' (p. 394). She has created a space for herself by narrating her story; she states her belief that systems can be evaded and that there is still a world outside Gilead:

1 keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping, mutilated story, because after all 1 want you to hear it...By telling you something at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore, vou are (p 280).

344 Finally she is able to call herself "1". At the end of the search, she has understood what the commonplace "I" given to her by pre-existing language might actually mean. This

"I" is, however, entirely modified, open to everything that it is not. Offred's discovery enables her to leave behind the pre-existing cultural forms that labelled her, thoughtlessly, a "woman": she used to be a woman looking for a function and a form.

And now, it was the freedom of having no function or forms. Language, encrusted in decaying identities, forms and functions of meaning, have been stripped bare in .Offred's experiment in search of a new, perhaps impossible, freedom.

On the personal level, Offred achieves identity through consciousness and experience.

She has to suffer domination in order to change. She has to hurt—be offended, somehow, to feel almost morally strangled. Only then she will know what to do with her life, how to fight for her own interest and direction. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is about faith in one's self, even if death, destruction, fragmentation, and madness are its obvious themes. This is symbolised in the image of darkness. Darkness is seen as an archetypal image of evil and danger. It is part of the realism of the novel that the narrator implicitly acknowledges the inevitability of adverse experiences. What the author claims is freedom from fear, not freedom from evil. The protagonist never tires in her violent exploration of the world and of the self, and is determined to find means to survive as she utters: "...I intend to last," and she means not just physical, but mental, spiritual and psychic survival too. And therefore she asks questions without expecting answers. It is a novel in which reason gives way to hallucination and paradox like the darkness and light—evocative images of possibilities, of fulfilment through venturing into the unknown which show her the way to salvation—survival.

345 Images analysed in this ciiapter as noticed are both rhetorical and psychological in nature.

The psychological ones being: mirrors, curtains, circles, landscape, and the maze. The novelist has created elaborate analogies which prove a synthetic interpretative framework for bringing out her concerns in the novel.

346 NOTES

' http://\vww.esu.edu:8000/~brains/science_fictionyhandiTiaid.html.

' Lee Briscoe Thomason, "Scarlet Letters: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale," Canadian Fiction Studies (Toronto: ECW Press, 1997)30. ^ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York: Fawcett Books, 1986). All further references to this edition of the novel will appear in the text in parentheses. ^ Jonathan Bignell,_ "Boundaries, Territories, Identities," Margaret Atwood the Shape Shifter, ed. Coomi S Veviana (New Delhi; Creative Books): 14. ^ The Holy Bible (King JamesVerson). ^ Chinmoy Bannerjee, "Alice in Disneyland: Criticism as Commodity in The Handmaid's Tale," Essays on Canadian Writing 41 (Summer 1990):80. ^ Nita-P Ramaiya, Images of Self in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood (Mumbai: Anil Ahuja, 1997)4, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex trans and. ed. M H Parshley(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974). ^ Coomi S Veyaina, Re/Membering SeWes: Alienation and Survival in the Novels of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1996) 76. '" Susan Jacob, "Woman, Ideology, Resistance: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Third World Criticism," Margaret Atwood: The Shape-Shifter ed. Coomi S Vevaina (New Delhi: Creative Books, I998):37. Margaret Atwood Victor-Levy Beaulieu-Two Solitudes, trans. Phyllis Arnoff and Howard Scott, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1996) 76. '^ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP., 1957) 315-16. '^Bignell 18 Banerjee 77. '"'' Jessie Givner, "Names, Faces, and Signatures in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale," Studies in Canadian Literature 14 (1989): 46. "' Catherine Simpson, "Atwood Woman," Nation, 24 (22 March 1986):76. I 7 Carol Ann Howells, Private and Fictional Worlds: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970's (London: Methuen, 1987) 63. '** Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1928). '^ Nelida Pinion, interview with Catherine Tinker 13"^ Moon (1982) 73. ^" Margaret Atwood, "The Circle Game," Selected Poems (Toronto: OUP. , 1974) 14.

347