Chapter 21
What do we learn in this chapter about how an “Unwoman” is defined? The reference to a “women’s culture” at the end of the chapter refers to certain kinds of feminists who have argued that women possess superior values and could build a superior society. What is Offred’s attitude toward this idea?
Chapter 22
In what way is Moira a “loose woman”?
Chapter 23
How does Offr ed try to defend herself against her terror when she first enters the study? Playing scrabble seems like an absurdly trivial form of transgression; why is it significant in this setting? Why does she lie about her reaction when the Commander asks her to ki ss him?
Section IX
Chapter 24
How does Offred interpret Aunt Lydia’s teachings about men? What do you think of this idea? What does the story about the death camp commander’s mistress convey? In ancient medicine, hysteria was a disease of women, caused by unnatural movements of the womb. How does Offred describe the sound of her beating heart?
Section X: Soul Scrolls
Chapter 25
Why does Offred covet Serena Joy’s shears? What do these occasional dark comments tell us about the state of her mind underneath her usual bitterly sarcastic narrative? Women’s fashion magazines such as the Commander shows Offred were once the target of fierce criticism from feminists. What does she say these magazines offered? How do the pictures of the women impress her? “My wife doesn’t understand me” is such an old clich as uttered by men trying to start an affair that it has become a joke.
Chapter 26
A British expression says that a pregnant woman has a “bun in the oven.” How have her feelings changed toward the Commander? How have his feelings changed toward her?
Chapter 27
Loaves and Fishes refers to a miracle story told in the Gospels (see the accountin Mark 6:34-44). Note how the memory of the ice cream store leads Offred tothoughts of her daughter. The Soul Scroll machines are most obviously likeTibetan prayer wheels, which are turned to activate the prayers inside them; butthey are also reminiscent to the old Catholic practice of paying priests to sayprayers for the repose of the dead. What do Ofglen and Offred see immediatelyafter they have revealed their true views to each other?
Chapter 28
Why did Moira criticize Offred for “stealing” Luke and how did Offreddefend herself? “Discoth ques” nightclubs with recorded ratherthan live music originated in France. The name was soon abbreviated to”disco.” The main feature of the book of Job is intense suffering. Whywould a totalitarian dictatorship prefer computer banking to paper money? Notethe statement by the newsstand clerk that sex-oriented enterprises can never begotten rid of entirely. She turns out to be right later. The law prohibiting theownership of property by women reinstates the law as it stood in the 19thcentury and earlier. Many of the extreme aspects of Giladean culture haveactually existed in the past. In the passage which begins “Rememberingthis, I remember also my mother,” note how anti-porn and abortion riots areblended together, though her mother must have been against porn and forabortion. Her opponents in the abortion demonstrations must have been herallies in the anti-porn demonstrations. Why did Offred find her motherembarrassing when she was an adolescent? How has her attitude changed now? Whywas Offred afraid to ask Luke how he really felt about her losing her job?
Chapter 29
“Pen Is Envy” is of course a pun on Freud’s “penis envy,” the notion that women who want to be like men are neurotic. When the Commander says of the previous Handmaid who killed herself “Serena found out,” what does this mean, and what is Offred’s reaction?
Section XI: Night
Chapter 30
There is a traditional Jewish prayer for men which thanks God for not having made them women. This prayer is satirized and parodied in this chapter.
Section XII: Jezebel’s
Chapter 31
What has changed about the holidays the Fourth of July and Labor Day? Why would Offred like to be able to have a fight with Luke? Taliths are the prayer shawls worn by Jews. “Magen Davids” are Stars of David, symbols of Judaism. How do you imagine Serena Joy’s offer of the picture affects Offred? Explain.
Chapter 32
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” is a paraphrase of Napoleon justifying the carnage he caused in attempting to build his empire. When a character in fiction uses it, it almost always indicates the speaker’s ruthlessness.
Chapter 34
Arranged marriages seem hopelessly exotic to many Americans, but in Western civilization they were the rule rather than the exception until a couple of centuries ago. Evaluate and respond to the arguments that the Commander at the Prayvaganza makes against the old dating and marriage system. The “quoted” passages which begin “I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel” are from 1 Timothy 2:9-15.
Chapter 35
React to Offred’s comments on love. In the next to the last paragraph, what does Offred mean when she says she has been “erased”?
Chapter 37
What is the Commander’s rationale for the existence of places like Jezebel’s? How does he misunderstand when Offred asks him “Who are these people?”
Chapter 38
“The Underground Femaleroad” is of course a pun on the old”underground railroad” along which escaped slaves were smuggled tofreedom. What kind of work do the women in the Colonies do? What does Moira saythe advantages are in working at Jezebel’s over being a Handmaid?
Section XIII: Night
Chapter 40
Why does Offred feel she has to make up stories about what happened between herself and Nick?
Section XIV: Salvaging
Chapter 41
Why does she say on the bottom of page. 268 “I told you it was bad”?
Chapter 42
Why are the crimes not described at “Salvagings”?
Chapter 43
Why does Ofglen attack the “rapist” so fiercely?
Chapter 44
Why does Offred tell her new companion that she met the former Ofglen in May?
Chapter 45
“She has died that I may live” is of course a parody of “He died that we may live,” a central Christian doctrine referring to Christ’s crucifixion as a source of salvation for believers.
Section XV: Night
Chapter 46
How does Nick reassure Offred when the black van comes? Note the offhanded, ambiguous, but emotionally loaded nature of the last line of Offred’s narrative, typical of her.
Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale
This is the real end of the story, of course, told as a parody of a scholarlysymposium. Note the date, two centuries from now. The title which Offred’snarrative has been given resembles those of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” MostSF dystopias end with a heroic conspiracy or uprising leading to the destructionof the evil government which has oppressed everyone. The jarring shift topretentious scholarly jargon, while amusing to scholars, may be off-putting formost readers; but Atwood is trying to avoid fatalism and sensationalism at thesame time. She is also parodying the ponderous, self-conscious attempts of scholars to be humorous. There is a long tradition of “nowhere” namesin utopian fiction. “Utopia” means “nowhere” and SamuelButler called his utopia “Erewhon.” The Chair comes from theUniversity of “deny” which is in the country of “none ofit.” But gturner@Selkirk.bc.ca of Selkirk College comments further on these place names:
The Northwest Territories in Canada as an area has been associatedwith two large native groups–the Dene (read “Denay”) in the Western Arctic andthe Inuit in the Eastern Arctic. In fact, the Northwest Territories throughreferendum (already held) will be divided into two massive land areas known asDenendeh and Nunavut. “Nunavut” means “Our Land” to the Inuit.
So it’s quite likely that Atwood meant the University of Denay to becoloured by the Dene and its massive land claims in the 1980s and the huge areato the East of the Mackenzie River Valley known as “Nunavut.” That she changedthe spelling of “Nunavut” to “Nunavit” is also interesting as “Nuna” stillmeans “land” and “vit” may mean “to live.”
Anthropology has traditionally been carried out by whites onminorities. Here an evidently Native American scholar has as her specialtystudying whites, a deliberately ironic twist. Other names suggest that thisconference is in fact dominated by Native Americans. It is difficult to see howKrishna (the erotic lover in Hindu mythology) and Kali (the also erotic avengingdemon slaying goddess) have to do with Gileadean religion, though that may beAtwood’s point. Scholars tend to read what they already know into w hat they areless familiar with. Certainly plenty of scholars have analyzed Krishna as aChrist figure. The reference to the “Warsaw Tactic” is more grim: theNazis walled up the Warsaw Jews in the ghetto and proceeded to starve most ofthem to death. The reference to Iran is of course the most pointed, because ofthat nation’s conservative Islamic revolution which involved strenuousdemodernizing and drastic restrictions on the freedom of women. The Iranianexample is one of the main inspirations of this novel. Given what ProfessorPieixoto has to say about the discovery of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” howdrastically would America seem to have changed between the end of the lastchapter and now? Anthropologists are famous for their refusal to judge thesocieties they study. What do you think is Atwood’s reaction to this strivingfor objectivity in the case of Gilead? How do you feel about it? WilliamWordsworth famously defined poetry as “emotion recollected intranquillity.” Note the allusion. Many details about the Gilead society’spolicies are revealed here. Atwood takes the opportunity to point to currenttendencies which could lead in the direction depicted in the novel. Thespeaker’s jibe at Offred’s education is not a comment on women, but the smuglysuperior observation of a South American mocking the inadequacies of NorthAmerica, clearly much fallen from its previous dominance. Note the Canadianreferences in this section. “Particicution” would seem to be ascholarly term formed out of “participant execution” to label whatGilead called “salvaging.”For the scapegoat, see Leviticus 16:10.Prof. Pieixoto’s talk is of a type familiar to literary historians: the attemptto connect a the author of a text with some historical person known from otherrecords, particularly in Medieval studies. But for us, the identification isirrelevant, it is the knowledge that Offred survived and the rebellionoriginally triumphed that matters. The final call for questions is traditional,of course, but also serves here as an invitation to further discussion of theissues Atwood has raised.