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The Handmaid’s TaleChapter 1Offred remarks that in the silent gymnasium “the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound” and the image of the “palimpsest” (something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form) is a powerful one, suggesting the erasing and rewriting of names, experiences and histories. Chapter 2-3Offred builds up her account through short scenes and fragments of memory. Image of the eye that “has been taken out”, suggesting blankness, blindness and torture.References to possible self-harm and suicide.Offred’s actions follow a prescribed pattern, with time “measured by bells, as once in nunneries”. Uniform – select group. The word “Martha”, meaning a female domestic servant in Gilead, comes from the biblical story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42). In this society, it will be noted that almost all the characters are desginated by their menting on Gilead’s dress codes, Priscilla Ollier-Morin notes the biblical prescription in Corinthians 11:6: “But if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered”, and compares it with Aunt Lydia’s rule for the Handmaids: “Hair must be long but covered…Saint Paul said, it’s either that or a close shave.”Chapters 4-6Powerful build of sinister, repressive atmosphere. Handmaids’ bizarre walk to the shops presents the odd mixture of familiar and unfamiliar which characterises Gileadean society, where ordinary domesticity and military regimentation exist side by side, just as the biblical car brand names combine religious fundamentalism with late twentieth-century technology.Double image of Christianity and institutionalised oppression – churchyard and the Wall. 1984 – abuse of language to hide the truth as a feature of totalitarianism.Religious references give biblical authority in Gilead: “Whirlwind” comes from Jeremiah 23:19; “Behemoth” from Job 40:15; “Eye” from Proverbs 15:3; “Blessed be the fruit” from Luke 1:42. Chapter 5“Doubled, I walk the street” – outwardly the Handmaids appear to be the embodiment of feminine submissiveness and companionship. This is in appearance only, the Handmaids are a parody of femininity, acting out a masquerade with hides Gilead’s oppression of women. “Sacred Vessels” and sisters “dipped in blood”, representing Gilead’s fascination with and vilification of female sexuality. Hypocrisy of state-sponsored exploitation of women’s sexuality is explored at Jezebel’s: they subvert “yet here they are”. Motif of doubles – Ofglen and previous Offred. Commander’s Wife and herself (blue coat going to Jezebel’s) – they both share Commander.Janine – dark double, representing what Offred might become if she allowed herself to be brainwashed. Contrast to doubles – Determined to maintaining distinction e.g. significance of colour red when it is blood and when it is the colour of flowers. Clarity of perspective and her continuing belief in the importance of individuals are courageous efforts to avoid confusion and are typical of her subversive attitude throughout the novel. Her awareness of incongruities Is also a way of entertaining herself – quips. Parody of family life is on display in Gilead’s public spaces – centre of Gilead is the illusion of peace: “From a distance it looks like peace”. Appearance is only achieved as a result of suspicion, fear and brutality. This is epitomised by the way language is officially used in Gilead, its platitudinous greetings and euphemisms such as “Ceremony” and “Salvaging” masking darker and more sinister truths.Offred exposes false image of domestic security as nothing but dead space “where nothing moves”. The limits of Gilead’s power are ill-defines, just as the edges of the embattled state are continually shifting: propaganda encourages Gilead to be not just a territorial state but a state of mind. Lydia: “Gilead is within you” – ultimate goal of totalitarianism, doctrines of state internalised.Blasphemous appropriation of biblical promise: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”As she walks with Ofglen, she is isolated, coping by reliving the old world. Offred’s memories of this street are superimposed over Gilead’s charade of normality. Her silent discourse is her resistance to Gilead. Her private narrative reassured the reader she is preserving her humanity, secret identity, her “shining name” underneath the imprisonment of her uniform. Chapter 7Relives 3 most influential figures: Mother, Moira, Daughter. Storytelling to survive. The ‘Night’ sections provide an imaginative outlet from the rigid behavioural controls. There are seven ‘Night’ sections in total, always indicating. A ‘time out’ where she is not under public scrutiny and she can escape into private world of memory and desire. She mentions this is an oral narrative – ‘Tell rather than write’, given that she has ‘nothing to write with’ this may be questioned. She desires for communication and companionship: ‘You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.’Self-conscious narrator, drawing attention to her storytelling and reasons she needs it. “If it’s a story I’m telling then I have control over the ending” suggesting she sees her testimony as a construct and believes there can be different interpretations of an event – the ‘doubling’ motif recurs here as she paradoxically states “If it isn’t a story I’m telling’; followed by “It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head as I go along”. Absence of a certain ending is an example of postmodern fiction.Chapters 8-10Minor deviations from conformity are gripping – weather, ‘may day’. Commander’s forbidden glance, she tries to work out what these unusual events mean. Her constant attention to minor details show her incapacity to handle ‘normality’. Offred sings snatches of hymns like ‘Amazing Grace’ written by John Newton (1728-1807), and old pop songs like Elvix Presley’s 1956 hit ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to alleviate her boredom.‘FAITH’ is one of the three primary Christian graces; see 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ Chapters 11-12Doctor a sexual exploiter – coercing into a relationship of victim and collaborator.Preparing for Ceremony, overwhelmed by strangeness of her own body, and her tattoo: “a passport in reverse…supposed to guarantee that I will never be able to fade, finally, into another landscape.”What she considered and isolated incident of her daughters’ attempted kidnapping were symptomatic of the worrying changes in society that were unfolding as a consequence of the steep decline in the country’s birth rate.‘Give me children, or else I die’ is an echo of Rachel’s plea in the Bible, Genesis 30:1, but it also underlines the threat to the Handmaid’s life. Chapters 13Complex construction characterised by temporal shifts between present/past, waking/dreaming. Her imprisonment provides a lot of free time, and in this waiting she escapes by remembering.“Two-legged womb” – resistance in refusing to define her body by Gilead’s terms.Offred insists on chronicling her life from within her own skin, offering a persona history of physical sensations. She transforms her body into a fantasy landscape. She imagines it first as an unknown continent she is trying to map, and later as a cosmic wilderness. “Only I know the footing”. To describe the rhythms of her menstrual cycle she uses the image of the night sky studded with stars and traversed by the moon waxing and waning. Analogy and transforming metaphor: the dark womb space expands until it assumes cosmic proportions. Images of immense bodily territories and later volcanic upheaval of her silent laughter in the cupboard (common with the écriture feminine of French feminist Hélène Cixous). Pregnancy: “these are signs, these are things I need to know about”. Much later, with Nick “I put his hand on my belly. It’s happened, I say. I fell it has. A couple of weeks and I’ll be certain.” In the analogy in this chapter, when the moon disappears, Offred, not having conceived, is left empty and drained of hope. Offred not only charts her bodily awareness but her changing sense of self in Gilead. She no longer thinks of her body as a ‘solid’ object but as a ‘cloud’ of flesh surrounding her womb, her defining feature. Her language is freeing in its re-appropriation of reality. Offred’s character is of compromised resistance. She is affected by her material circumstances as she resents Gilead’s control over her, and yet she regrets not becoming pregnant as is required. “I wish I had a pig ball” – challenging her own captivity and inhuman treatment.Chapter 14Household assembles for family prayers – presided over Wife in traditional space, but Offred’s response to this charade of old-fashioned Puritan values is to see not a ‘parlour’ but a trap like a spider’s web. Commander’s house appears as the embodiment of traditional family values, but beneath this fa?ade lie sexual coercion, enslavement and political expediency. “Household” – house and its male head. “The house is what he holds” but also ironic reference to “hold” of a ship (perhaps a slave ship). Chapters 15-17Offred builds emotional tension: “Serena has begun to cry” which she compares to “a fart in church”. Offred refuses to pray and instead she silently repeats the secret message written in her closet, linking her unknown predecessor to Moira as a talisman of female resistance to Gilead’s sexual tyranny. The Ceremony is described with deliberate detachment, using third person. In Chapter 17, Offred transgresses against the arbitrarily imposed rules of the household by stealing something – a withered daffodil – intending to press it and leave it as part of a chain of Handmaids’ secret messages.Offred’s satirical description of the situation of ‘something hilarious’ despite the apparent legalisation of rape. The Ceremony is a parodic version of Genesis 30:1-3. Rachel and Leah were sisters who became wives of Jacob. Both gave their Handmaids to him, so that he had children by all of these women. See the Bible, Genesis 29:16 and 30:13-, 9-12.All the following are biblical references: “Be fruitful and multiply” from Genesis 1:28; “Give me children” to Genesis 30:1-3; “Beatitudes” to Matthew 5:3 and “For the eyes of the Lord” to Proverbs 15:3.Chapter 18-20Chapter 18 opens with Offred ‘still trembling’. The tension mounts, with the Offred describing that “This is what [she] feel[s] like: this sound of glass.” The riot of images combining fear and desire, life and death, indicated Offred’s tumultuous private emotional life behind her silent, submissive exterior.It could be noted that the tension culminates not at the ceremony itself, with external influences and the Commander’s intrusion, but in the aftermath, where Offred has to contend with the detrimental affects to her mind.In Chapter 20, Offred describes a ‘Birthing Stool, with its double seat, the back one raised like a throne behind the other’. Just as at conception, birth will symbolically involve both Wife and Handmaid.Gilead dictates that all births should take place at home by national methods, in the presence of women only. As Offred notes with some scepticism, Gilead’s emphasis on natural childbirth embraces also the idea that the pains of childbirth are women’s punishment for Eve’s Original Sin. Offred’s account of Ofwarren’s baby is a grotesquely comic mixture of birthday party celebration and a description of natural childbirth. However, the celebrations are undremined by female rivalries; the system generates envy and hostility between women – just as Offred witnessed envy of Ofwarren in Chapter 5. Gilead’s women are divided and therefore powerless. Chapter 21-23Moira’s escape: “out there somewhere”, “had power now” she was “a loose woman”, “like an elevator with open sides”, “our fantasy”.Offred has her first secret meeting with the Commander on the evening of Birth Day, representing a radical departure. She pities the Commander.Chapter 23: “It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was”. Offred makes distinction between kinds of power: “Never tell me it amounts to the same thing”. Tyranny and control vs. Power of love and forgiveness. Determination to remain sane, same as in Chapter 6 with bodies on the wall – refocusing reality in order to stay sane, a significant strength. Chapter 24Commander and Offred’s relationship represent a breaking of taboos and a transgression of Gilead’s prescribed m x f relationship. She says she would once have taken women’s magazines “lightly” and she says she finds the Commander’s needs “obscure…ridiculous, laughable”, “banal”.They establish something of close to an intimate relationship along very familiar lines, part of the triangle of husband, wife and mistress. When the Commander watches her putting on the hand lotion he has obtained for her, it is all with the hungry pleasure of a voyeur. As the relationship with the Commander develops, Offred realises that the freedoms it brings are small. Despite her pleasure in the word games, she does not forget the unequal power relationship. Flower imagery: high summer, Offred is dazzled by its beauty and giddy with desire. Imagery of flowers and gardens (synthetic and real) recur throughout the novel: tulips of chapter 3, the lily of the valley scent of Serena Joy’s perfume in Chapter 14 and the limp daffodils in Chapter 17. Chapter 46 “dusty-rose carpeting of the stairs”. Chapter 25Despite grim circumstances, she still believes in love, desire, delights of the flesh: “I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance.” However, one could argue that this romantic view of the world undermines true events, for she has disillusioned herself into believing that’s real/is trying to change reality through her story: “I can control how it ends”. Garden as an image of the natural world: celebrates beauty and fertility already lost in the public world of Gilead and reminds her of her own garden from before (Chapter 3). She uses “we” and “our” to signal her private sense of possessing its beauty. One spot in the household where she feels a strong sense of belonging.In this lyrical passage, Offred rhapsodies over the garden in full bloom, finding in it a moment of release when she transcends her physical constraints and enters the natural world – almost a ‘Romantic’ sentiment.Flower imagery with its sexual suggestiveness provides image of repressed desires and a space of romantic fantasy, ‘a Tennyson garden’, ‘the return of the word swoon’, where traditional images of femininity breathe through the prose as the garden itself ‘breathes’ in the light and heat of the summer. (“A sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light”)“The bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they’d not long since been rooted out” and their importance in reproduction: “the selling genitalia of the flowers? The fruiting body”. Dissenting quality: “a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light” and she considers their silence to be a sign of their strength and powers of endurance: “Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard”. This is why she refers to Serena Joy’s garden as “subversive”, uplifting effect.Garden unleashes Offred’s figurative language, just like her expansive vocabulary in the scrabble chapters. Sibilant words – ‘whispers’, ‘terraces’, ‘rustles’, classical ‘goddesses’. Place of colour, movement, delightful temptation. In this world of heightened physical sensation she becomes aware of her own body inside her dress, “the summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs” and feels the grass growing and hears the birds singing. This passage mirrors the creationist story of Eden, where, following Eve’s eating of the apple of eden, the humans become aware of themselves, self-conscious, under God’s eye, among the beauty of Eden. The story also mirrors Offred’s preoccupation with surveillance, as if she were an allegory of Eve herself. “Metamorphosis” – associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the early first-century Latin poem about supernatural transformations of human beings into trees or animals. The word ‘goddesses’ also has classical rather than Christian connotations and suggests images of myth and desire. The garden comes alive as Offred watches, but she is aware that her rhapsody is at least in part a sublimation of her own frustrated desires. (transferred epithet)Offred’s imagination is not attached to the Christian image of the enclosed paradise presided over by the Virgin Mary as the image of female virtue, even though Serena Joy, whose garden it is, wears a blue gardening dress, the Virgin’s colour. Instead, for Offred it is a pagan garden presided over by goddesses, and being in the garden evokes a heady combination of feelings filtered through a literary imagination that enacts its own magical transformations. It is a kind of nature mysticism where Offred herself undergoes a ‘metamorphosis’, changing from Handmaid to ripening fruit like a ‘melon on a stem’ attached to a natural life – giving source, as she becomes for a moment a part of this pulsating world filled with a yearning for love and the energy of desire. Shows Offred’s characteristic mixture of lyricism ad irony, for she knows that this erotic fantasising is an escape from her real circumstances, which are bleak and deathly as winter. However, the impressive energy defies Gilead’s master narrative of phallic power underpinned by the Bible. Chapter 26-27The next ceremony is complicated given Offred and Commander’s newfound relationship. Offred is aware that state control cannot function if people see each other as individuals.The chapter ends with a sharp reminder of the power of the regime as a man is brutally beaten up by the secret police in the street and nobody dares take notice. The limits of her courage are noted when she is glad she’s not the victim.Piety and Dissent: Chapter 27 – “Soul Scrolls” she redefines as “Holy Rollers”, subversive. Offred thinks “it was lingerie” before it was Soul Scrolls. She implies that the reasons people print prayers have more to do with the appearance of piety rather than an expression of actual faith: “so of course the Commanders’ Wives do it a lot. It helps their husbands’ careers”. It’s tragic that the Wives’ roles are diminished to false piety. The stores “Daily Bread”, “Loaves and Fishes” take their names from the Bible. “Daily Bread” features in the Lord’s Prayer while “loaves and Fishes” is a reference to Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes, see Mark 6:38-44. “Tibetan Prayer Wheels” are cylindrical boxes inscribed with prayers, revolving on a spindle, uses especially by Buddhists of Tibet.Chapters 28-29In Chapter 28 she recollects on the creation of Gilead. Atwood’s account of the mechanics for a fundamentalist takeover of society speculates on the links between religious fanaticism, militarism and computerised technology. Gilead’s social policies were specifically directed against women. Offred realises how all the feminist advances in the 1970s and 1980s her mother crusaded were swept away by simply changing computer databases. Offred’s flashback memories convey a sense of the growing threat of violence – from the menacing presence of uniformed men with machine guns in Offred’s workplace to the violent response to protest marches. As she holds the Commander’s pen and writes, Offred recalls that one of the Red Centre mottoes was ‘Pen Is Envy’, a corruption of Freudian psychoanalytic theory presenting ‘penis envy’ as a stage of female psychosexual development. Chapters 30-32Chapter 30 – at the end, Offred says the Lord’s prayer, or her own ironic version spoken in anguish, deliberately confusing the literal and symbolic meaning of the words. She tries to cling to key Christian concepts of forgiveness and hope but contemplates suicide. She craves communication, “I wish You’d answer. I feel so alone”.Outwardly life goes on as usual for Offred as she moves discreetly between her room and her shopping expeditions. But there are signs of resistance – Serena’s agreement and Mayday.“Context is all; or is it ripeness?” – Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 5: Scene 2: ‘Ripeness Is all’. The phrase ‘Context is all’ also features in Chapter 24.The phrase “I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar” underscores Offred’s life being regulated by her menstrual cycle – once though to be connected to the cycle of the moon.Chapters 33-34The Prayvaganza of Chapter 33 and 34 focuses on Gilead’s New Right ideology of traditional male domination over women, justified by God’s law. The arranged mass marriages between soldiers and daughters of Gileadean officials provide occasion for legalising woman’s subjection and silence, (Timothy 2:9-15).Throughout, Janine is presented as a casualty of the system. Offred thinks it’s typical of Janine “to decide the baby’s flaws were due to her alone”, adding that “people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use…No plot.” “Do you like butter?” Buttercups were held under the chin to see their yellow reflection. “Blow, and you tell the time”, dandelion trick. “Daisies for love” - he loves me, he loves me not. Offred remembers Moira’s comment: “There is a bomb in Gilead”, here irreverent pun on an American folk hymn, the opening words of which are: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole/There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” It is based on the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah’s question, “Is there no balm in gilead; is there no physician there?”. Offred delights in the exposure of Gilead’s fraudulent biblical rhetoric.Chapters 35-37Offred sees herself as Serena’s double, in her get up for Jezebel’s.Her wry self description makes it plain that her costume is a parody of feminine glamour.Jezebel’s is run by the state as a brothel. The women are in Jezebel’s because they refused to be Handmaids. They are not classed as ‘people’ – it appears the commander is giving her freedom but he’s taking her to the place women are most degraded and guilt-tripping her into having sex with him. Jezebel was a Phoenician princess and wife of King Ahab, king of northern Israel. Her story, in which she incites her husband to follow her gods rather than Yahweh, and is severely punished, is told in the Bible in Kings 1:16-21 and Kings 2:9. The word ‘Jezebel’ has come to be synonymous with an immoral and deceitful woman, and also has connotations of a woman who ostentatiously adorns herself with make-up, wigs and other finery. This name indicates a certain hypocrisy and sexism that characterises Gilead. Chapters 38-39Moira suggests the Commander brought Offred to Jezebel’s as part of a male power fantasyMoira has seen Offred’s mother in a film about the colonies. Offred, idealising her mother in the same way she idealises Moira, says she hopes her mother’s “cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this”, secretly fearing the worst.Offred embeds Moira’s story into her own narrative, partly to celebrate her heroism/try to keep alive her idol and partly as an elegy to Moira, whom she never saw again. “I’ve tried to make it sound as much like her as I can” – she wants so badly to make a heroic story of her, but she is limited by her own capability as well as Moira’s. She refuses to admit life is a lost cause, and assumes Moira’s persona in her recordings as an attempt to fill the void her own cowardice has made. The “Underground Femaleroad” Moira references is an allusion to the Underground Railroad, which was an escape route for runaway slaves from the United States to Canada between 1840 and 1860, prior to the abolition of slavery. It was an informal network of safe houses and supportive people. Around 30,000 slaves reached Canada this way. No private relationship is possible for the Commander and Offred because their relationship is inescapably political – Offred cannot forget that he represents the tyrannical power responsible for her losses nor the fact that she is his slave, emphasised by her self-admonishment at the end of Chapter 39: “Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly. It’s the least you can do”. She would prefer the grotesque arrangement with Serena Joy present. Chapter 40Offred’s first encounter with Nick is retold three times, but admits that none of them are true because no language can adequately describe falling in love. These multiple versions are a reminder of Offred’s self-consciousness.“Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless.”By locating Offred’s affair with Nick within ‘Salvaging’, she underlines the precariousness of their love. This juxtaposition could either highlight their bravery and insubordination in the face of the regime, or their blind stupidity. Their first encounter is actually to ensure Offred’s continued, but safe, repression by guaranteeing pregnancy.Ironically, at this stage, one could argue that Offred holds the most power within the household: her relationship with the Commander is unknown to Serena, her relationship with Serena is unknown to the Commander, her relationship with Nick beyond their first encounter is unknown to the Commander and Serena, placing her in the paradoxical situation of being both with power and without – with, given her power to subvert the regime despite living amongst its intricacies, and without, for many of her actions guarantee her subordination (i.e. pleasing the commander, agreeing to get pregnant with Serena’s permission). Chapter 41Offred makes note of her conscious attempts to distract herself from the harsh realities by focusing on the minutiae of life, either her juvenile re-depicting of the world or her intense focus on the natural surroundings. She likens the structure of her ‘fragmented’ story to a dismembered body, using personification to portray her story as ‘a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force’. Violent imagery and personification make parallels between her story and the victims of the salvaging, implying that her attempt to give a truthful account as possible is shaped by the harsh conditions imposed on communications under the Gilead regime.Coral Ann Howells: “Offred shared the postmodern narrator’s self-awareness of the dimensions of fabrication in her memoir.”Margaret Atwood in 1980: “Writing…is an act of faith; I believe it’s also an act of hope, the hope that things an be better than they are.”As a self-conscious narrator, Offred is aware of her ‘limping and mutilated’ narrative with its fragmented structure, its isolated scenic units, its gaps and blanks, its dislocated time sequence, and her own hesitations and doubts. Her story is an eyewitness account of disaster, but it is also, as she recognises, a substitute for dialogue and an escape fantasy. One could even say that her tale is an act of catharsis.Offred’s awareness of her strategy is plain in her deliberate address to readers as ‘you’ – outside the text and outside Gilead.She puns Descartes’ famous sentence “I think, therefore I am” into “I tell, therefore you are”.Offred shifts the emphasis from an examination of the enclosed self to speaking about language and communication between human beings. Her prison narrative is presented as the only way of bridging the gap between an isolated self and the world outside. In a way, her own narrative mirrors the poor Handmaids in Chapter One: “If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged…” She has exchanged her story for her identity, some acknowledgement that she exists – she achieves this in Piexoto’s somewhat misguided analysis of her life. Once again, Atwood is demonstrating the disappointing truth to humanity and their lack of heroes. Offred’s identity, misconstrued by the Historical notes, echoes Moira’s disappointing narrative about her escape. Offred’s idol was ruined, watered down, just like her own tale. Offred’s narrative is resistance – it challenges not only Gilead’s perspective but also the misrepresentations of her experience in the future, for it illustrates the difference between a woman’s private narrative of memory and the grand impersonal narrative of history. She admits to flaws in herself and her story, since the two are inseparable, wishing herself “more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia.” Thus, we are unlikely to accept Pieixoto’s scholarly gloss in the Historical Notes, which consigns her, like Eurydice, to the world fo the dead – or at best to the world of romantic myth. At one point, even, he pompously refers to her narrative as “This item – I hesitate to use the word document”, a description of her testimony that is reductive and silencing. Perhaps the pinnacle of her resistance is that despite her own misgivings, hesitations, the extreme repression she experiences from Gilead, she tells her story, “So I will myself to go on”. She tells her story in secret and ultimately it survives far longer and exceeds the limits of Gilead. Chapters 42-44Salvaging is a frightened game display of fantasy sim, presided over by Aunt Lydia. The Handmaids are forced to be collaborators. The name ‘Salvaging’ has associations with ‘salvage’, ‘salvation’ and ‘savage’. However a startling example of the abuse of language the world ‘salvaging’ came to mean an extra-judicial execution in the Philippines. The truth Ofglen reveals about the alleged rapist actually being a political activist demonstrates the power of a mob and the Handmaid’s unrealised potential for rebellion and the regime’s power to fabricate in order to mobilise the masses.Chapters 45-46The final chapters in Offred’s narrative are full of unexpected plot twists. She decides to stop fighting the regime, feeling relieved, only for this to be ruined by Serena’s revelation. It seems to be heading towards a denouement. Offred sits in her room and idly fantasises of her possible escapes but does nothing. For a moment, she feels as trapped as her predecessor “my ancestress, my double”, but perhaps this is na?ve as, like her ‘ancestress’, and her double, Ofglen, she still has suicide as an escape. Her final narrations seem to be aimless bravado.Given that it would have been impossible either to anticipate the events of her being taken away, or record her narrative whilst events occurred, one could speculate that she must have survived in order to be able to prescribe her narrative. The coming of the van echo real-life totalitarian regimes from Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany to apartheid in South Africa; even the ‘disappearances’ under the military juntas of Chile and Argentina. ................
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