Offred

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Summary

  • Main protagonist and narrator
  • Trapped in Gilead as a Handmaid
  • Once married to Luke, has a daughter
  • Patryonymic name - derived from the name of her current Commander - she doesn't reveal her real name
  • Survivor from the past - uses memories of her husband and child to help her carry on in the present

Handmaids

  • Generic women for breeding - 'two-legged wombs'.
  • Denied all individual rights - imprisoned in the domestic setting of the home, only allowed out with a shopping partner and for official excursions.
  • Victims of Gileadean sexist ideology which equates men with power and sexual potency, and women with submission and reproduction.
    • Offred resists being reduced in this way: she refuses to forget her past or her name when she was a daughter, lover, wife, working mother and friend. She refuses to give up hope and believes that she will either be able to escape or will outlive the regime.

Significance of her name

  • Her identity has been erased and she's forbidden to use her own name. Despite this, she keeps it buried like a treasure, as a guarantee of her other identity: 'I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day'.
  • She gives her name to Nick, like a token of her love and he uses it as an exchange of trust when the black van arrives, 'He calls me by my real name. Why should this mean anything?'.

Psychological freedom 

  • Survivor from the past.
  • Her ability to remember helps her cope in the present.
  • Reconstructs the past through flashbacks in order to escape from isolation, loneliness and boredom.
  • Layered image of past and present is like a palimpsest (a document where later writing has been superimposed on earlier, erased words).
  • Offred inhabits two spaces: her Handmaid's space and the happier spaces of memory.

Her curiosity 

  • She's sharply observant of physical details in her surroundings.
  • She's curious and likes to explore.
  • Her response to the Commander Wife's garden is emotional, arguably poetic.
  • She notes all seasonal changes in detail - representative of the healthy growth and fertility of the natural world.
    • She's denied this by the regime but is able to observe this through the beauty of the garden.
    • Observations of the garden demonstrate her resistance to the

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