Key themes
- Patriarchal power and its institutions
- Resistance, complicity and survival
- Language and the power to name
About this book
Women reduced to their fertility in a theocratic America; chillingly plausible and fiercely written.
Published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale is set in a near-future theocracy that occupies what was New England. Atwood has insisted every element is drawn from documented historical practice.
Discussion questions
- Offred is a narrator who survives by compromising. How do you read her compromises — as necessary, as complicity, or as a form of resistance in themselves?
- The Aunts are women who enforce the system of women's oppression. What is Atwood saying about complicity — and about the conditions under which people enforce their own subjugation?
- The novel includes an academic epilogue set centuries later, treating Gilead as a historical object of study. What does this frame do — does it offer hope, or undercut the horror?
- Atwood insists that everything in the novel has a historical precedent. How does knowing this affect your reading — as political document as well as fiction?
- The novel has gained new readers at moments of political change. What do you think it captures about how quickly and gradually social change can be imposed?
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