The Handmaid's Tale Discussion Guide: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Information about the author and her work is available at http://www.notablebiographies.com/An-Ba/Atwood-Margaret.html
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Did you know Margaret Atwood tweets? Follow her here Atwood is one of the inventors of the Long Pen, which allows her to meet and sign books for her fans all over the world from her own home. Margaret Atwood's life partner is another writer, Graeme Gibson.
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The Handmaid's Tale has been adapted into a film (1990), an opera (2000) and a TV series (2017). The book was #37 on the top 100 most frequently banned books between 1990 - 2000. The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.
Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins with three epigraphs. What are their functions?
2. In Gilead, women are categorized as wives, handmaids, Marthas, or Aunts, but Moira refuses to fit into a niche. Offred says she was like an elevator with open sides who made them dizzy; she was their fantasy. Trace Moira's role throughout the tale to determine what she symbolizes.
3. Aunt Lydia, Janine, and Offred's mother also represent more than themselves. What do each of their characters connote? What do the style and color of their clothes symbolize?
4. At one level, The Handmaid's Tale is about the writing process. Atwood cleverly weaves this sub-plot into a major focus with remarks by Offred such as "Context is all, " and "I've filled it out for her," "I made that up," and "I wish this story were different." Does Offred's habit of talking about the process of storytelling make it easier or more difficult for you to suspend disbelief?
5. A palimpsest is a medieval parchment that scribes attempted to scrape clean and use again, though they were unable to obliterate all traces of the original. How does the new republic of Gilead's social order often resemble a palimpsest?
6. The Commander in the novel says you can't cheat nature. How do characters find ways to follow their natural instincts?
7. Why is the Bible under lock and key in Gilead?
8. Babies are referred to as "a keeper, "unbabies, " "shredders." What other real or fictional worlds do these terms suggest?
9. Atwood's title brings to mind titles from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Why might Atwood have wanted you to make that connection?
10. What do you feel the "Historical Notes" at the book's end add to the reading of this novel? What does the book's last line mean to you?
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The Handmaid's Tale by ISBN: 9780385490818Publication Date: 1998-03-16Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....
Read A-Likes
Nineteen Eighty-Four by ISBN: 9780679417392Publication Date: 1992-11-03Winston Smith, a member of the outer Party, spends his days rewriting history to fit the narrative that his government wants citizens to believe. But as the gap between the propaganda he writes and the reality he lives proves too much for Winston to swallow, he begins to seek some form of escape.
Fahrenheit 451 by ISBN: 9780671870362Publication Date: 1993-09-09Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a short novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch."
Daughters of the North by ISBN: 9780061430367Publication Date: 2008-04-01England is in a state of environmental crisis and economic collapse. There has been a census, and all citizens have been herded into urban centers. Reproduction has become a lottery, with contraceptive coils fitted to every female of childbearing age. A girl who will become known only as "Sister" escapes the confines of her repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living as "un-officials" in Carhullan, a remote northern farm, where she must find out whether she has it in herself to become a rebel fighter.
