Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale: The Paris Review Perspective

by Jascha Hoffman

We can’t live without a mother to deliver us. So perhaps it is natural that writers of speculative fiction have long been preoccupied with man’s efforts to control the way we are born. By taking on the subject of infertility, Margaret Atwood’s harrowing novel The Handmaid’s Tale has a prominent role in this tradition. What is different about Atwood’s work is that it manages all the satire of science fiction without resorting to any high-tech menaces. Her cautionary tale may as well be set in the Dark Ages.

Writers looking to the future have tended to pin their fears and hopes on scientific breakthroughs. In Brave New World, published nearly half a century before the first successful in-vitro fertilization, Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which children bred in test tubes were taught to enjoy sterile sex. Sarah Hall’s recent Daughters of the North raised the prospect of universal chastity belts that can be disabled only by the government. Films like Gattaca and Code 46 presented scenarios in which the genetic screening of babies leads to a society stratified by a new sort of eugenics. And science is catching up to science fiction. Artificial wombs, featured in such outlandish distractions as Star Wars and The Matrix, are now under development at Cornell.

The Handmaid’s Tale, however, builds its dystopia on nothing more sophisticated than the missionary position—coupled with the threat of force. The novel is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late twentieth century, after the far-right Protestant theocracy of Gilead has taken over New England and enslaved women as servants and surrogate mothers in apparent response to an epidemic of infertility. We observe this monstrous society through the eyes of Offred, one of the few women left who might still be fertile. She has been forced into the role of a surrogate mother, or handmaid. Each month she must rest her head on the belly of her master’s sterile wife to be used as little more than a womb with legs.

In many ways The Handmaid’s Tale resembles historical fiction more than it does science fiction. The men who founded the repressive state of Gilead are modeled less on contemporary Christian conservatives than on Atwood’s own Puritan ancestors, she has commented, and the novel can therefore be read as a potent distillation of some old-fashioned prejudices against women. The sense of looking back into a dark time is confirmed in the epilogue, which reveals that the whole story has been reconstructed from a lost audio diary by male historians in 2195.

Atwood returned to a similar mode of cautionary satire in her novel Oryx and Crake, set in a near-future filled with genetically engineered hybrid animals, blood sport posing as entertainment, and rampant child pornography. Like that book, The Handmaid’s Tale is undeniably meant as social commentary. But to read it mainly as a warning against patriarchal repression would be to miss the moral ambiguity that lies at its heart.

Even as she earns a bit of leverage with her master, Offred does not grow into the role of a heroine. Rather, she adapts to the daily humiliations, learns to protect herself by betraying others, and seldom hesitates to sacrifice her dignity for fleeting comfort. Over time it becomes harder to see Offred as a victim. Her memories of life as a free woman only highlight how complicit she has become in her own imprisonment. In the end, Atwood gives us neither the satisfaction of a daring escape nor the pathos of a tragic death at the hands of the regime. Instead, the handmaid does what she’s always done. She gropes for a path that will allow her to survive.

At one point Offred recalls that her mother, a radical feminist who was presumably assassinated by the government, tried to pass on a small piece of wisdom from an earlier era: “Truly amazing what people can get used to,” she said, “as long as there are a few compensations.” It is Offred’s fate—and mankind’s shame—that the daughter proves the mother right.

Source

Copyright © 2008 by Jascha Hoffman.

Bibliography

1 

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor, 1986.

2 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Guides: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” New York: Chelsea House, 2004.

3 

____________, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” New York: Chelsea House, 2001.

4 

Hall, Sarah. Daughters of the North. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008.

5 

Howells, Coral Ann, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

6 

____________. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Hoffman, Jascha. "The Handmaid’s Tale: The Paris Review Perspective." Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CIW_Handmaids_1003.
APA 7th
Hoffman, J. (2009). The Handmaid’s Tale: The Paris Review Perspective. In J. B. Bouson (Ed.), Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Hoffman, Jascha. "The Handmaid’s Tale: The Paris Review Perspective." Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.