“I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.”

~ Margaret Atwood

Caught on Tape

Offred is a handmaiden; the reader cannot be sure of what that will mean or how this character is even telling this story. She opens with the line, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium” (3), and ends with, “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (295). The technique that Margaret Atwood uses is Offred the narrator telling her story on a tape cassette. In this story we do not learn that right away, and as a reader one can just assume that we are in the character’s mind. This technique of a handmaid telling an oral history lends itself to the believability of Offred’s story in a totalitarian society. How Offred’s life ends up is unsure and it is cut off just like a person caught recording, the tapes are in different pieces not even numbered, and they are camouflaged by songs of that era at the beginning and end. This manner also lends itself to Offred’s not even trying to escape. She is cut off, and all she does is think about doing something, but never is capable of going through with anything. In having The Handmaid’s Tale told in this manner, the reader gets a chance to see a woman who is torn between her two worlds:  The one that she grew up in and the one that she has been forced into.

Things in this new world of hers do not mean the same as they used to in one passages it  reads, “The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive, Even men used to say, I’d like to get laid” (37). The repetitiveness of her statements suggest boredom and lack of anything else to even think. She uses the same words, but now the meaning is different. Pondering things is all she has time for and using this technique it is easy to just see her sitting there rambling to a mike and talking. Atwood uses a simple phrase that men say in our age to connect it to the times in Gilead. We recognize the phrase, “get laid” as something sexual and as a conquest. Now, in Offred’s thoughts the conquest it gone she has nothing for any man to win.

            Also in the terms of her dress, in the story they call the head gear that the handmaid’s have to wear habits. Which makes us think of nuns and their head coverings. Offred does not think of nuns, but of the word itself and a deeper meaning that just a covering for the head. “Habits are hard to break” (25).

            She herself is broken of any habits she has, at the ending when the commanders wife confronts her she just sits in her room. She could do anything:  Set fire to the house, hang herself, throw herself at the mercy of the commander, but she just sits there and waits (292). Even just walking out. She does nothing, “Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered” (292). She is tired of fighting with them. Her mind is made up and she does not know what will happen to her, but it is better than fighting the hopelessness of her situation.

            When she has her private meetings with the commander he has a request of her. Offred thinks that is for some type of sexual act that is forbidden, but it is instead for a game of scrabble (138). She almost falls off her chair at the request and at the sight of the letters she describes them as something foreign, but so familiar, “I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, and eyeblink of it” (139). Then when she needs to look up a word she is overwhelmed at the letters that are there for all she had before are just pictures, “It was like using a language I’d once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long before passed out of the world” (156). She then revisits the idioms of the language that everyone knows, but now they are foreign, not normal.

            Women in this world are not allowed to write, and Offred is saying that she is telling this story and she does not even know who she is telling it to (39). The order of this story is unsure because it was pieced together after the society fell and the tapes were not numbered (291). Offred could be the only person in the room, but after being left in the ending one has to wonder why she just does not say where she is at. Maybe there is a tape missing. How did she get a hold of a recording device? One downfall in the ‘telling’ of this story is that even though these tapes where found you cannot know how they got there or who put them there.

            This last argument could either help or hinder the technique of Offred’s oral history. All the same it shows the wavering of the two worlds trying to mix, but in the end just leaving her mind with nothing but time. It shows her loss of memories and how the conditioning is affecting her ability to remember what she used to be able to do. In this a person can see how she moved from being someone who could make up her mind, to someone that is so unsure of what to do she just lets things happen. It could be that she just has dumb luck or is too far gone from her old self. The abrupt ending to this tale and the scholars analyses of Offred’s story leaves the reader in a state of mind to reread this telling. The manner in which it is constructed is brilliant and makes it Offred’s story. This is her tale, and whether we believe it or not, she was finally able to tell it.

“Are there any questions?” (311).