Notes

The Handmaid's Tale opens with the immediate establishment of important themes in the novel: identity, liberty, and captivity. The fact that Offred begins the tale with no introduction, not even a name, suggests the theme of a compromised identity. The women have been stripped of their voices, the ability to tell their stories and claim their identities. The only communication takes place in silence through lipreading. The women are bound without liberty to the prison-like setting through weapons and force. In all ways, socially and physically, these women are captives.

The first chapter sets the scene, and represents “the time before” the nuclear holocaust, and the Handmaids – the fertile women – being in something that ‘had once been the gymnasium’ (p.13) – in “the time before”, and they are now sleeping there. The reader could infer that this is a place for the Handmaids to be taught how to act and behave in society, due to the connotations of the ‘gymnasium’ being in a school. And we can see that their identity has been wiped since the nuclear holocaust, as the last line of the chapter gives five names of women:

‘Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.’ (p.14).

These names are important as these are five identities that have been wiped, and we have to figure out who they are. It is interesting how the first four names are polysyllabic, but the final name is monosyllabic. At this point of the novel, we do not know the significance of these names, but the short syllable of ‘June’ could make us wonder whether this has either more significant, or no significance, in the story.


The word "palimpsest" is useful to remember. It is used in the opening paragraph, as Offred describes the former gymnasium: "Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light." A palimpsest is a parchment or similar that has been written on several times. The previous texts have not been fully erased and are therefore still visible. Gilead can therefore be thought of as a palimpsest-under the structures it has imposed can still be seen the shapes and colors of the former society, which Offred recalls in flashbacks.