The Handmaid's Tale Essay

The title The Handmaid’s Tale is adequate for the novel because this is a story, which may or may not be completely true, similar to a tale, that is narrated by a Handmaid named Offred in a society where women are reduced to objects for reproduction. As revealed in the historical notes of the Handmaid’s Tale where the Professors discloses that this was a title they had given to the novel after it was discovered, and making it similar to many of Chaucer’s famous works, the title connects the fact that the narrator is a Handmaid. Furthermore, the word tale is a homophone to the word tail which connects to the phrase “get some tail” showing that the title is a reference to the sexual acts the Handmaid is forced perform in the novel.
The main conflict in the novel revolves around Offred who is a handmaid that desires freedom and happiness against the restricting theocracy of Gilead. With the rules of Gilead, Offred and many other handmaids struggle between oppression from societal rules and autonomy. In the beginning of the novel, Offred is assigned to a Commander’s house and although she is forced to be submissive, she thinks that a knife she sees is “sharp and bright, and tempting ” revealing her hidden thirst to revolt against her position (47).

Offered spends several months at the Commander’s house, but she frequently has flashbacks to her past before the Gilead era. The events in the novel occur in a city that was the United States, however, it is now called Gilead. The women and others in the Resistance are mostly feminists or related to others who were feminists, similar to Offred, before the totalitarian society took over, and the men, similar to the Commander, are part of the religious extremists of the Gilead society. Furthermore, within the two gender groups, these people were also separated into distinct social