Margaret Atwood presents a dystopia whose main features are patriarchal rule, totalitarian social regimentation and the disappearance of individual difference in the interest of a ‘collective good’, censorship, propaganda and state control of the language used by citizens. However Offred’s attempt at narrating the story is her means of defying the state, because after all it is her story which survives the demise of Gilead and which finally exceeds the limits that Gilead tried to impose.
Offred’s main emphasis is on the misery of her condition with its boredom as well as its dangers. As a self-conscious narrator she is aware of her ‘limping and mutilated’ narrative, with its gaps and blanks, fragmented structure, dislocated time sequence and her own hesitation and doubts. Her story is not only an eye-witness to disaster but also a substitute dialogue and an escape fantasy. In the process she adopts to develop her storyline Offred invents listeners in
whom she must and needs to believe in as to connect to a world outside Gilead. She addresses the reader as ‘you’, emphasised by her punning vision on Descartes philosophy ‘I think therefore I am’. She sets up an interaction between ‘I’ and ‘you’. – ‘I tell therefore you are’ and insists on telling the story, ‘So I will myself to go on.’ Her prison narrative is presented as the only way of bridging the gap between an isolated self and the world outside.
Offred resembles Mary Webster who did not die despite being hanged. In Atwood’s ‘Half-hanged Mary’, Mary’s assertion of being alive echoes Offred’s theory of being; ‘I hurt, therefore I am.’ Like Mary, Offred is ‘determined to last’ so that her story might more appropriately be seen as a woman’s survival rather than a prison narrative. Indeed one of her surviving techniques is her secretive and rebellious storytelling, for she is the voice of the excluded other in the heartland of Gilead. As Atwood has said ‘(Offred) Was boxed in… the more limited and boxed in you are, the more important details become.’ It is very significant that the story shifts from the present to her past history. More than being a breath of nostaligia, memory is Offred’s chief escape mechanism.
Offred’s first priority is to survive physically in Gilead, where everyone is under constant surveillance and death is an everyday possibility. Her second priority is to survive psychologically and emotionally after the trauma of separation from her husband and daughter and her period of indoctrination at the Rachel and Leah centre. In her determination to resist Gilead’s offer to erase her individual identity and to retain her sanity, she, she keeps telling herself stories, reminding herself of who she was in ‘ the time before’ and hoping for the future. The importance of language is unearthed here, and it is her strongest form of rebellion. She further resists Gilead’s essentialist definition by telling the story of her sensations, emotions and desires showing that she has power to tell a different story from that one already scripted. Only in memory and imagination does she have my freedom of choice and it is through storytelling that she can invent a multi-dimensional life for herself; ‘What I need is perspective, the illusion of depth.’
Apart from her own story, Offred tells the stories of many other women as well. Some are fixed in the past like the mother, while others extend even to the present, like Moira. There are also shorter fragments about other Handmaids all of the rebels of victims, but in the end they are all victims of the regime. There is also the conversation of her unnamed predecessor at the Commander’s house and Serena Joy who despite what she used to preach before is trapped jus the same by the regime’s ideology.
Offred insists on voicing her own point of view when the regime demands silence. Storytelling serves her many functions: as a main survival technique, as an eye-witness account to the present circumstances and as an escape back up memory or forward in the future when she will get out of Gilead. Offred also knows, it is the only message she can send to the outside world from her imprisonment, trusting that one day her message will be delivered:‘A story like a letter. Dear you…. You can mean thousands’.
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