Revision Cards - The Handmaid's Tale: A Level, Genre, Structure and Language

Revise the key points

The main features of a dystopia are evident in Gilead: patriarchal rule, totalitarianism and the erasure of individual difference.
The Commander and his wife are high in the strict dystopian hierarchy of Gilead; Handmaids are given special status because of their potential for procreation.
A significant dystopian feature of Gilead is state control of language through biblical rhetoric.
Whether a text is dystopian or utopian depends on the narrator’s viewpoint: for Offred, Gilead is dystopian because she does not benefit from her new society.

Genre, Structure and Language

The Handmaid's Tale: A Level

Offred’s external story is a bleak account of everyday experiences, often permeated with a sense of fear or despair.
The internal narrative is Offred’s survival strategy where she expresses her emotions and desires.
Offred tells the story of the loss of her loved ones through internal narrative, using flashback.
Other external events such as Prayvaganzas or Salvagings are Gileadean constructions which reveal the nightmarish quality of the new social order.

Genre, Structure and Language

The Handmaid's Tale: A Level

Offred’s daily life is described in fine detail, which both emphasises the extreme monotony of her life and heightens the sense of confinement she endures.
The descriptions of the hanged men, and public ceremonies such as the Particicution and Salvagings, reveal the barbarity at the heart of Gilead.
Clinical language is used to describe the monthly copulation ceremony, where the intimate act of sex becomes a bizarre, semi-public ritual.
The secret outing to Jezebel’s blurs the boundaries between public and private. The descriptions of the hotel emphasise its familiarity for Offred.

Genre, Structure and Language

The Handmaid's Tale: A Level

The internal narrative offers us a patchwork of glimpses of Offred’s former life, through flashback.
Three different versions of Luke’s story are presented, which function as psychological survival for Offred but also emphasise her anguish.
Poetic imagery expresses Offred’s desires and emotions and constitutes her hidden resistance to the regime.
The use of imagery from nature and the body can be viewed as a feminine voice of protest in a patriarchy.

Genre, Structure and Language

The Handmaid's Tale: A Level

The flashback sections describe Moira in Offred’s former life using vibrant descriptive language; she is a colourful and increasingly heroic figure.
Stories of other women form a subtext to Offred’s; her narrative is one which emphasises her fight for survival but others fade into silence.
The unnamed woman, who occupied Offred’s room before her, is a ghostly presence throughout who foreshadows Offred’s possible fate.
Vivid detail is used to describe Moira’s outfit at Jezebel’s. It is grotesque: its comic presentation reveals also the desperate state to which she is reduced.