The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Published 2017 · 320 pages · 96,894 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction, Feminist Literature, Literary Fiction

How hard is The Handmaid's Tale to read?

The Handmaid's Tale scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
Atwood writes in plain contemporary English, with wordplay (chair/charity, lie/lay) and a few Latin and biblical touches. It is clearer than The Great Gatsby's ornate prose and closer to the accessible register of The Remains of the Day.
Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
Offred's sentences are short, fragmentary and run-on in turn, with clipped asides and shifts into memory. They demand more attention than 1984's declaratives but stay well below Faulkner or Woolf.
Abstraction: 50 out of 100
Ideas about power, gender and religion are carried by concrete objects: the egg, the red gloves, the butter. The abstraction is grounded the way it is in To Kill a Mockingbird, though Offred's reflections on forgiveness and storytelling push higher.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Each scene delivers worldbuilding details: tokens, Compuchecks, Angels, Eyes, Unbabies. The text also threads memories of the coup, the Centre and Luke. It is denser than a thriller but paced and readable.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
Offred withholds, revises and admits invention: 'This is a reconstruction.' Readers must infer what she hides, such as Nick's role and the Commander's motives. It asks more of the reader than The Great Gatsby's biased narrator.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Red, tulips, eggs, the plaster eye, the FAITH cushion and the Latin scrawl recur and accumulate meaning. The symbolism is signposted more than in Gatsby but runs through every scene.
Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
Aunt Lydia's pious slogans, 'Blessed be the fruit' and the hollow Scrabble room all carry irony. Offred mocks and obeys at once, so the reader must hold both. It is sharper than Orwell, more direct than Nabokov.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
Offred's fate, Luke's fate and her daughter's remain open through the opening chapters. The shifting hypotheticals about Luke show the narrative refusing closure, though the daily plot stays clear.
Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
Numbered sections alternate Night chapters with daytime ones and interleave flashbacks to the Centre, college, the coup and Moira's escape. It is more fragmented than Orwell but far less than Bolano.

How The Handmaid's Tale is regarded

The Handmaid's Tale holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Handmaid's Tale sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (190 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Handmaid's Tale scores 84 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
The Commander, who has been propping himself on his elbows, away from our combined bodies, doesn't permit himself to sink down into us.
Mythos: Irony and Satire, phase 4 (Tragic pathos) (irony iv)
And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy + Novel
This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said.

Where the story of The Handmaid's Tale takes place

  • Gilead, near-future Cambridge, Massachusetts, a theocratic republic, the main setting
  • University of Denay, Nunavit, symposium, 25 June 2195

7 things that are true of The Handmaid's Tale, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens in a converted school gymnasium where women whisper their names from bed to bed.

    In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:

  2. Offred's Handmaid greeting and reply are fixed phrases.

    “Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

  3. Moira escapes the Red Centre using a toilet lever against Aunt Elizabeth.

    They found out afterwards that she’d dismantled the inside of one of the toilets and taken out the long thin pointed lever

  4. The Commander's first request to Offred is for a game of Scrabble.

    “I’d like you to play a game of Scrabble with me,” he says.

  5. The phrase scratched in the cupboard is revealed as a schoolboy mock-Latin joke, not real Latin.

    “That’s not real Latin,” he says. “That’s just a joke.”

  6. Offred's predecessor in her room hanged herself from the removed chandelier.

    “She hanged herself,” he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. “That’s why we had the light fixture removed. In your room.”

  7. The book ends with a mock academic symposium set in the year 2195.

    held as part of the International Historical Association Convention, which took place at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195.

Scenes in The Handmaid's Tale that Frye would name

21 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Confession, untitled
This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. The narrator admits her sustained introverted act of telling and recollection.
Sparagmos, untitled
red bodies tumble forward and I can no longer see, he’s obscured by arms, fists, feet. A high scream comes from somewhere, like a horse in terror. The Particicution tears a man apart collectively.
Demonic imagery, untitled
The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways. The Wall of hooks and hanged bodies is the book's demonic image of the body as flesh.
Displacement, untitled
This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is in control, of the process and thus of the product. The Genesis Rachel/Bilhah rite shows through realistic domestic motivation in the Ceremony.
Agon, untitled
Don’t move, said Moira, or I’ll stick it all the way in, I know where, I’ll puncture your lung. Moira's escape from the Centre is the quest's agon, a contest against the Aunts.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it, here, in this room. Offred recognises the dead predecessor's message and her own place in the Commander's pattern.

Books that share these scenes with The Handmaid's Tale

About the author

Margaret Atwood