Handmaid’s Tale Commentary

In this excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred is talking to the Commander about her past, more specifically, her views on love. At this point in the novel, Offred has been secretly seeing the Commander in his office and has been learning about the reasons for the creation of Gilead among other things. By using diction that relates to falling, a change in tone from content to disgust, and irony, Atwood foreshadows the immutable dominance man was to have over women.


Firstly, whenever Atwood says the word love, it is not far from the world love.

• “Still loving, still falling”
• “Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.”


Atwood uses this peculiar diction to show how women were already subject to man’s abuse. Offred can now admit that love was her downfall but at the time, she was oblivious to it. The same could go for most women. This helps with the essence of foreshadowing because it shows that women had been, for a long time, being hindered by man. Nowadays it is because they are only permitted to work in certain areas and it is much more drastic, but if you water this down, you get what women consider love. Women like to fall in love but it is something that is abusive to them. It is something that one has to get out of, but once they fall in too deep, it would be hard to remember if they ever had any role of power in society. Atwood uses the words love and following in succession to show that love was one of the beginning signs of the subjection of women.


Next, Atwood changes the tone from the first stanza to the second stanza to show how women were oblivious to the detriments of their love when the first fell into it.

• Before: “It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space.”
• After: “… through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime, and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? ... What if he doesn’t love me?

The piece from the first stanzas shows how women thought that love was an integral part of their life. They needed it to find themselves and they were happy once they did. The tone of this is much happier than the following. The next piece from the second stanza shows how women began to feel insecure and see the flaws that a man has. Although these faults have been there the whole time, the women are credulous when the first fall in love. It is only when they sleep with them do they begin to think what if, but by then it is too late. The tone in the second stanza is much more solemn and it relates to the society Offred lives in now. There is nothing the handmaids can do now to better the society they live in now and the same would have gone for a women who sees the true side of a man.


Lastly, Atwood uses irony to show how oblivious women were.

• “We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.

The use of oxymorons helps demonstrate how women were subject to abuse yet they still lived with it. The same goes on now but in current day Gilead the women have a lot less chance to revolt than they did back in the day. This piece is ironic because the women liked to fall in love but at the same time were somewhat aware of the negative effects it had on then. Nonetheless, they still went for it.