Writer's Techniques (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes

Writer's techniques

Understanding how Margaret Atwood constructs The Handmaid's Tale is essential for appreciating the novel's impact and meaning. Atwood employs a range of sophisticated techniques to create a compelling dystopian narrative that challenges readers to question power, language, and truth itself. This note explores the key techniques Atwood uses to craft her unsettling vision of Gilead.

Structure and narrative form

Atwood divides The Handmaid's Tale into fifteen distinct parts, marked by Roman numerals rather than standard numbering. This classical approach to structuring gives the novel a sense of formality and historical weight. Within these parts, the narrative unfolds across forty-six chapters, each focusing on Offred's experiences and observations in Gilead.

At the conclusion of the novel, Atwood includes a section called the Historical Notes. This section represents the only break from Offred's voice throughout the entire narrative. Presented as a dictated lecture delivered many years in the future by Professor Piexoto, the Historical Notes serve multiple purposes.

Despite the oppressive circumstances in Gilead that prohibit reading and writing for women, Offred's narrative proves remarkably evocative. She tells her story with detail and emotion, demonstrating both her mental fortitude and the enduring spirit of her resistance. Atwood suggests here that the act of telling your story matters deeply, regardless of the consequences or circumstances you face.

Unreliable narration

One of Atwood's most sophisticated techniques is her creation of Offred as an unreliable narrator. This literary device involves a narrator whose credibility or accuracy is questionable, forcing readers to actively engage with the text rather than passively accept what they're told.

Offred herself acknowledges her own unreliability several times throughout the narrative. In one particularly revealing moment, she admits:

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances.

By having Offred announce her own narrative limitations, Atwood comments on the blurry line between fiction and reality. This technique is characteristic of speculative fiction, where authors blend familiar elements with unfamiliar scenarios to create unsettling worlds. Throughout The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood combines recognisable aspects of oppression with an extreme vision of the future, making readers question what is entirely reliable in storytelling itself.

Literary comparisons

Atwood places Offred within a tradition of famously unreliable narrators in literature. Nick from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays events from his outsider perspective, influenced by both his class position and his personal attitudes towards the wealthy world he observes. Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye filters his experiences through his adolescent viewpoint, which affects how truthfully he presents events and other characters.

Similarly, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the narrators Captain Walton and Victor Frankenstein could be interpreted as unreliable in their interpretation of events and their opinions of themselves and others. These literary precedents help contextualise Atwood's choice to make Offred's perspective questionable, inviting readers to think critically about whose stories are told and how they're shaped by personal experience.

Genre: speculative fiction

The Handmaid's Tale belongs to the genre of speculative fiction, an umbrella term encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian literature. The term originated in association with mid-twentieth century science fiction, though speculative fiction now represents a distinct category.

Common themes running through speculative fiction include dystopia, science fiction elements, technological advancement, and social experimentation. Many authors use these fictional settings to critique the political environments of their own time. Orwell's 1984, written in 1949, examines mass surveillance, dictatorship, and social repression, drawing inspiration from Stalinist Russia. Through the speculative genre, Orwell explored what a totalitarian Western state might resemble. Oceania, the state in 1984, exists in what was formerly the UK, US, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa, just as Gilead occupies what was once the United States.

Atwood's approach to speculative fiction

Margaret Atwood's style of speculative fiction has developed into its own recognisable category. Much of her work in this genre encompasses science fiction elements, often including alien life forms and terra incognita (unknown lands). However, Atwood's approach exists much closer to reality as we know it. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a world removed from our own but not entirely dissimilar.

Language and biblical references

The Handmaid's Tale is saturated with Biblical references and religious language, which Atwood uses to expose how religious texts can be manipulated to justify oppression. In the epigraphs that open the novel, Atwood quotes Genesis 30:1-3, the first book of the Old Testament:

And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.

This quotation serves multiple functions. It establishes the tone for the entire novel, signalling to readers that Biblical language and themes will permeate the narrative. It also explains the Biblical precedent for the situation in Gilead, where infertile wives use Handmaids as surrogates. In the original story, Jacob's wife Rachel is infertile, so she asks him to impregnate her maid Bilhah. The phrase "she shall bear upon my knees" directly echoes the Ceremony in The Handmaid's Tale, where Offred must lie between the Commander's Wife's legs during the monthly ritual.

Religious language as control

At the Red Centre, Aunt Lydia employs many religious epithets in her educational practice, as do the other Aunts. After Offred leaves the Centre, these phrases remain with her, and she quotes them frequently throughout her narrative. One example from Chapter 12 demonstrates this:

You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek.' She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.

Here, Aunt Lydia references a section of the Bible known as the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus delivers his famous blessings. The complete phrase is "Blessed are the meek, as they shall inherit the Earth", meaning that those who suffer now will rise from their circumstances to better days in future.

Offred completes the phrase for her, but only in her thoughts. Her sarcasm and awareness that she knew the rest of the passage betray that Offred comes from an educated background. Throughout the novel, Offred uses the language of her thoughts to undermine her oppressors, maintaining a sense of intellectual resistance even when physical resistance is impossible.

Biblical allusions in Gilead

The name Gilead itself comes from a later reference in Genesis. Gilead is where Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, has his final meeting with his uncle, under whom he had been working in poor conditions, before escaping to a better life. It exists as a mountainous region in modern-day Jordan. In Hebrew, Gilead means "eternal happiness", a deeply ironic choice by the religious leaders in The Handmaid's Tale for naming their oppressive state.

In Gilead, vehicles are named after references from the Bible. Offred mentions that Whirlwind, Chariot, and Behemoth are all names for vehicles, each representing allusions to the Old Testament. Law enforcement vehicles are also named after Old Testament concepts: the Guardian Angels and the Eyes of the Lord. This naming system provides a metaphor for the oppression of people in Gilead on religious grounds, suggesting that surveillance and control are divinely sanctioned.

Before Gilead, Offred's career seemed to involve writing and editing, making the loss of literacy especially painful for her. Her love of language remains evident in Chapter 23, when the Commander invites Offred to play Scrabble with him. Through their games, we witness Offred's enthusiasm for words revealed. She plays increasingly esoteric words like "zygote", "larynx", and "prolix", and she even begins to create nonsense words, mirroring Atwood's own use of wordplay in the novel.

Through her linguistic creativity and resistance, Offred maintains a sense of empowerment against the oppressive circumstances that seek to silence her completely.

Neologisms and wordplay

Atwood demonstrates mastery of neologisms throughout the novel—newly coined words created specifically for the universe of Gilead. The novel contains numerous words and phrases with double meanings and multiple significances, reflecting how language can be manipulated to control people.

This linguistic control extends to how identity itself is constructed and controlled through language. By creating new words and restricting access to existing ones, the Gileadean regime attempts to limit what people can think and express.

Historical parallels

Context and literary influences

1980s political climate

While the events of The Handmaid's Tale are extreme, they are firmly rooted in concerns current to the 1980s when Atwood wrote the novel. The rise of the Christian right and the Reagan administration in the United States hinted at the potential rise of a right-wing theocracy in the future. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher had just been elected as Conservative Prime Minister, and her leadership led to significant events like the Miners' Strike and the Falklands War.

Many conservative politicians in power during the 1980s were elected in retaliation to the sexually progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973, Roe vs Wade was a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court establishing that the US Constitution protected a pregnant woman's right to choose an abortion without excessive government restriction. This represented a major victory for the women's rights movement but was viewed by many in the conservative Christian right as proof of society's moral degradation.

The Iranian Revolution

Women's rights globally were being called into question during this period, not only in the West. This context of political upheaval and religious fundamentalism directly influenced Atwood's creation of Gilead.

Literary influences: Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is recognised as one of the earliest works of science fiction and speculative fiction, establishing foundational elements for the genre. In Frankenstein, Shelley uses the monster as a device through which she examines issues of class, reproduction, and the social effects of rapid technological advancements in the 18th century. She creates a social commentary on the treatment of oppressed people in Victorian society.

Similarly, in The Handmaid's Tale, questions around basic human rights and power dynamics take centre stage. Atwood's novel uses Gilead as a device through which class and reproductive rights are examined. In Frankenstein, the creation of the monster and its consequent tragedy can be interpreted as a metaphor for anxieties about reproduction that existed at a time when childbirth carried a high rate of morbidity (death or serious illness) for both mother and child.

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