The Handmaid's Tale

In the Republic of Gilead, the former United States has become a theocratic state built around obedience, gender hierarchy, and reproduction. Women have lost the right to read, hold jobs, control money, or move freely. Because the birthrate has collapsed, fertile women are forced into service as Handmaids, valued only for their ability to conceive. Offred, the narrator, lives in the household of a Commander and his Wife, Serena Joy, where her role is to undergo a monthly sexual Ceremony meant to produce a child for them.

Offred’s present life is defined by restriction. Her room has been stripped of objects that could be used for suicide, her clothes are regulated, and even shop signs use pictures because women are forbidden to read. In the Commander’s house, the Marthas Rita and Cora manage domestic labor while maintaining wary distance from Offred. Serena Joy, once a public religious figure, is bitter, possessive, and openly hostile. Nick, the household Guardian and driver, unsettles Offred by showing small signs of risky familiarity.

Offred frequently retreats into memory. At the Red Center, where Handmaids were trained, she and other women slept in a converted gym under the surveillance of Aunts armed with cattle prods. Aunt Lydia and the other Aunts taught submission through slogans, scripture, humiliation, and fear. Yet the women formed covert bonds by whispering, lip-reading, touching hands, and exchanging names. Offred remembers Janine being forced during Testifying to accept blame for her own rape and abortion, a lesson in how Gilead turns victims into participants in their own degradation.

Her memories also preserve the life Gilead destroyed. She recalls college days with the irreverent Moira, protests attended by her activist mother, and domestic life with Luke and their daughter. As the regime rose, women’s bank accounts were frozen, Offred was dismissed from her library job, and armed men enforced the new laws. Luke tried to comfort her, but even his protection created a new imbalance. When the family attempted to flee with forged papers, Luke killed their cat to avoid leaving evidence behind. The escape failed after they were betrayed; Offred remembers running through the woods with her drugged child, hearing shots, and losing her daughter to authorities who later showed her a photograph of the girl with another woman.

In the Commander’s household, Offred’s days revolve around shopping walks with Ofglen, public rituals, and the threat of the Wall, where executed bodies are displayed. She sees hanged doctors punished for past abortions, a priest, and men labeled for sexual crimes. Public violence is normalized, while scarcity and gossip shape the Handmaids’ small social world. Janine, now known as Ofwarren, becomes pregnant and later gives birth to a healthy girl named Angela, though the Wife of Warren claims the child and Janine will eventually be reassigned.

The monthly Ceremony exposes the brutal core of Offred’s role. The household gathers, the Commander reads from the locked Bible, and Serena grips Offred while the Commander has sex with her. The ritual is empty of intimacy and framed as religious duty. After one Ceremony, Offred illegally wanders downstairs, where Nick catches her and kisses her. He tells her that the Commander wants to see her privately in his office, beginning a dangerous secret arrangement.

Offred expects sexual demands, but the Commander first asks her to play Scrabble. The forbidden pleasure of language thrills her. Over time he gives her contraband magazines and lotion, asks for kisses, and treats her as a private companion while remaining blind to the danger he creates. The meetings make the Ceremony more complicated: Offred begins to see him as a person, which produces resentment, pity, and guilt. In his study, she asks about the Latin phrase scratched in her closet, Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. He explains it as schoolboy mock Latin meaning, roughly, do not let the bastards grind you down, and admits the previous Handmaid learned it from him and hanged herself after Serena discovered their contact. Offred uses his guilt to ask for real information about what is happening.

Meanwhile, Ofglen quietly reveals that she belongs to a resistance network. At Soul Scrolls, after they risk admitting disbelief, Ofglen hints at an underground 'us.' Later she confirms that Mayday is the password and urges Offred to spy on the Commander. Offred is frightened but tempted by the possibility of connection. She also watches an Eyes van seize a man from the street, reminding her that any trust may be fatal.

Serena Joy separately approaches Offred with a practical scheme: if the Commander is sterile, Offred should try to conceive with Nick. Serena offers help and later gives Offred a Polaroid of her daughter, alive but changed, using the image as both leverage and reward. The photo devastates Offred because it proves her daughter has continued growing without her, yet it also sustains her. Serena arranges a midnight meeting in Nick’s garage apartment. Offred and Nick’s first encounter is awkward and transactional, but it becomes tender. Offred later admits that her memory of it shifts, and that her own desire feels like the true betrayal.

The Commander also takes Offred further into transgression. He dresses her in illicit lingerie and makeup and smuggles her to Jezebel’s, a hidden club where elite men meet women forced into sexual service. There Offred finds Moira. Moira recounts how she escaped the Red Center by overpowering Aunt Elizabeth and posing as an Aunt, then traveled through a Quaker-run Underground Femaleroad before being captured near Maine. After torture and a film about the Colonies, she chose Jezebel’s over exile. The reunion is painful because Moira, once a symbol of rebellion, now survives by accommodation. The Commander later takes Offred to a hotel room and awkwardly presses for sex, exposing the emptiness of his fantasy of intimacy.

Offred becomes increasingly absorbed in Nick, secretly visiting him and withdrawing from Ofglen and Mayday. She even tells Nick her real name. Ofglen offers the possibility of escape and urges her again to gather information, but Offred wants only to remain near Nick. At a district Salvaging, Aunt Lydia presides over the hanging of two Handmaids and a Wife. Then a battered Guardian is presented for Particicution as a supposed rapist responsible for a baby’s death. Ofglen rushes forward and knocks him unconscious before the crowd kills him, later explaining that he was actually a political prisoner and that she spared him torture.

The next day, Ofglen has been replaced. The new Ofglen warns Offred to forget dangerous echoes, then reveals that the former Ofglen hanged herself when the Eyes came for her. Terrified, Offred resolves inwardly to submit and survive. But when she returns home, Serena confronts her with evidence from Jezebel’s: lipstick on her cloak and the sequined outfit. Serena condemns her and threatens that she will end like the previous Handmaid.

Alone in her room, Offred waits in a suspended calm, considering arson, escape, confession, violence, and suicide. A black van marked with the Eye arrives. Nick enters first and whispers that the men are Mayday, using Offred’s real name and telling her to trust him. With no certain alternative, she goes. The men escort her downstairs past Serena, the Commander, Cora, and Rita, claiming a violation of state secrets. The Commander grows anxious for himself, Serena is furious, and Cora cries because her hope for a child vanishes. Offred steps into the van without knowing whether she is being rescued or arrested, surrendering herself to an uncertain fate.