The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Margaret Atwood · a novel in fifteen parts, with the Historical Notes · McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1985 · scored on Atwood’s English as published, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Dystopian novel told as first-person testimony, closed by a satirical scholarly frame
Mythos
Genesis 30 enacted as law, Rachel, Jacob and the maid Bilhah; scripture made into institutions; the Handmaid as nun and harlot, womb and witness; a pilgrim’s tale, and a Scheherazade who lives by telling
Phase
The narrator’s time in the Commander’s household, ending at the van, with the Red Centre and the time before remembered at night; then a symposium of 25 June 2195
Presentation
Fiction; fifteen titled parts, the Night parts alternating with the parts of the regime’s day, under three epigraphs; followed by the Historical Notes, the transcript of a lecture on the tapes
Register
From the flat, exact present tense of the Ceremony and the Wall to the regime’s liturgy, the narrator’s turning over of words, Moira’s defiance and the academic jokes of the Notes
Scale
One room, one household and the streets of a Cambridge renamed; behind them a state glimpsed; two centuries on, a lecture hall in Nunavit
Governing Proposition
A woman in Gilead, a theocracy set in a near future in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is assigned as a Handmaid to bear a child for a Commander and his Wife; she tells of her days in their household, of the husband and daughter taken from her, and of the small transgressions she risks, until a van takes her to an end she cannot see, and two centuries later scholars sort her tapes. The wager of the novel is that a state seeking total power seizes the female body first, that it needs no new instruments and is enforced by women as much as by men, and that a woman’s testimony is taken from her a second time by those who come after.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
McClelland and Stewart published the novel in Toronto in 1985; Houghton Mifflin in Boston and Jonathan Cape in London followed in 1986. It is dedicated to Mary Webster and Perry Miller, and it stands under three epigraphs. The first is from Genesis 30, where Rachel, childless, gives Jacob her maid Bilhah: “Give me children, or else I die”. The second is a passage from Swift’s A Modest Proposal. The third is a Sufi proverb: “In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones.” Scripture, satire, and a saying about the law no one needs to write down: the book will use all three.
The tale is in fifteen titled parts, and the titles are the structure: Night, Shopping, Night, Waiting Room, Nap, Household, Night, Birth Day, Night, Soul Scrolls, Night, Jezebel’s, Night, Salvaging, Night. Every odd-numbered part is a part of rest, seven of them Night and one a Nap; every even-numbered part is a part of the regime’s day. The day belongs to Gilead, its errands, its examinations and its rituals; the night is the only time the narrator has for herself, and in it she remembers. After the fifteenth part come the “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale”, which are part of the book as Atwood published it.
The narrator speaks in the first person, in the present tense for her days in Gilead and in the past for the time before, and she never gives her own name. She is called Offred, a possessive: the Handmaid of a Commander named Fred. The setting is Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a near future of the late twentieth century, with Harvard’s walls, yard and gymnasium recognisable and never named. The book won the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction in 1985, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, and in 1987 won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Movement II
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium” (Part I, Night). The first sentence gives the method of the whole: the old world visible under the new, stated flat. The gymnasium is the Red Centre, where women still able to bear children are trained as Handmaids by the Aunts, and Aunt Lydia’s lessons return all through the book. The method of the regime is in them: “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to.” And: “Freedom to and freedom from”. Gilead offers its women freedom from the dangers of the time before, and takes in exchange the freedom to do almost anything at all.
Offred goes out to shop in the red habit and the white wings that keep her from seeing or being seen, paired with another Handmaid, Ofglen. Handmaids may not read. The walk passes the Wall, where bodies hang with bags over their heads. Of the time before she remembers what she can: her husband Luke, their daughter, her mother, her friend Moira, and the day her bank card was refused and her account frozen, which was how it began for women. The memories are not innocent. Luke accepted the change too easily, and she and he had lived, before, as people do who think the news is about others: “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.”
Her room in the Commander’s house has been made safe against her. In the cupboard, scratched small, someone has left a line: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”. The Handmaid who held the room before her left it, and hanged herself. Offred does not know what the words mean, and holds to them as a message. In the nights she tells herself that what she says is a story, and doubts it: “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling.” The telling is all she has; whether anyone will hear it, she cannot know.
Movement III
The sixth part, Household, holds the Ceremony, and the book turns on it. The household gathers and the Commander reads from the Bible; then, in the bedroom, the Handmaid lies between the knees of the Wife, Serena Joy, who holds her hands, while the Commander does what the law requires. It is Genesis 30 enacted to the letter, Bilhah bearing upon Rachel’s knees, and it is told flatly, without heat and without comment. The flatness is the horror, and the coldness is the point: no one in the room is permitted to feel anything, and the narrator obliges.
The household is a structure of women set against women. The Marthas cook and clean; the Wife keeps her garden of tulips and her grievance; the Handmaid is the vessel; and all of them answer to the Commander. The language of the house is liturgy. “Blessed be the fruit”, a Handmaid greets another, and is answered, “May the Lord open”; the parting word is “Under His Eye”. Offred turns every word over, the chair and charity, Gilead and its hymn, and finds in each the other meanings the regime cannot quite remove. Her attention to words is her one freedom, and it is the book’s mind at work.
The eighth part is a Birth Day. A Handmaid of another household is delivered of a child with the Handmaids gathered round her chanting and the Wives in the house beside, and the child is given to the Wife. The scene is grotesque more than terrible, and it shows Gilead’s whole order at the one moment of its success. Around it the private life of the household begins to change. The Commander has started to send for Offred alone, against the rules he enforces, and Serena Joy, who wants a child, is ready to break them too.
Movement IV
The Commander’s study is the regime’s private room. There, against the law, he and Offred play Scrabble, and he lets her read; he wants, it turns out, to be liked. When she spells out the Latin from the cupboard, he laughs: it is schoolboy Latin, a joke, and its sense is that one should not let the bastards grind one down. Offred understands that the woman who left it learned it in this room. The evenings are the book’s dry comedy and its proof of hypocrisy at the top, and they repeat their turn more than once after their point is made.
Outside, Ofglen discloses that she belongs to Mayday, a network of resistance, and asks Offred to learn what she can in the study. At the Soul Scrolls, where machines print prayers to order, the two stand at the window and speak. Serena Joy arranges for Offred to go to Nick, the Commander’s driver, in the hope of a child the household can claim; and Offred goes back to him, at night, again and again, of her own will. She tells the first night in more than one version and takes each back. The stolen nights are where tenderness enters the book, and they are why she stops wanting to escape.
In the twelfth part the Commander takes Offred, in borrowed finery, to Jezebel’s, a club for officials where women for whom the regime has no other use are kept. Moira is there. Her escape from the Red Centre was the one act of defiance the Handmaids had to hold to; now her story arrives, at length, as a recital, and it ends in the club. The part rests on a convenience of plot, and the confinement of the narration slackens there into exposition; but it shows the regime’s private appetite and the price of Moira’s courage, and it is the last time Offred sees her friend.
Movement V
The fourteenth part is a Salvaging: a public hanging of women, and then a Particicution, in which the Handmaids are given a man to kill with their hands and tear him apart. Ofglen strikes first, and tells Offred afterwards that he was one of their own. Soon Ofglen is gone, replaced by another woman under the same name, who lets Offred know that the first hanged herself when she saw the van coming. The cold dread the book has kept in reserve arrives all at once, and it is still told in the same level voice.
Serena Joy learns of the night at Jezebel’s, and Offred waits in her room for what will come. The van of the Eyes arrives, and Nick tells her to go with them, that they are Mayday. She does not know whether to believe him, and the book does not say. The tale ends on the step: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (Part XV, Night). Whether it is rescue or arrest is left open, and has stayed open.
Then the Historical Notes: a partial transcript of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on 25 June 2195, chiefly the keynote of Professor James Darcy Pieixoto of Cambridge. Gilead is gone. The tale, he explains, was transcribed from cassette tapes found in a footlocker on the site of what had been Bangor, Maine, and the order of its sections was set by the two men who transcribed them. He makes a joke on the title and treats the woman who spoke as a source to be dated and sorted. The lecture ends, and the book with it: “Are there any questions?” (Historical Notes).
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little that can go. The Ceremony is the hinge, and everything leans on it. The Red Centre gives the Aunts and their method; Moira gives the one act of escape; the narrator’s mother and Luke give the time before and its own small complicities; Ofglen and the Mayday network give the possibility of resistance and its cost; the Commander’s study gives the regime’s private hypocrisy; the Historical Notes give the afterlife of the testimony. The alternation of Night and day is structure, not padding. Charged on two counts: Jezebel’s depends on a convenience, the Commander taking Offred to the one club where Moira happens to be, whose history then arrives as a long recited story rather than a scene; and the Scrabble evenings repeat their turn after their point is made. Necessary in its architecture; a few joints show.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A state that wants total power over its subjects seizes the means of reproduction first, and writes its law on the female body. It needs no new instruments: it assembles itself from scripture, existing prejudice and the bank card, and it is enforced by women on women, by Aunts and Wives, as much as by men. Consent is won by adjustment, “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to”, and by trading one liberty for another, “Freedom to and freedom from”. The harder finding is the narrator’s own: before Gilead she was among those who “lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print”, and in it she survives by not acting. The Historical Notes add a second: liberation does not end the appropriation of a woman’s testimony. Held off the top because the regime’s politics, economy and racial order are schematic and kept offstage.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is real, and most of it is cold dread. The Ceremony, told flatly, the Wife holding the Handmaid’s hands, is among the coldest scenes in the fiction of its decade. The Wall with its hanged bodies, bags over their heads; the Salvaging, and the Particicution in which the Handmaids tear a man apart; “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” scratched in the cupboard by the woman who held the room before and hanged herself; the last step into the van, “into the darkness within; or else the light” (Part XV, Night). Tenderness rises in the memories of the daughter and in the stolen nights with Nick. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the register, ironic and controlled by design: the voice turns from height to wit almost every time, the Birth Day is grotesque more than terrible, and transport is rarely allowed to stand.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth built, and built in an unusual way: the regime literalises it. The Ceremony enacts Genesis 30 to the letter, the Handmaid lying between the Wife’s knees as Bilhah bore upon Rachel’s; the epigraph, “Give me children, or else I die”, is the law of the house. Gilead, the Marthas, the Angels, Jezebel’s and the Soul Scrolls are scripture made into institutions, and the book shows myth as an instrument of power by building a society on it. The Handmaid becomes an archetype while staying particular: the red habit and the white wings, nun and harlot, womb and witness, a woman whose name is a possessive, Offred, of Fred. The title raises a second frame, Chaucer’s pilgrims’ tales, and the teller is a Scheherazade, keeping herself alive by telling. Held at the bar: the myth is the regime’s, parodied as much as built, and the narrator’s own arc is an everywoman’s by design.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the twentieth-century dystopia, Zamyatin, Huxley and above all Orwell, whose appendix on Newspeak stands behind the Historical Notes; feminist speculative fiction, Russ, Le Guin and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and behind it Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937); and Atwood’s own literary realism. The turn moves the dystopia from the state’s machinery to the female body, and from Winston Smith’s rebellion told in the third person to an intimate first-person testimony in which the narrator rebels almost not at all; the found-document frame becomes a satire on the scholars who will receive her. The stake was real and bounded: the most prominent Canadian novelist of her generation staked her standing on a form the literary establishment held at arm’s length. Held below the bar because the path was proven: Orwell’s architecture is visible throughout, and Burdekin and Piercy had already turned the form toward gender.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first-person narration, in the present tense for Gilead and the past for the time before, confines the reader to what a Handmaid may see: the winged bonnet is a narrative rule, and the state is known only in glimpses. The Night parts are the only time that is hers, and the alternation of Night and day is the shape of her life. The narration doubts itself, “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling”; she gives versions of Luke’s fate and of the night with Nick and takes them back. Then the Historical Notes turn the whole: the tale was spoken onto tapes, and its order was set by two men, so the reader learns too late that the form itself was taken from her. Testimony, unreliability and appropriation are what the book knows, and its form makes them. Held off the top because Jezebel’s slackens the confinement into exposition.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is forty years of return, and the questions stay open. Whether Nick is an Eye or of Mayday, and whether the van is rescue or arrest; whether the Historical Notes are the book’s last cruelty or its hope; what the narrator’s complicity amounts to; whether the removal of the Children of Ham to the National Homelands, kept offstage, is a charge against the book or part of its finding; how its feminism stands against the women it shows enforcing Gilead: each has been argued and is argued still, and the readings have moved with each political decade. The language rewards rereading at the level of the word, where Offred turns words over, chair and charity, Gilead and the hymn. Held below: the central argument is plain at a first reading, returns confirm more than they overturn, and forty years is a real test, short of the centuries.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is the English-language novel of the 1980s, and within it the dystopia. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised the dystopia around reproduction, sexuality and a woman’s testimony, and showed that a literary novelist could take the form without apology. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, though of the form’s matter more than its method, which is Orwell’s: the state, the slogans, the ritual violence and the frame that looks back from the future. Held near the bar because much of the reach runs through image and premise rather than through the way novels are written. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the template of the feminist dystopia that followed; “handmaid”, “Gilead” and “Under His Eye” carried into the speech of politics; the red habit worn as a protest costume in several countries from 2017; and a place among the books most taught, and most challenged, in North American schools.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is shown over forty-one years. The text survives whole as published and has been in print without a break; form and fabric take no charge. The presence is the widest a novel of its age can show: translated widely, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, set for national examinations, carried by Volker Schlöndorff’s film of 1990 from Harold Pinter’s screenplay, by Poul Ruders’s opera, by a television series from 2017 and by a graphic novel, followed by a sequel, The Testaments (2019), that won the Booker Prize, and adopted as a political emblem. Charged: much of the recent presence comes through the series and through topical politics, which are presence, not proof; the surface, its televangelists and its Compubank, is partly fixed to the American 1980s, though the book reads as more pertinent now than in 1985; and four decades demonstrate far less than centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on Atwood’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the exact, ironic sentence and of the word turned over. The first sentence, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium” (Part I, Night), sets the method: the old world visible under the new, given flat. The prose works by inventory and pun; the regime’s liturgy, “Blessed be the fruit”, “May the Lord open”, is caught exactly, and Offred’s attention to words is the book’s mind at work. The imagery is held across the length, red, the eye, the tulips of Serena Joy’s garden, mirrors and windows, and present and past are interleaved cleanly. Charged: Moira’s story and some of the Commander’s explanations deliver exposition as talk; the fragmented sentence, effective early, hardens toward mannerism; and the satire of the Notes is broad, a lecture whose jokes fall on the reader as much as on Pieixoto.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Ceremony, and the academic jokes of the Historical Notes two centuries later. They obey one law: a woman’s body and voice as material for men’s use, and the telling as the one counter-act. The Notes apply the law after the regime is gone, in Pieixoto’s pun on the title and his handling of her tapes, and the book ends on his “Are there any questions?” The time before obeys it too, in the frozen bank account, the mother’s feminism and Luke’s too-easy acceptance; the Aunts’ slogans and Moira’s defiance are two answers to it. Charged: Jezebel’s runs on a looser law, a convenience of plot and a turn toward carnival; the regime’s war, economy and Colonies are left loose; and the single point of view narrows the range, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
More orders than its narrow window suggests, held through one consciousness. Consciousness itself, in memory, doubt and desire. The family: a husband, a lost daughter, a mother, and the forced household of Commander, Wife, Marthas and Handmaid. Sexuality and the body, at the book’s centre. The state, as theocracy, police, war and propaganda. The sacred, as scripture taken over. Labour and class: Marthas, Econowives, Guardians, the Colonies. The natural order, poisoned: infertility and the toxic Colonies. History, from the time before through Gilead to the symposium of 2195. Held below the upper band because the state, the economy and race are glimpsed rather than held: the narrator cannot see them, by design, and a statement about their absence is not the same as holding them.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.7. A first-person present tense that confines the reader to what a Handmaid may see, an alternation of Night and day that is the shape of her life, and a frame that discloses too late that the order of her testimony was set by men; a finding about power and the female body that can be stated and holds; and a text in print without a break for four decades, taught, adapted and carried into political speech as widely as any novel of its age.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.0, held by a register ironic and controlled by design: the Ceremony, the Wall and the Salvaging rise to cold dread, but the voice turns from height to wit almost every time and transport is rarely allowed to stand. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.1, where the state, the economy and race are glimpsed rather than held; and The Swerve at 8.3, a real turn of the dystopia toward the female body, made on a path that Orwell had built and Burdekin and Piercy had already turned.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.5, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, scored as the novel published by McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, in 1985, and by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, and Jonathan Cape, London, in 1986: fifteen titled parts under three epigraphs, followed by the “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale”, which are part of the book as Atwood published it and are scored as part of the work. The sequel, The Testaments (2019), Volker Schlöndorff’s film of 1990 from Harold Pinter’s screenplay, Poul Ruders’s opera, the television series from 2017 and the graphic novel are reception, named under The Imperishable, and none is part of the work. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Atwood’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; the epigraph from Genesis is given in the King James wording. Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Russ, Le Guin, Piercy and Burdekin are named as the book’s inheritance, and Chaucer as the second frame its title raises. The length of the book in words, the number of its chapters and of the tapes, the descent of particular later novels from it, Atwood’s own account of her sources, the wording of the keynote beyond its last line, and adaptations beyond those named are beyond this reading and are not given. Quotations are placed by part only where the part is certain, and the last line by the Historical Notes.