Commentary on extract from The Handmaid's Tale

This extract from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ describes Offred’s memories and thoughts about love. It portrays her confusion and insecurity both towards love and life as a Handmaid through the use of structure, tone and diction. Structure and Tone depict her different attitudes towards love, while diction is specifically selected in order to create different tones throughout the extract thus emphasizing Offred’s confusion.

The structure of this extract is important for the understanding of Offred’s ambivalence towards love and life as a Handmaid. The principal characteristics of structure in this extract are the variety of sentence lengths and the manner in which the paragraphs are arranged. Margaret Atwood makes these differences so clear, enabling the readers to understand easily Offred’s confusion. Firstly, at the beginning of the extract, sentences are quite short, but as the reading continues they become longer and more intricate. Short sentences convey Offred’s fragmented ideas and her indecision, also creating a tone of denial. Offred starts the narration of this extract with short sentences; for example, “I don’t want to be telling this story. I don’t have to tell it” and “I could withdraw”. These sentences are very simple and short, as well as repetitive (applies only to the first example). It makes the reader feel as though the speaker were trying to make a point against an argument, thus also portraying her emotions, such as anger, and confusion. A transition is marked in the first half of the passage with the sentence “That will never do”. When looking at the passage aesthetically, the way this sentence is placed, isolated from the rest of the paragraphs, one can understand that Offred’s thoughts are taking another direction, and probably a change in tone of the passage as well.

The changes in tone throughout this extract also portray Offred’s change of thoughts. With tone, also comes the importance of diction; by choosing specific words, Atwood is able to create those contrasting tones. As mentioned previously, at the beginning of the extract, Atwood creates a tone of denial and almost desperation. The repetition of the words “I don’t have to” throughout the first sentences is key in conveying tone, since it shows that Offred doesn’t want to accept and is confused about whatever she is about to say, and feels that must not be obliged to do so. Another key word in creating tone at the beginning of the extract is “withdraw”, since it hints the idea that if she could, Offred would try to retreat from talking and communicating or maybe even escape, thus portraying her desperation in living the way she does.

However, as the passage continues, Atwood creates a melancholic and romantic tone with which the reader can realize that Offred, as well as many of the other Handmaids perhaps, long for loving a man again and being free. Diction is again very important in creating this, as well as imagery. Offred describes love as a “downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely”. This simile depicts very precisely how love is experienced by women; lovely and flying convey the romance and the passion that go with love, whereas dire, extreme and unlikely, portray the nerveracking feelings of love and its unfortunate events. The repetitive use of the word falling when refering to love also gives the reader the idea of the heavenly nature of love. Other key words that portray this tone are wonder, abstract and amazing, giving the idea that love is sublime. At this point, the structure of the passage has also changed. Sentences are longer in order to narrate the complexity of love. 

Nevertheless, the passage ends with a series of rhetorical questions, “Who know what they do, on their own with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? Who can tell what they really are?... What if he doesn’t love me?”. The fact that the extract ends with the speaker wondering about these ideas, allows the reader to finally see that the dominating feeling she has is confusion and instability.