Critics of the Handmaids Tale

Stokwitz (language)

"language is the main instrument of social and ideological control"

Jessie Givner (identity)

"the rules of Gilead attempt to eliminate mirrors, the reflection of faces, so they attempt to eliminate names"

Goldblatt (the ceremony)

"it synthesises the institutionalised humiliation, objectification and ownership of women in Gilead"

Wisker (intertextuality with 1984)

"reduced people to their functions: control, reproduction, service"

Wisker (feminine unity)

"there is no sisterhood, only division and disempowerment"

Hooper (Offred)

"Offred is a soppy stand-in for Winston Smith"

Ecofeminist Vision - K Reshmi (reproduction)

"her body is segmented and her value is determined on the basis of her reproductive capacity"

Amin Malak (religion)

"in practice miserably lacks spirituality and benevolence"

Thompson (Moira)

Moira is Offred's "rebel alter ego"

Lorna Irvine (jezebels outfits)

"simultaneously parodies the demeaning nature of the female outfits in Hugh Hefner's former bunny clubs" "stands for the irrepressible return of everything the Republic has attempted to obliterate"

Rigney (Nick)

sees Nick as a hero who "redeems all men by his act of saving Offred, although it may mean his own death"

"He is a kind of Orpheus to her Eurydice, as he brings her out of the world of the dead" and ensures her escape from Gilead at the end of the novel

Madonna Miner (male characters)

Offred "wants us to imagine these men as unique" when they are "in fact eerily similar"

Macpherson (Offred)

Offred "is not heroic. She is, instead, a passive everywoman, awaiting rescue

Gleiberman

“Atwood, after all that didactic scrubbing, couldn’t quite wash the princess fantasy out of her story”