chapter 1

“How does the author bring us into the world of Gilead in Chapter 1?”

In Chapter 1 of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Atwood manages to successfully invite the reader into the enclosed world of Gilead, highlighting a wistful atmosphere created by Offred and the environment in which she finds herself. Atwood describes a room that ‘had once been the gymnasium’, with ‘varnished wood’, ‘stripes and circles painted on it’ and basketball hoops with ‘nets [that] were gone'.’ This vivid use of imagery immediately informs the reader of the purpose of Offred’s habitation there, suggested by the location of the ‘gymnasium’, of re-education. Throughout this initial scene-setting, there is a consistent theme of the infantilisation of the women living with Offred; the school ‘gymnasium’, the repurposed ‘army cots’ and ‘flannelette sheets, like children’s,’ enhancing the sense that how the women had once believed was the right way to live is now obsolete. Atwood subsequently invites the reader into the reminiscing mind of Offred’s, who recounts the previously spontaneous and emotional nature of the act of sex, achieving this via the poetic construction of description within this particular section, as opposed to the functional structures of the description of the present day. This therefore implies a widespread functionality to the contemporary society created, and that has begun to be explored, contrastingly set alongside the ‘old sex’ that could take place ‘in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh’ - he society of the past was of recreation, and a lack of certain structure ‘without a shape’…