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Discussion Guide
The Handmaid's Tale
With terrifying understatement, this novel narrates the life of a college-educated mother ripped from her career and family to be a slave, in a dystopian United States too plausible to be forgotten. Forbidden by a fanatical government to read, choose their own clothes or appear in public alone, handmaids fulfill an awful purpose as the servants of wealthy families. All the while, however, strange new friendships emerge between the powerless and the powerful, as revolution glimmers on the horizon.
Book club questions for The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
Who is responsible for maintaining Gilead society in the novel, women or men?
What does this novel want romance to be? Why do you think the relationship with Nick is there? With Luke? Why does Atwood make Offred a mother?
What seems dated about the way Atwood imagines a dystopian society? What seems topical and convincing today?
Do you miss not having another point of view in this novel?
In an important scene in the beginning of the novel, Offred and Ofglen are photographed, in their uniforms and veils, by a group of "Westernized" tourists from Japan. In a similar moment, an academic at the end of the book writes a paper that compares the 20th-century theocracies of Gilead and Iran. Does the comparison seem just to you, as Gilead might satirize or exaggerate tendencies Atwood saw in late-twentieth century America?
In literary criticism, scholars often distinguish between Orwellian dystopias, based on George Orwell's novel 1984, and Huxleyan dystopias, based on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The key difference is in the methods by which the State achieves its citizens' consent. 1984 relies on brutal repression of dissent; Brave New World, famously, acclimates its citizens to living in a slave state by making high-dosage opiate painkillers easily available, and normalizing their daily use. Which of these types is A Handmaid's Tale?
What do the academics at the end miss, or get wrong, about Offred’s experience of writing specifically?
The Handmaid's Tale Book Club Questions PDF
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