1The earliest accounts (Leclaire 1985, Malak 1987) described The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist dystopia. According to Sally Miller Gearhart (quoted by Libby Falk Jones), a feminist utopian fiction:

1. contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time or space);

2. offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions;

3. sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills;

4. presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions.

2The quotation also applies to dystopia, except that deals with a negative society rather than an idealized one, but unlike negative utopia or anti-utopia includes the promise of a return to our norm or to a more desirable state (Greven 1984). Many of those features are present in The Handmaid’s Tale, but as early as 1985 I also suggested that there were many other ways of reading it. The feminist dystopia would be the emerging part of the iceberg, although the image is not totally apt as the submerged part is far from being solidified. It exemplifies both freedom to write a dystopia and freedom from writing a dystopia, the real creative freedom developing in the space between the two opposites.

3The Handmaid’s Tale makes almost parodic use of the main dystopian features. First, a selected community is isolated within the walls of Gilead so that it can be subjected to the extreme consequences of the central hypothesis. It also has to be distanced and isolated in time, generally some more or less distant future. Offred’s story is just slightly futuristic but the "Historical Notes" are definitely futuristic, they are situated in the XXIInd century. The Handmaid’s Tale is not science fiction, strictly speaking, because no technique that does not exist nowadays is considered.

4All such societies tend to be incomplete: Golding’s Lord of the Flies, for instance, includes no girls and no adults. Gilead society is almost the exact opposite and equally selective, with strict consideration of the central thesis: no children are fully developed as characters, not even Offred’s daughter, there are no elders and hardly any animals except in metaphors and similes which are derived from our uncomfortably close world. It enables the vision to concentrate on women as victims of the misogynist hypothesis. The focus is made even sharper as everyone and everything is perceived through the filtering consciousness of Offred, even when she recalls conversations with other characters. Most characters are types reduced to their social functions by their different uniforms, often uncomfortably reminiscent of the IIIrd Reich, and, for the Handmaids, by the multiple emblematic values of the red colour and by the substitution of their Commander’s names for their own obliterated names.

5Dystopias are primarily concerned with exposing that are latent in the societies in which they are written. As "speculative fiction" The Handmaid’s Tale tends to denounce the potential dangers lurking in the institutions of the self-named land of liberty and in Western democracies. It is important to maintain comparison with the societies we know, even if they are imperfect, in order to provide moral markers by which the imagined negative society can be judged. [There is always at least one square peg in a round hole who stands for the reader]. Here, all the individualized characters are "refugee [s] from the past" (239), so that comparisons are permanent and a hankering after their former lives subsists even in those who, like the Commander, are supposed to operate Gilead. Subversion is progressively revealed at all levels, starting with black market delicacies to which Fred, Serena Joy or Nick have access, and symbolically with the subversive flowers of Serena Joy’s garden. It treads on mortally dangerous ground with Serena Joy’s bribing Olfred into sexual intercourse with Nick, in her opinion a cynical and more promising substitute for the Ceremony, which becomes the ironic double and negation of the central institution, but is a capital crime in Gilead. The Commander’s transgressions of Gileadian rules [in his secret encounters with Offred and his sexual outing at Jezebel’s are purely hedonistic and don’t even have the excuse of procreation], A more positive resistance is revealed in the existence of the secret communication network of the ’grapevine, ’ and in the underground movement of Mayday, which smuggles victims outside into Canada and plans the overthrowing of the theocracy. Although Offred refuses to commit herself, it is instrumental in her problematic rescue, a temporary conclusion to her story.

6Margaret Atwood has recourse to narrative strategies such as circularity, mutiplicity, fluidity and open endings, which have been claimed as feminine by feminist writers, for instance by Luce Irigaray: "se retrouver pour la femme ne pourrait donc signifier que la possibilité de ne s’identifier à aucun en particulier, de n’être jamais simplement une... la femme resterait toujours plusieurs"1 or Nicole Brossard: "les femmes ne racontent pas d’une façon linéaire, mais elles racontent en employant la fragmentation et en ayant recours au passé"2 , or Chritl Verduyn "c’est l’image de la spirale qui, selon bien des écrivaines aujourd’hui, correspond le mieux a leur écriture."3 Four layers of narrative time have been identified in the novel which is also viewed as "historiographic metafiction" (LeBihan 1991 97). If we follow the Historical Notes we realize that the first three levels are contained within "some thirty" narrative sequences of the cassettes about which we know neither their exact number, nor the order nor the proximity or distance of the recording sessions. They are further included in Professor Peixoto and Professor Wade’s chronology which is partly aleatory and invites the reader’s creation of his/her own chronology.

7Another feature is "writing the body": Offred’s body has been fragmented and reduced to a womb on legs, she constantly observes "the droolings of the flesh" (83) for signs of pregnancy and she attempts to define her new relationship with it just before the Ceremony: "I used to think of my body as an instrument... for the accomplishment of my will... Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, she shape of a pear" (83). The dystopian hypothesis is thus internalized, made flesh, at the core of her womanhood even if it is restricted by the patriarcal state. The fantasy displayed in the neologisms and portmanteau words invented by the regime is camivalesque and is counterbalanced by Offred’s musings on the altered meaning of words, and on the possibility of creating feminine counterparts such as "sororize" (21). The games of Scrabble are not only to be interpreted as sexual encounters running parallel with the Ceremony, and do not only display metonymies of Offred’s situation, but enact the male/female contest for the mastery of language. It is an ambiguous, ironical struggle in which each of the partners is able to win, but also allows his opponent to win some of the games.

8The feminist dimension of the dystopia has been explored in detail by Coral Ann Howells, and a number of critics. Gilead is seen by a young woman educated during the rise of the feminist movement in which her mother was an activist. The more radical, male rejecting tendencies are embodied in her friend Moira. The different hypotheses that have been suggested concerning the chronology of Offred’s life in order to establish the referential background show that it covers successive feminist attitudes from the sixties to the eighties.

9In The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood has stretched to their ultimate, hideous and absurd consequences some of the questions which were very much in the foreground at the time when her book was published, and she has also combined apparently opposite attitudes which were rife in the United States in order to show that they could be combined to victimise its citizens. The Berlin wall is echoed in the Gilead/Harvard wall and was still the metonymy of threatening warfare between East and West, and of the risk of a nuclear war, with all its consequences. Pollution, biological war, mutations in viruses were also a threat. One of the most controversial topics was that of surrogate motherhood because no legal or even ethic frame existed. Margaret Atwood has combined this extreme claim for the free use of one’s body, with the pro-family, anti-abortion, anti-Equal Rights Amendment campaigns of the New Right and fundamentalist sects in the United States. Superimposing the sanction of literal Bible reading on an extreme feminist claim shows that such synthesis is possible and could turn all the preceding achievement of women’s movements against them. The central hypothesis of institutionalised surrogate motherhood is exposed as hideous, absurd and yet possible. The feminist background involves:

the emergence of ’second wave’ North American feminism and... the changing climate when Women’s liberation was becoming a political issue.... the shift away from private experience to the recognition of the relatedness between domestic and social structures... (Howells 1996 14)

10Striking similarities of outlook with Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous have been extensively explored, which situates the feminist values of The Handmaid’s Tale within the range of very contemporary and complex outlooks.

11However, there are significant departures from a mere feminist dystopia: Gilead is seen from the viewpoint of the subject. It is a hair-raising account of how it would feel for the heroine if... It certainly is easier for dystopia than utopia to be seen from the point of view of the subject rather than the object. If we remember Thomas More’s Utopia, no character is developed or made to convey what it feels like living in a perfect society in spite of ironies concerning XVIth century England. Perfect harmony and happiness tend to be static and uninteresting so that More concentrates on the object, the manner in which his society is operated to achieve its aim. In The Handmaid’s Tale the takeover is broadly sketched but we know nothing of how and where decisions are made, or people judged and sentenced. Atwood, with metahistorical irony, causes Pieixoto to regret that Offred did not include "even twenty pages or so of printout from Waterford’s private computer" (322). It is a clear indication that the organisation of the dystopian state was not the subject of the novel, and that the surviving patriarcal science misses the point of the narrative altogether by concentrating on the collection of objective facts where none can be gained, and by failing to realize that the horror of such an experience is what matters in Offred’s narrative. We do not know either how and when the downfall of Gilead happened. The conference which takes place in northern Canada belongs to a society in which women are no longer silenced and scholars of Indian origin debate with scholars from the old core of the empire. Yet such a society has preserved all the germs of gender and race discrimination, and closely resembles the present apparently liberal western democracies. By depicting only terrible things that have happened or are still happening, Atwood brings her warning of such dangers much closer to the bone.

12But Coral Ann Howells stresses the important point that Atwood, who certainly writes from a feminist background while maintaining a critical independence from various groups:

has speculated beyond the issues addressed by the feminist movement with her awkward and daring questions, not only about relations between women and men, but about relations between women and women" (1998 17).

13It seems to me that Margaret Atwood’s is a very personal and passionately independent form of feminism, which is part of the more general exploration of what she calls elsewhere ’power politics’ defined in The Handmaid’s Tale as "who can own whom, who can do what to whom, and get away with it, even as far as death." (144) It is striking that the definition, like that of the four basic victim positions in Survival, is not gendered and is not even restricted to mankind as witness Surfacing or the disposal of Offred’s cat. Feminism is then part of a humanist attitude insisting that the human being is the measure and that any threat to his/her integrity is evil. The Handmaid’s Tale carefully keeps clear of manicheism, all the characters are victims, including the Commanders and the Wives who embody the first basic victim position, that of flatly denying fact in order to retain privileges. But Wives can be hanged and the Commander comes to a sticky end. Conversely, women such as the Aunts are victimizers who try to brainwash the Handmaids into the second victim position in which they accept the role because they "explain this as... the Will of God, the Dictates of Biology, ... the necessity decreed by History" (Atwood 1972a 37). Off red, like all Margaret Atwood’s heroines, progresses from position one to position four of the victim: she first "plays the sedulous ape" as William Golding once said, trying to convince herself that " [hers] is a position of honour, " thus accepting Aunt Lydia’s aphorisms as part of a survival strategy. Then she proceeds to the second victim position when she accepts her role in the Ceremony "nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for" (105). At the same time, acknowledging her responsibility announces the next victim position which can refuse the role. But here, as an unreliable narrator, Offred acknowledges more responsibility than she could have because no real choice had been offered. Then by establishing the landmarks of her dispossession and imprisonment, she becomes increasingly subversive, she breaks free from Gilead, first in the "Night" episodes, then in her secret meetings with the Commander when she is able to recover some power and finally in her affair with Nick, which denies the power of Gilead. Moira and even Nick, despite his ambiguity, also exemplify the third position. As for Offred, the existence of her recorded story is proof that she reached, maybe only for a short while, position four, the position of a creative nonvictim. It has been pointed out that her real power is that of language (York 1990, Johnson 1996, Stein 1996, Ventura 1998). Her storytelling which has reached us then becomes her central act of rebellion and her supreme power. It has been suggested that her story is finally controlled and distorted by its male editors, Pieixoto and Wade, even to the extent of providing a title for it, complete with a machoist and lewd pun. But we must remain aware that calculated narrative deception is operating permanently. Peixoto and Wade as well as the Gileadian scholars are part of the fiction and ultimately controlled, like Offred’s narrative, by the implied author who certainly would not allow Offred’s tale to be altered out of recognition.

14The "Historical Notes" also suggest that the order imposed upon the narrative sections is arbitrary and can be rearranged by a reader engaging in creative writing. True enough, the analepses concerning her former life can be placed differently and some narrative units seem to have been interrupted: the section beginning with "Love? said the commander" (237) is an obvious continuation of the discussion ending abruptly with Offred’s question about "falling in love" (231) in the preceding chapter. I have suggested that the novel is not only open-ended with Offred’s fate remaining unknown and an unanswered final question but also partly aleatory. It tallies with similar strategies of feminist and postmodern writers. But again we must beware of taking this intellectual game too literally: its possibility is more theoretical than real as it is doubtful whether the delivered message or the storytelling would be greatly improved by altering the narrative strategies of a master storyteller.

15In spite of the seriousness of its warnings this novel is also an uproarious comedy in which the face value of statements is constantly subverted by humour, irony and fantasy. Wole Soyinka once said that the writer is the sensitive point of his/her society. Atwood constantly pricks the bubbles of self-deception and exposes what really lies behind high-sounding theory. The two contradictory visions of woman’s situation in society, whether feminist or New Right and fundamentalist, come back like boomerangs to hit those who profess them. Offred comments with almost the same words on Serena Joy’s and her own mother’s absurd predicament when they are both caught at their own game: " [Serena Joy] doesn’t make speeches any more. She has become speechless. She stays in her home but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word." (56) Offred mentally jibes at her mother: "You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies." (137)4 There is more than one meaning to it." (71) Dissonance is a permanent device underlining the distance between reality and the words used to describe it as a sign of human perversity but perhaps even more human folly and crankiness. Euphemisms can cover up and institutionalize abominations as in the case of the Ceremony or Salvagings, or make capital offences out of previously legal abortion or tolerated homosexuality, now called Gender Treachery. It holds up to ridicule man’s power to falsify reality. Man can be made to countenance the most absurd attitudes, but laughter is there because Offred is aware of the situation and mocks it as a means of retaining her sanity. The human being is seen as a tragi-comic figure tossed between absurdity and sanity, and the reader is drawn into carnival fantasy.

16The intertextuality of The Handmaid’s Tale is extraordinarily complex. Many forms of writing are parodied such as diaries, fairy-tales, epistolary novels, romance, metahistory, metafiction, even Harlequin formula. Those alternative readings have been convincingly explored. Perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale ought finally to be called a Protean novel, Proteus being the prophetic old man of the sea in Greek mythology who knew all things past, present and future but who disliked telling them; he had to be captured but even then he would try to escape by assuming all sorts of strange appearances. But if you held him strongly enough he would ultimately deliver his answer. The challenge of The Handmaid’s Tale is somewhat similar, the text resists attempts to pin it down, it is a feminist dystopia but it cannot be reduced to this definition. If you wrestle with it, it will give you an astonishingly clear answer concerning all forms of totalitarianism when you contrast it with the lability of the novel. But the answer becomes more qualified for relationships between individuals. Men and women are involved in the power game, they attempt to dominate each other, and to evade the other’s attempts to do the same. Is it then a substitute for fate, or a form of determinism? Although a Darwinian situation appears to be prevalent most of the time, in the present novel perhaps more than in the preceding ones, the human being seems to be able to achieve at least intervals of freedom from it in selfless moments of friendship and love, but also in the working of imagination which makes very original use of the language of fantasy by turning it into an instrument of knowledge rather than escape, into a shortcut exploding appearances and bridging to some extent the space separating language and fiction from reality.