SOURCE: “Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Resistance Through Narrating,” in English Studies, Vol. 76, No. 5, September, 1995, pp. 455-67.

In the following essay, Staels examines modes of resistance and creative self-expression in the language and poetic imagery of Offred's narrative in The Handmaid's Tale. According to Staels, “In a society that censors aesthetic speech, Offred's poetic discourse reactivates the lost potential of language and the conditions for the production of meaning.”

In the futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood presents a dystopian vision of a world in which the American neo-conservatives and the New Christian Right or New Puritans of the 1980s have seized power in a totalitarian theocratic republic named after the biblical land of Gilead. Like the New England Puritans of the seventeenth century, the rulers of Gilead establish a theocratic state in the area surrounding the city of Boston, Massachusetts, in the year...