What Does Margaret Atwood Suggest About the Complexity of Female Complicity in The Handmaid’s Tale?

Margaret Atwood suggests that female complicity in The Handmaid’s Tale is a complex phenomenon driven by survival instincts, limited choices within oppressive systems, internalized patriarchal values, and strategic calculations about power and safety rather than simple betrayal or moral failing. Through characters like the Aunts, Serena Joy, the Wives, and even the Handmaids themselves, Atwood demonstrates that women participate in maintaining Gilead’s patriarchal structure for various reasons including self-preservation, access to limited power, ideological conviction, coercion, and lack of viable alternatives. The novel reveals that oppressive systems deliberately create conditions where some women benefit from or appear to benefit from collaborating against other women, strategically dividing women by class, fertility, and function to prevent solidarity that might challenge male power. Atwood’s nuanced portrayal refuses to simplify female complicity as either pure villainy or complete victimhood, instead exploring the moral ambiguity, impossible choices, and psychological mechanisms that enable women to participate in their own and other women’s oppression while simultaneously being oppressed themselves.

How Do the Aunts Represent Institutionalized Female Complicity?

The Aunts represent the most visible and institutionalized form of female complicity in Gilead, functioning as the regime’s primary agents for indoctrinating, controlling, and disciplining other women. Aunt Lydia, the most prominent Aunt character, conducts brutal training sessions at the Red Center where women are conditioned to accept their roles as Handmaids through violence, humiliation, and ideological manipulation (Atwood, 1985). The Aunts employ cattle prods to torture women, orchestrate public shaming sessions, and use psychological warfare to break women’s spirits and resistance. They teach women to police their own thoughts and desires, to accept rape as religious duty, and to view their subjugation as privilege compared to being sent to the Colonies or executed. The Aunts’ authority depends entirely on their willingness to enforce patriarchal control over other women, making them simultaneously powerful within the system and utterly dependent on maintaining it for their survival and status.

Atwood’s portrayal of the Aunts reveals how oppressive systems recruit members of subjugated groups to enforce their own oppression by offering limited power, relative safety, and survival advantages that create incentives for collaboration. The Aunts have escaped the worst fates available to women in Gilead—they are not raped monthly like Handmaids, do not face the drudgery of Marthas, and have authority that other women lack (Stillman & Johnson, 1994). Their position demonstrates a calculated exchange: enforce patriarchal control in return for exemption from its worst manifestations and access to positions of authority otherwise denied to women. However, Atwood complicates this portrayal by suggesting that even the Aunts’ power is conditional, limited, and ultimately controlled by the Commanders who could eliminate them if they ceased being useful. The Aunts’ literacy, for instance, is functional rather than full—they can read biblical passages necessary for indoctrination but remain constrained by the same system they enforce. This complexity suggests that female complicity often operates through cooptation where oppressive systems grant limited privileges to some women in exchange for maintaining control over all women, creating hierarchies that prevent collective resistance.

What Does Serena Joy Reveal About Ideological Complicity?

Serena Joy represents the tragic irony of women who advocate for patriarchal ideology and traditional gender roles, only to discover that such systems ultimately subjugate all women regardless of their initial position or loyalty to conservative values. Before Gilead’s rise, Serena Joy was a televangelist and gospel singer who promoted domesticity, traditional family values, and women’s return to the home (Atwood, 1985). She advocated for precisely the kind of society that Gilead claims to embody, making her complicit in creating the ideological foundations for her own oppression. Once Gilead consolidates power, however, Serena Joy finds herself trapped in the very system she helped construct: forbidden from reading even her own Bible, barred from speaking publicly or singing, confined to domestic space, and forced to participate in the ritualized rape of Handmaids who might bear the children she cannot. Her story illustrates how patriarchal ideology uses women as advocates and enforcers, only to betray them once power is secured.

Atwood uses Serena Joy to explore how women become complicit through genuine ideological conviction rather than merely strategic calculation or coercion, revealing the dangers of internalized patriarchy and conservative gender ideology. Serena Joy apparently believed that traditional gender roles would elevate and protect women through wifehood and motherhood, not recognizing that ideologies privileging women’s reproductive and domestic functions ultimately reduce women to these functions and strip away all other forms of identity, agency, and value (Neuman, 2006). Her bitterness and resentment toward Offred reflects her realization that she has been betrayed by the ideology she promoted, though she cannot articulate this understanding or imagine alternatives to the system she helped create. The character demonstrates how women who support patriarchal structures often believe they will be exceptions to its oppressive logic or that their class, race, or position will protect them from its worst consequences. Atwood suggests that ideological complicity is particularly insidious because it operates through genuine belief rather than obvious coercion, making it more difficult to recognize and resist. Serena Joy’s tragedy warns that women who advocate for restricting other women’s rights ultimately endanger their own freedom, as patriarchal systems do not reward female advocates with genuine power or protection but rather use them until they are no longer useful.

How Do the Wives Demonstrate Complicity Through Privilege?

The Wives as a class demonstrate how women with relative privilege become complicit in oppressing other women to maintain their advantageous position within hierarchical systems, even when they recognize the injustice and experience their own forms of oppression. The Wives preside over the monthly Ceremony where Handmaids are raped by their husbands, literally positioning themselves as participants in the sexual violence by holding Handmaids between their legs during the ritual (Atwood, 1985). Their participation is required by Gilead’s interpretation of the Rachel and Bilhah story, but their compliance demonstrates how systems of oppression function by implicating those with relative privilege in the subjugation of those with less. The Wives maintain their position through marriage to Commanders, receiving material comfort, social status, and domestic labor from Marthas in exchange for accepting limitations on their own freedom and participating in the oppression of women beneath them in Gilead’s hierarchy.

Atwood reveals the complex psychology of privileged complicity through the Wives’ obvious discomfort with and resentment toward the Ceremony and the Handmaids, suggesting that complicity does not require enthusiasm or moral agreement but merely continued participation despite moral reservations. The Wives clearly resent the Handmaids for their fertility and for their sexual access to the Commanders, directing anger downward toward women with less power rather than upward toward the patriarchal system and the men who created it (Stillman & Johnson, 1994). This misdirected anger serves the regime’s interests by preventing solidarity between Wives and Handmaids who might otherwise recognize their common subjugation. The Wives’ material privileges—nice homes, gardens, domestic help—depend on maintaining the system that oppresses other women, creating incentives to preserve rather than challenge the status quo. Atwood suggests that privilege often produces complicity even among those who recognize injustice, as the costs of resistance appear greater than the benefits of maintaining advantageous position within oppressive structures. The Wives’ situation demonstrates how patriarchal systems strategically distribute privileges to create classes of women invested in maintaining hierarchies that ultimately subordinate all women, preventing unified female resistance that might threaten male power.

What Role Does Survival Play in Female Complicity?

Survival emerges as perhaps the most sympathetic explanation for female complicity in The Handmaid’s Tale, with Atwood demonstrating how oppressive systems create conditions where collaboration becomes necessary for staying alive and protecting loved ones. Offred herself engages in various forms of complicity—performing gratitude for her subjugation, participating in public rituals, maintaining silence about resistance she observes—because the alternatives are death, torture, or exile to the Colonies (Atwood, 1985). Her relationship with the Commander, while transgressive of some rules, represents complicity with his power and her exploitation, yet refusing his invitations would be dangerous and potentially fatal. The novel repeatedly shows how Gilead eliminates meaningful choices, offering women only various degrees of terrible options where the best decision might be compliance that ensures survival for another day. Even small acts of resistance carry enormous risks, making passivity and compliance rational survival strategies rather than moral failures.

Atwood complicates simplistic judgments about collaboration by demonstrating how survival calculations differ based on position, vulnerability, and dependence on others requiring protection. Offred’s memory of her mother, a feminist activist who would likely judge her daughter’s passivity harshly, haunts the narrative precisely because Offred recognizes the gulf between her mother’s theoretical resistance and her own practical survival strategies (Neuman, 2006). The novel asks readers to consider what they would do in similar circumstances, whether they would choose martyrdom or survival, and whether judging others’ survival strategies from positions of safety is fair or meaningful. The Econowives, lower-class women who must serve multiple functions—wife, handmaid, martha—for their husbands, represent perhaps the most constrained position with the fewest options and the most desperate need to comply for survival. Atwood suggests that easy moral judgment about complicity often comes from those who have never faced impossible choices where every option involves some form of collaboration with oppression. The emphasis on survival-driven complicity does not excuse or celebrate collaboration but rather contextualizes it within systems deliberately designed to eliminate meaningful choices and punish resistance with death, making survival itself an act requiring constant negotiation with oppressive power.

How Does the Novel Portray Moments of Female Solidarity Despite Complicity?

Despite the pervasive complicity that characterizes women’s relationships in Gilead, Atwood includes crucial moments of female solidarity and resistance that suggest complicity is often coerced rather than voluntary and that sisterhood remains possible even within systems designed to prevent it. The underground Mayday resistance network represents organized female solidarity working to help women escape Gilead, demonstrating that some women risk everything to resist rather than comply (Atwood, 1985). Ofglen’s revelation of her resistance involvement and her suicide to avoid interrogation shows that women maintain capacity for heroic resistance even when complicity appears universal. More subtly, the novel includes small acts of solidarity: Rita the Martha eventually showing kindness toward Offred, the previous Handmaid’s carved message “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” connecting women across time, and the shopping partner system that, despite its surveillance purpose, sometimes enables brief moments of authentic connection and information sharing.

These moments of solidarity complicate the novel’s portrayal of complicity by suggesting that women’s participation in oppression is often strategic, coerced, or situational rather than reflecting authentic alignment with patriarchal ideology or genuine desire to harm other women. Moira’s multiple escape attempts and eventual presence at Jezebel’s—where she has chosen survival as a prostitute over death or the Colonies—illustrate the complex negotiations women make between resistance and survival, showing that even those who resist ultimately face limitations and may choose forms of complicity that enable continued survival (Howells, 1996). Atwood suggests that Gilead’s elaborate systems of division, surveillance, and punishment exist precisely because women’s solidarity poses existential threat to patriarchal power, requiring constant effort to prevent. The regime must work continuously to maintain female complicity through combinations of incentive, coercion, ideological manipulation, and structural constraint, suggesting that women’s natural inclination might be toward solidarity rather than complicity. The novel thus refuses to present female complicity as inevitable or chosen, instead framing it as something systems must actively produce and maintain against women’s potential for collective resistance.

What Does the Novel Suggest About Judging Female Complicity?

The Handmaid’s Tale ultimately resists easy moral judgment about female complicity, instead inviting readers to understand the structural conditions, psychological mechanisms, and impossible choices that produce collaboration while maintaining that complicity has real consequences for oppressed women. Atwood refuses to completely excuse or condemn characters like the Aunts, Serena Joy, or the Wives, instead presenting their complicity as comprehensible given their circumstances while acknowledging the harm they cause (Stillman & Johnson, 1994). The novel suggests that focusing exclusively on individual women’s choices obscures how patriarchal systems deliberately create conditions for female complicity through strategic distribution of privileges, elimination of alternatives, deployment of violence against resisters, and ideological manipulation that naturalizes oppression. However, understanding structural constraints does not eliminate individual responsibility, as some women—Moira, Ofglen, the Mayday network—choose resistance despite terrible costs, proving that complicity is not inevitable even in the most oppressive circumstances.

The complexity Atwood presents regarding judgment extends to questioning who has authority to judge women’s survival strategies and what purposes such judgment serves. The novel implies that men who created and benefit from patriarchal systems have no legitimate standing to judge how women navigate oppression, while also suggesting that women judging each other’s strategies can reproduce the divisions that serve patriarchal interests (Neuman, 2006). Offred’s own ambivalence about judgment—her understanding of why women comply, her recognition of her own complicity, her refusal to completely condemn even the Aunts—models a nuanced ethical stance that maintains moral seriousness while avoiding self-righteous condemnation. The “Historical Notes” epilogue, where male academics trivialize and misinterpret Offred’s testimony, demonstrates how judgments about women’s experiences under patriarchy can be appropriated and distorted when removed from context and analyzed from positions of power and safety. Atwood suggests that addressing female complicity requires understanding its structural production within patriarchal systems, maintaining space for both accountability and compassion, recognizing that survival is political, and focusing on dismantling systems that create impossible choices rather than primarily blaming individuals who make difficult decisions within constrained circumstances. The novel’s refusal of simple judgment reflects Atwood’s broader feminist project of exploring women’s complex positions within patriarchy without reducing them to either pure victims or simple villains.

Why Does Understanding Female Complicity Matter?

Understanding the complexity of female complicity in The Handmaid’s Tale matters because it reveals crucial insights about how oppressive systems maintain power, how patriarchy strategically divides women, and how resistance movements must address complicity without reproducing hierarchies or judgments that serve oppressive interests. Atwood demonstrates that totalitarian patriarchy cannot function through male force alone but requires recruiting women to enforce, normalize, and reproduce the system’s values and structures (Stillman & Johnson, 1994). Recognizing this dynamic helps explain why women’s movements must address not only male power but also how patriarchal ideology operates through women themselves, including through internalized sexism, competition among women, and investments in hierarchies that provide relative advantages. The novel suggests that effective feminist resistance requires understanding why women collaborate, addressing the structural conditions that produce complicity, and building solidarity across differences rather than simply condemning women who make different choices within oppressive systems.

The contemporary relevance of Atwood’s exploration of female complicity extends beyond historical or fictional dystopias to illuminate ongoing patterns where women participate in limiting other women’s rights, opportunities, and freedoms. Women who oppose abortion rights, support political candidates hostile to women’s equality, enforce beauty standards and sexual double standards, or participate in slut-shaming and victim-blaming represent modern forms of female complicity with patriarchal ideology (Neuman, 2006). Understanding Atwood’s nuanced portrayal helps avoid both the error of ignoring female complicity and the error of focusing disproportionately on it while ignoring that patriarchal systems are created and primarily benefit men. The novel suggests that discussions of female complicity should center questions about what conditions produce it, how systems incentivize collaboration, why some women resist while others comply, and how to build movements that address complicity compassionately while maintaining accountability. By refusing simple answers and easy judgments, The Handmaid’s Tale models the kind of complex ethical thinking necessary for understanding women’s positions within patriarchy and building effective feminist resistance that acknowledges difficult realities while maintaining vision of liberation beyond the impossible choices oppressive systems create.

References

Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland & Stewart.

Howells, C. A. (1996). Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance through narrating. In C. A. Howells (Ed.), Modern novelists: Margaret Atwood (pp. 124-145). Macmillan.

Neuman, S. (2006). “Just a backlash”: Margaret Atwood, feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale. University of Toronto Quarterly, 75(3), 857-868.

Stillman, P. G., & Johnson, A. S. (1994). Identity, complicity, and resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale. Utopian Studies, 5(2), 70-86.