How Does The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Explore the Commodification of Women’s Bodies?
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale explores the commodification of women’s bodies through the systematic reduction of women to their reproductive functions within the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead. The novel demonstrates how women’s bodies become state property, stripped of autonomy and transformed into vessels for procreation to serve the regime’s demographic agenda. Through the protagonist Offred’s experiences as a Handmaid, Atwood illustrates how Gilead’s patriarchal structure transforms women into commodities valued solely for their fertility, while simultaneously controlling their sexuality, stripping their identities, and reducing them to biological functions. The text reveals that this commodification operates through ritualized sexual exploitation, color-coded classification systems, and the complete erasure of women’s individual rights, ultimately presenting a cautionary tale about the dangers of treating human bodies as resources to be controlled and exploited by authoritarian power structures.
What Is the Historical Context Behind Women’s Commodification in The Handmaid’s Tale?
The historical context of The Handmaid’s Tale draws from real-world instances of reproductive control and women’s oppression across various cultures and time periods. Margaret Atwood has consistently stated that every element of Gilead’s system has historical precedent, making the novel’s dystopia disturbingly plausible (Atwood, 1986). The narrative was published in 1985 during a period of increasing conservatism in North America, particularly regarding women’s reproductive rights and the rise of religious fundamentalism. Atwood’s inspiration came from multiple sources, including the decline in Caucasian birth rates in North America, totalitarian regimes throughout history, and particularly the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which dramatically restricted women’s rights virtually overnight (Beauchamp, 2018).
The novel reflects historical patterns of controlling women’s bodies that span from ancient civilizations to modern times. Throughout history, women’s reproductive capacity has been regulated by religious institutions, governments, and social structures that view fertility as a resource to be managed rather than a personal choice. The practice of forcing women into reproductive servitude has precedents in slavery systems, where enslaved women were forced to bear children to increase their enslavers’ wealth and labor force. Additionally, the twentieth century witnessed numerous examples of state control over reproduction, from forced sterilization programs in Nazi Germany and the United States to coercive population control policies in various nations (Kaplan, 1990). Atwood synthesizes these historical realities to create Gilead’s system, demonstrating that the commodification of women’s bodies is not merely fictional speculation but rather an extrapolation of persistent historical patterns that continue to threaten women’s autonomy in contemporary society.
How Does Gilead’s Social Structure Facilitate Women’s Commodification?
Gilead’s social structure facilitates women’s commodification through a rigid hierarchical system that categorizes women based on their reproductive utility and social function. The regime divides women into distinct classes, each identified by specific colored clothing that signifies their role and value within society. Handmaids wear red, symbolizing fertility and their function as reproductive vessels; Wives wear blue, representing their status as commanders’ spouses; Marthas wear green, indicating their domestic service roles; Econowives wear striped dresses, signifying their lower-class status; and Aunts wear brown, marking their position as enforcers of Gilead’s ideology (Atwood, 1986). This color-coded system immediately transforms women into visual commodities whose worth is determined entirely by their assigned function rather than their individual humanity, creating a system where women’s bodies are literally marked and categorized for specific purposes.
This hierarchical structure operates through systematic dehumanization that strips women of their individual identities and transforms them into interchangeable units serving state purposes. Handmaids lose their birth names and instead adopt patronymic designations that literally mean “of” their assigned Commander, such as “Offred” meaning “Of Fred,” reducing them to possessions rather than autonomous individuals (Atwood, 1986). The social structure also eliminates women’s economic independence, legal rights, and access to literacy, ensuring complete dependence on the patriarchal system. Women cannot own property, hold jobs, access their own money, or even read, which historically have been primary mechanisms for maintaining women’s subordination. The regime justifies this structure through selective biblical interpretation, particularly drawing from the story of Rachel and Bilhah in Genesis, where a fertile servant bears children for her infertile mistress (Neuman, 2006). By institutionalizing this biblical narrative, Gilead creates a theocratic framework that presents women’s commodification as divinely ordained rather than politically constructed, making resistance appear not merely illegal but sacrilegious. This intersection of religious authority and state power creates a particularly insidious form of control that colonizes both women’s bodies and their spiritual lives.
What Role Does the Ceremony Play in Commodifying Women’s Bodies?
The Ceremony represents the most explicit manifestation of women’s commodification in The Handmaid’s Tale, functioning as state-sanctioned ritualized rape disguised as religious duty. During the Ceremony, the Handmaid lies between the Wife’s legs while the Commander has intercourse with her, creating a grotesque physical representation of the Handmaid as merely a reproductive vessel rather than a human being (Atwood, 1986). This ritualized sexual act occurs monthly during the Handmaid’s fertile period, transforming intimate human sexuality into a mechanical reproductive transaction devoid of pleasure, consent, or emotional connection. The positioning of the three bodies during the Ceremony literally embodies the reduction of the Handmaid to a detachable womb, her upper body held by the Wife while the Commander uses her lower body for insemination purposes. Atwood describes the experience through Offred’s perspective as deeply dehumanizing, with the protagonist mentally disassociating from her body during the act, demonstrating the psychological violence inherent in treating women’s bodies as reproductive commodities.
The language surrounding the Ceremony further reinforces this commodification by sanitizing sexual violence through religious and euphemistic terminology. The regime refuses to call the Ceremony rape, instead framing it as a sacred duty and religious obligation that serves God’s will and the nation’s survival. This linguistic reframing mirrors historical and contemporary attempts to justify sexual violence against women through religious, cultural, or nationalist rhetoric. The Handmaids are taught by the Aunts to view their bodies as “national resources” and their reproductive capacity as a privilege that gives them purpose in Gilead’s society (Atwood, 1986). This indoctrination attempts to make women complicit in their own commodification by presenting exploitation as empowerment and servitude as service. The public nature of fertility also commodifies women’s bodies, as pregnancies are celebrated with public displays, birth is attended by all the Handmaids in the district, and successful reproduction earns temporary privileges. However, these rewards only reinforce the transactional nature of women’s bodies in Gilead, where human worth is calculated based on reproductive output. The system creates what scholars have termed “reproductive slavery,” where women’s bodies become property of the state, forced into sexual servitude for procreative purposes without consent or compensation beyond basic survival (Cooper, 2017).
How Does Gilead Control Women’s Sexuality Beyond Reproduction?
Gilead’s control over women’s sexuality extends far beyond reproduction, encompassing comprehensive regulation of female desire, pleasure, and intimate relationships. The regime systematically eliminates all forms of female sexuality that do not serve reproductive purposes, prohibiting masturbation, homosexual relationships, romantic love, and sexual pleasure for women. Handmaids are taught that their bodies exist solely for procreation, not pleasure, and any expression of sexual desire or enjoyment is severely punished as evidence of moral corruption (Atwood, 1986). The regime’s ideology presents female sexual pleasure as dangerous and subversive, capable of undermining the social order by asserting women’s autonomy over their own physical experiences. This suppression of female sexuality reinforces women’s commodification by denying them ownership of their own sensory and emotional experiences, reducing their bodies to objects that serve others’ purposes rather than subjects capable of experiencing pleasure and desire.
The surveillance state that Gilead creates ensures constant monitoring of women’s bodies and behaviors to prevent unauthorized sexual activity or expressions of desire. Women are forbidden from being alone with men other than their assigned Commanders, and movements are strictly controlled through a pass system that requires approval for all travel. The Eyes, Gilead’s secret police force, maintain constant surveillance to detect any deviation from prescribed sexual norms, including adultery, homosexuality, or even private conversations between women that might foster intimacy (Atwood, 1986). This panoptic control system transforms every space into a potential site of surveillance, ensuring that women internalize their own policing and self-regulate their thoughts, desires, and expressions. The regime also controls women’s appearance, mandating modest clothing that conceals the female form and eliminates individual expression through fashion or personal style. Handmaids wear wings beside their faces that literally limit their peripheral vision, symbolizing the regime’s efforts to control not just their bodies but also what they see and experience in the world. This comprehensive control over women’s sexuality serves the dual purpose of maintaining patriarchal power and preventing women from forming bonds of intimacy or solidarity that might enable resistance. By isolating women from each other and from their own desires, Gilead ensures that women remain commodities rather than autonomous agents capable of collective action or self-determination (Stillman & Johnson, 1994).
What Is the Significance of Fertility and Infertility in Women’s Commodification?
Fertility and infertility serve as the primary determinants of women’s value in Gilead, creating a hierarchy of worth based entirely on reproductive capacity. The novel’s premise establishes that environmental contamination and sexually transmitted diseases have caused widespread infertility, making fertile women extremely rare and therefore extremely valuable as commodities (Atwood, 1986). This scarcity of fertility transforms reproductively capable women into precious resources that the state must control and exploit to ensure societal survival. Handmaids represent the ultimate commodity in this system, their fertility making them simultaneously valuable and vulnerable, protected yet imprisoned. The regime’s obsession with fertility reduces women to their biological functions, creating a society where a woman’s entire identity and worth derive from her ability to bear children rather than her intelligence, skills, creativity, or humanity.
The treatment of infertile women in Gilead further illustrates how commodification operates through reproductive capacity. Women who prove infertile face catastrophic consequences, including being declared Unwomen and sent to the Colonies to clean toxic waste, a sentence equivalent to slow death through radiation poisoning (Atwood, 1986). This brutal treatment reveals that women’s commodification in Gilead is conditional—women have value only insofar as they can serve the state’s reproductive agenda, and those who cannot fulfill this function become disposable surplus to be eliminated. Interestingly, the regime never questions male fertility, always attributing reproductive failure to women despite medical evidence that male infertility contributes equally to conception difficulties. This ideological refusal to acknowledge male infertility demonstrates that women’s commodification serves patriarchal power maintenance rather than rational demographic policy (Staels, 2005). The novel’s revelation that many Commanders are infertile and the regime’s secret encouragement of Handmaids to have intercourse with other men to achieve pregnancy exposes the hypocrisy underlying Gilead’s system. Despite claiming religious and moral justification, the regime’s primary concern is producing children through any means necessary, even if those means contradict their stated values, proving that women’s commodification is fundamentally about control and exploitation rather than sincere religious belief or demographic necessity.
How Does Language and Naming Function in Women’s Commodification?
Language and naming serve as powerful tools for women’s commodification in The Handmaid’s Tale, systematically erasing individual identity and replacing it with designations that emphasize ownership and function. The renaming of Handmaids represents perhaps the most explicit linguistic commodification, as women lose their birth names and receive patronymic identifiers that signal possession by their assigned Commanders. The prefix “Of” in names like “Offred,” “Ofglen,” and “Ofwarren” grammatically transforms women into objects belonging to men, linguistically eliminating their status as independent subjects (Atwood, 1986). This naming practice echoes historical instances of women losing their surnames upon marriage and enslaved people being named after their enslavers, demonstrating how language has consistently functioned to reinforce power hierarchies and erase subjugated people’s identities. The loss of original names also severs women’s connections to their past lives, families, and former selves, facilitating their psychological transformation from autonomous individuals into state-owned reproductive vessels.
The regime carefully controls all language related to women’s bodies and reproductive functions, creating euphemistic terminology that obscures the violence of commodification. Terms like “the Ceremony” sanitize ritualized rape, while “posting” describes the assignment of Handmaids to Commanders’ households as though women were parcels being delivered rather than human beings being forcibly relocated (Atwood, 1986). The language of religious duty and national service frames exploitation as honor, with phrases like “serving the nation” and “fulfilling God’s plan” disguising the reality of sexual slavery and forced pregnancy. The Aunts, who train Handmaids in proper submission, constantly employ this euphemistic language to indoctrinate women into accepting their commodification as natural and necessary. They describe fertility as a “gift” and pregnancy as a “privilege,” inverting the reality that women’s reproductive capacity has become a curse that strips them of all rights and autonomy (Neuman, 2006). The regime also bans reading and writing for women, eliminating their access to alternative narratives and limiting their ability to articulate resistance or imagine different possibilities. This linguistic control extends to prohibiting certain words entirely, making it impossible to name experiences of oppression and thereby making those experiences harder to recognize and resist. Offred’s internal narrative frequently demonstrates the power of secret language, as she mentally preserves forbidden words and her real name, maintaining a private linguistic space of resistance. This underground preservation of authentic language suggests that while commodification operates partly through linguistic control, language also contains the potential for resistance and the reconstruction of subjugated identities (Stillman & Johnson, 1994).
What Psychological Effects Does Commodification Have on Women?
The psychological effects of commodification on women in The Handmaid’s Tale manifest through dissociation, loss of self, and the internalization of objectification. Offred frequently describes experiencing her body as separate from herself, viewing it as a container or vehicle rather than an integrated part of her identity. During the Ceremony, she mentally removes herself from the experience, describing how “I am not here. I am elsewhere” (Atwood, 1986). This dissociation represents a psychological survival mechanism in response to the trauma of having one’s body used as a commodity against one’s will. The splitting between mind and body allows women to psychologically distance themselves from the violations their bodies endure, creating a mental space where their sense of self can persist despite physical objectification. However, this dissociation also reflects the success of Gilead’s commodification project, as women begin to view their own bodies as objects separate from their consciousness, internalizing the regime’s dehumanizing perspective.
The erosion of identity and sense of self represents another profound psychological consequence of commodification. Women in Gilead experience what scholars have termed “identity death,” where their former selves are systematically erased and replaced with their assigned roles (Cooper, 2017). Offred struggles to remember her previous life, her real name, and her former identity, finding that memories become increasingly distant and unreal as she adapts to her existence as a Handmaid. The regime deliberately cultivates this amnesia through isolation, renaming, and the prohibition against discussing the past. Women are taught to surrender their individual desires, opinions, and aspirations, replacing them with complete submission to their assigned functions. This psychological colonization creates what psychologists term “learned helplessness,” where individuals subjected to inescapable conditions cease attempting resistance and accept their powerlessness. Some Handmaids, like Janine, experience complete psychological breakdown, their identities fragmenting under the stress of commodification and abuse. Others, like Offred’s predecessor who hanged herself, choose death over continued existence as a commodity, viewing suicide as the only remaining form of bodily autonomy. The pervasive depression, anxiety, and dissociation among Gilead’s women demonstrate that commodification inflicts severe psychological harm that extends far beyond physical exploitation, damaging the fundamental sense of self and human dignity (Stillman & Johnson, 1994).
How Do Women Resist Commodification in the Novel?
Despite the oppressive totality of Gilead’s system, women in The Handmaid’s Tale engage in various forms of resistance that challenge their commodification and assert their humanity. Small acts of defiance, what scholars term “everyday resistance,” allow women to maintain their sense of self and agency within an almost entirely controlled environment. Offred’s preservation of her real name, which she refuses to reveal to readers until near the novel’s end, represents a private act of resistance that maintains her connection to her former identity (Atwood, 1986). She also tells herself stories, mentally reconstructs her past, and maintains hope for reunion with her daughter and husband, all of which preserve her psychological autonomy despite physical captivity. These internal resistances demonstrate that even when the body is commodified, consciousness can remain partially free, creating spaces of mental rebellion against totalitarian control.
More explicit forms of resistance include the underground network known as Mayday, which works to smuggle women out of Gilead to Canada, and the development of forbidden relationships and communication between women. Ofglen reveals herself as a member of the resistance to Offred, demonstrating that networks of solidarity persist despite the regime’s efforts to isolate women from one another (Atwood, 1986). The illicit relationship between Offred and Nick, while complicated by power dynamics, represents a reclaiming of sexuality for pleasure and emotional connection rather than merely reproduction, challenging the regime’s commodification of women’s bodies. Moira’s escape from the Red Center, though she is ultimately recaptured and forced into prostitution at Jezebel’s, demonstrates audacious resistance that inspires other women and proves that Gilead’s control is not absolute. Even Offred’s mother, mentioned through flashbacks as a feminist activist, represents an earlier generation’s resistance to women’s commodification. The novel’s ambiguous ending, which leaves Offred’s ultimate fate uncertain as she enters a van that might lead to escape or execution, suggests that resistance persists even when outcomes remain unknown. The “Historical Notes” epilogue reveals that the resistance eventually succeeded in overthrowing Gilead, validating the significance of even small acts of defiance. These various forms of resistance demonstrate that commodification, while powerful and destructive, cannot entirely eliminate human agency, dignity, and the desire for freedom (Neuman, 2006).
What Are the Parallels Between Gilead and Contemporary Women’s Issues?
The commodification of women’s bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale resonates disturbingly with contemporary issues surrounding reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and women’s status in society. Debates over abortion access, contraception, and reproductive healthcare often center on who controls women’s bodies—women themselves or governmental, religious, or medical institutions. Restrictions on abortion and reproductive healthcare effectively treat women’s bodies as state property whose reproductive capacity must be regulated, echoing Gilead’s ideology that women’s fertility belongs to society rather than to individual women (Beauchamp, 2018). The increasing legislative restrictions on reproductive rights in various regions, including mandatory waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, and abortion bans even in cases of rape or medical necessity, demonstrate continued efforts to control women’s reproductive functions. These policies reflect the persistent view of women primarily as potential mothers whose reproductive capacity must be managed by external authorities rather than autonomous individuals with the right to make their own healthcare decisions.
The commodification of women’s bodies also manifests in contemporary commercial surrogacy arrangements, sex trafficking, and the marketing of women’s appearance and sexuality. Commercial surrogacy, where women carry pregnancies for others in exchange for payment, raises complex questions about whether reproductive capacity can be ethically commodified even when women ostensibly consent (Kaplan, 1990). Critics argue that economic desperation often drives surrogacy decisions, particularly in developing nations, creating systems where wealthy individuals or couples essentially purchase access to poor women’s reproductive capacity. Sex trafficking and prostitution similarly commodify women’s bodies, reducing them to sexual objects for others’ use, though debates continue about whether sex work can ever be truly voluntary under patriarchal capitalism. The beauty and fashion industries’ emphasis on women’s appearance, anti-aging products, and cosmetic surgery creates markets that profit from women’s insecurity about their bodies, treating female bodies as projects requiring constant improvement and management. Social media and digital culture have intensified these dynamics, with platforms enabling unprecedented surveillance and judgment of women’s bodies while simultaneously creating new markets for influencers who monetize their appearance and sexuality. These contemporary parallels suggest that Atwood’s dystopian vision, rather than being purely speculative fiction, extrapolates existing tendencies within patriarchal capitalism to their logical extremes, warning against complacency about women’s rights and bodily autonomy (Stillman & Johnson, 1994).
How Does the Novel Address Intersectionality in Women’s Commodification?
The Handmaid’s Tale engages with intersectionality by demonstrating how race, class, religion, and reproductive status intersect to create different experiences of commodification and oppression for different women. The novel reveals that Gilead’s system did not oppress all women equally; rather, it created hierarchies where some women wielded limited power over other women. Wives, typically from elite backgrounds before Gilead’s establishment, maintain relative privilege through their marriages to Commanders, though they too experience commodification through forced participation in the Ceremony and loss of independence (Atwood, 1986). Aunts, who train and discipline Handmaids, occupy positions of authority within the women’s sphere, demonstrating how patriarchal systems often co-opt some women to enforce other women’s subordination. This hierarchical structure prevents women from forming unified resistance, as their different positions within the system create conflicts of interest and differential access to resources and safety.
The novel also addresses racial dimensions of commodification, though critics have noted that Atwood could have explored this aspect more thoroughly. Gilead’s regime forcibly relocated “Children of Ham,” their euphemism for Black people, to “National Homelands” or executed them, revealing how the theocracy combined gendered oppression with racial genocide (Atwood, 1986). This racial purging demonstrates that Gilead’s vision of reproductive futurity centered specifically on white reproduction, treating white women’s bodies as valuable commodities while viewing women of color as disposable or threatening. The novel’s focus on predominantly white characters and limited exploration of racial dynamics has prompted scholarly discussion about the intersections of racial and gendered commodification. Some critics argue that this limitation reflects the novel’s origins in 1980s feminism, which often centered white women’s experiences while marginalizing women of color’s perspectives. The text also briefly mentions how the regime persecuted religious minorities, including Jews and Catholics, and executed gender and sexual minorities, particularly gay men termed “gender traitors.” These intersecting oppressions demonstrate that Gilead’s commodification of women occurred within a broader totalitarian project that violently enforced racial, religious, and sexual conformity. The novel thus suggests that women’s commodification cannot be understood in isolation from other systems of oppression, as patriarchal control over women’s bodies intersects with racism, religious persecution, homophobia, and class exploitation to create complex hierarchies of power and vulnerability (Staels, 2005).
What Literary Techniques Does Atwood Use to Depict Commodification?
Margaret Atwood employs sophisticated literary techniques to convey the commodification of women’s bodies, beginning with her choice of first-person narration from Offred’s perspective. This narrative strategy creates intimacy and immediacy, allowing readers to experience commodification from inside the consciousness of a woman undergoing this process. Offred’s fragmented, non-linear narrative reflects her psychological state and the trauma of commodification, as she struggles to maintain coherent identity and memory under oppressive conditions (Atwood, 1986). The narrative frequently shifts between present experiences and memories of the past, demonstrating how Offred psychologically resists her reduction to a commodity by maintaining connection to her former self. However, the narrative’s limitations—Offred cannot access other characters’ inner lives or provide objective verification of events—also reflect how commodification restricts women’s knowledge and agency, confining them to narrow subjective experiences without broader understanding of the system exploiting them.
Atwood’s use of symbolic imagery powerfully conveys commodification’s dehumanizing effects. The color symbolism of women’s clothing transforms women into visual commodities categorized by function, while the recurring imagery of eyes—both literal and as the name of Gilead’s secret police—suggests constant surveillance and the objectifying male gaze that reduces women to objects to be observed and controlled (Atwood, 1986). The novel frequently employs commercialized language to describe women’s bodies, with terms like “usable” and “viable” borrowed from business and manufacturing contexts, linguistically transforming human beings into products. Atwood also uses irony extensively, particularly in the gap between Gilead’s religious rhetoric and its brutal practices, exposing how language can disguise exploitation as morality. The “Historical Notes” epilogue employs satirical academic discourse to critique how systems of oppression can be studied dispassionately by future generations, suggesting that intellectual distance can function as another form of commodification that treats human suffering as mere data for scholarly analysis. Through these varied literary techniques, Atwood creates a multi-layered exploration of commodification that operates on linguistic, symbolic, structural, and thematic levels, making the novel’s critique both intellectually complex and emotionally devastating (Cooper, 2017).
Conclusion: What Does The Handmaid’s Tale Teach About Women’s Commodification?
The Handmaid’s Tale ultimately teaches that the commodification of women’s bodies represents an ever-present possibility that requires constant vigilance to prevent. Atwood’s dystopian vision demonstrates how quickly rights can be stripped away when totalitarian ideologies combine with technological surveillance, religious fundamentalism, and demographic anxiety. The novel reveals that commodification operates through multiple mechanisms simultaneously—legal structures that deny women rights, religious rhetoric that justifies exploitation, linguistic control that prevents articulation of oppression, social hierarchies that divide women against each other, and psychological conditioning that makes women internalize their objectification (Atwood, 1986). By presenting this comprehensive system, Atwood illustrates that women’s commodification is not incidental or accidental but rather systematically constructed and maintained through institutional power.
The novel’s continued relevance decades after publication demonstrates that the dangers it warns against remain urgent contemporary concerns. The persistence of debates over reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and women’s roles in society suggests that the ideological foundations of Gilead exist within current political and social movements, requiring active resistance to prevent their full realization. Atwood’s work teaches that the commodification of women’s bodies begins long before dramatic totalitarian takeovers, manifesting first in subtle erosions of rights, gradual limitations on autonomy, and incremental increases in control disguised as protection or morality. The novel thus serves as both warning and call to action, demonstrating that preserving women’s humanity and autonomy requires recognizing and resisting all forms of commodification, from the dramatic to the mundane, from the explicitly violent to the rhetorically disguised. Ultimately, The Handmaid’s Tale insists that women’s bodies are not commodities, resources, or vessels but rather integral aspects of full human beings deserving of respect, autonomy, and dignity—a message that remains as necessary today as when Atwood first articulated it (Beauchamp, 2018).
References
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Beauchamp, Z. (2018). The Handmaid’s Tale, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/22/17261524/handmaids-tale-season-2-margaret-atwood-donald-trump
Cooper, L. (2017). “The Handmaid’s Tale”: Reproductive slavery and the feminist dystopia. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28(1), 38-56.
Kaplan, A. E. (1990). Motherhood and representation: From postwar Freudian figurations to postmodernism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema (pp. 142-165). Routledge.
Neuman, S. C. (2006). “Just a backlash”: Margaret Atwood, feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale. University of Toronto Quarterly, 75(3), 857-868.
Staels, H. (2005). Atwood’s specular narrative: The Handmaid’s Tale and the dystopian tradition. Orbis Litterarum, 60(6), 470-483.
Stillman, P. G., & Johnson, A. S. (1994). Identity, complicity, and resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale. Utopian Studies, 5(2), 70-86.