What Does a Postcolonial Reading Reveal About Empire and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale?
A postcolonial reading of The Handmaid’s Tale reveals that Gilead operates as an internal colonizing force that employs familiar imperial strategies of territorial conquest, cultural erasure, bodily control, and hierarchical classification to dominate its population, particularly women and marginalized groups. Margaret Atwood’s novel demonstrates how totalitarian regimes utilize colonization techniques including renaming, displacement, surveillance, and the creation of subjugated classes to maintain power. The text exposes parallels between Gilead’s oppression of women and historical colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples, while also revealing how resistance operates through cultural memory, linguistic subversion, underground networks, and preservation of suppressed identities—strategies that mirror anticolonial resistance movements throughout history.
How Does Gilead Function as an Internal Colonial Power?
Gilead operates as an internal colonial power by employing systematic strategies of territorial conquest, population displacement, and cultural domination that mirror historical colonial projects. The regime conquers and occupies former United States territory, renaming locations with biblical designations that erase previous cultural and historical meanings, similar to how colonial powers renamed indigenous territories to assert dominance and rewrite history (Atwood, 1985). Gilead forcibly displaces populations it deems undesirable—including racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and political dissidents—sending them to “the Colonies” where they perform forced labor in toxic conditions until death. This displacement echoes colonial practices of forced migration, reservations, and the creation of exploited labor forces. The regime establishes a rigid hierarchical social structure that categorizes people into distinct classes with different rights, privileges, and functions, reminiscent of colonial caste systems and racial hierarchies that justified unequal treatment by claiming natural or divine ordination of social divisions.
The mechanisms through which Gilead maintains control directly parallel colonial governance strategies including surveillance, collaborative elites, and divide-and-conquer tactics. The regime creates a system where members of oppressed groups monitor each other, with Handmaids reporting on fellow Handmaids and Aunts enforcing compliance among women, mirroring how colonial powers recruited indigenous collaborators to police their own communities (Ashcroft et al., 2002). Gilead’s commanders, like colonial administrators, position themselves as civilizing forces bringing order and morality to a society they claim was corrupt and chaotic, using this narrative to justify extreme measures. The novel reveals how both colonial and totalitarian systems require not just physical force but ideological control—convincing the oppressed that their subjugation serves necessary, even beneficial purposes. Atwood’s depiction suggests that colonization need not involve crossing oceans; dominant groups can colonize populations within their own national boundaries using identical strategies of dehumanization, exploitation, and cultural destruction. This insight proves particularly relevant for understanding how marginalized groups experience systematic oppression within ostensibly democratic nations, where internal colonization operates through institutional discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure rather than overt military conquest.
What Role Does Language Play in Colonial Control and Resistance?
Language functions as a primary site of both colonial control and resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale, with Gilead weaponizing linguistic practices to consolidate power while resisters preserve alternative meanings and memories through language. The regime prohibits women from reading and writing, recognizing that literacy enables independent thought, access to alternative narratives, and potential for organized resistance (Atwood, 1985). This prohibition mirrors colonial policies that suppressed indigenous languages and literacy to prevent cultural transmission and limit colonized peoples’ ability to document their own histories or coordinate resistance. Gilead imposes euphemistic language that obscures violence and oppression—executions become “Salvagings,” forced reproductive servitude becomes “service,” and the regime’s victims become “Unwomen”—creating an Orwellian linguistic system where official terminology makes atrocity sound acceptable or even virtuous. The renaming of Handmaids with possessive designations like “Offred” (Of-Fred) linguistically erases women’s independent identities and defines them exclusively through relationships to male commanders, paralleling colonial practices of renaming colonized peoples to assert dominance and deny indigenous identity.
However, language also enables resistance and preservation of suppressed identities despite Gilead’s control. Offred’s narrative itself represents an act of linguistic resistance—her internal monologue preserves her authentic voice, memories, and identity despite external silencing, similar to how colonized peoples maintained cultural knowledge through oral traditions when written records were forbidden (Spivak, 1988). The underground resistance network employs coded language and secret communication systems to coordinate opposition, demonstrating how marginalized groups develop covert linguistic practices to evade surveillance and maintain community connections. The novel’s structure, which presents Offred’s narrative as a recovered historical document studied by future academics, raises critical postcolonial questions about who controls historical narratives, whose voices are preserved or erased, and how power shapes which stories are told and believed. The “Historical Notes” epilogue, featuring academic scholars who analyze Offred’s testimony with detached objectivity while failing to fully grasp her suffering, critiques how academic discourse can perpetuate colonial attitudes by treating oppression as intellectual curiosity rather than lived tragedy. Atwood suggests that language serves simultaneously as tool of oppression and instrument of resistance, with the struggle over meaning, naming, and narrative authority central to both colonial domination and anticolonial liberation.
How Does the Novel Address Racial and Cultural Erasure?
The Handmaid’s Tale addresses racial and cultural erasure through Gilead’s explicit policy of ethnic and religious “purification” that forcibly removes non-white and non-Christian populations from the visible society. The novel references “resettlement” of African Americans to “National Homelands” and deportation or extermination of Jewish people, euphemistically called “Children of Ham” and “Sons of Jacob” respectively, revealing how Gilead employs biblical terminology to justify genocidal policies (Atwood, 1985). This systematic removal of racial and religious minorities represents internal colonization’s ultimate form—not merely subjugating different populations but eliminating them entirely to create an imagined homogeneous society. The regime’s actions directly parallel historical colonial projects including indigenous genocide, forced assimilation programs, residential schools, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that sought to eliminate cultural diversity and establish dominant group supremacy. Atwood’s decision to set this racial violence somewhat in the background of Offred’s narrative, rather than centering it, has prompted important postcolonial criticism about whose oppression receives literary focus and whose suffering remains peripheral even in texts critiquing totalitarianism.
The novel’s treatment of race and cultural erasure raises complex questions about the intersections of gender and racial oppression that postcolonial feminist scholars have extensively debated. Critics have noted that The Handmaid’s Tale primarily centers white women’s experience of oppression under Gilead while mentioning racial violence without fully exploring its dimensions, potentially reproducing the white feminist tendency to universalize women’s experiences while marginalizing women of color (Kaplan, 2003). This critique suggests that the novel’s feminist dystopia, while powerful in depicting gender oppression, may inadvertently reflect colonial patterns of whose stories are told and whose perspectives are centered. However, other scholars argue that Atwood deliberately includes these references to racial violence precisely to demonstrate that Gilead’s misogyny cannot be separated from its racism and that totalitarian oppression always operates through multiple, intersecting hierarchies. The regime’s policies reveal how colonial ideologies of racial and cultural superiority work in conjunction with patriarchal control—Gilead seeks to subjugate women while simultaneously eliminating racial and religious difference, suggesting that various forms of oppression support and enable each other. This intersectional dimension of Gilead’s colonization demonstrates that resistance must address multiple, interconnected systems of domination rather than treating gender, race, or religion as isolated categories of oppression.
What Strategies of Resistance Does the Novel Depict?
The Handmaid’s Tale depicts multiple resistance strategies that parallel historical anticolonial movements, ranging from covert cultural preservation to organized underground networks and individual acts of refusal. Offred’s maintenance of memory, her refusal to completely internalize Gilead’s ideology, and her secret relationship with Nick represent everyday resistance—small acts of autonomy and humanity that preserve selfhood under totalitarian conditions (Atwood, 1985). These quotidian resistances mirror what postcolonial theorist James Scott calls “weapons of the weak,” the subtle, often invisible forms of resistance that colonized and oppressed peoples employ when open rebellion proves impossible or suicidal (Scott, 1985). The novel demonstrates that resistance need not always be dramatic or public; simply maintaining one’s authentic identity, preserving suppressed memories, and refusing complete psychological colonization constitute significant political acts under totalitarian rule. Offred’s narrative itself functions as resistance—her story survives Gilead’s fall, ensuring that victims’ perspectives are preserved rather than allowing only official histories to define the past.
The novel also depicts organized resistance through the underground network that helps people escape Gilead and the “Mayday” resistance movement that works to undermine the regime from within. These structured resistance efforts parallel historical anticolonial movements that employed clandestine communication, coordinated sabotage, and underground railroads to resist imperial power (Atwood, 1985). Characters like Ofglen reveal that resistance operates secretly throughout Gilead’s society, with ordinary people taking enormous risks to oppose the regime despite overwhelming state power and constant surveillance. The network’s existence demonstrates that totalitarian control is never absolute—even the most oppressive systems contain spaces for resistance, and dominated peoples always find ways to contest their subjugation. However, Atwood also depicts the costs and limitations of resistance; Ofglen’s capture and punishment, Moira’s recapture and consignment to prostitution, and the uncertainty about whether resistance networks ultimately succeed reveal that opposition to entrenched power proves difficult, dangerous, and often unsuccessful. This realistic portrayal avoids romanticizing resistance while still affirming its necessity and possibility. The novel suggests that resistance requires both individual courage and collective organization, that small acts of refusal accumulate significance, and that maintaining hope and human connection constitutes political resistance against systems designed to isolate and dehumanize.
How Does the Historical Notes Epilogue Function as Postcolonial Critique?
The “Historical Notes” epilogue functions as sophisticated postcolonial critique by interrogating how dominant academic and historical discourses represent oppressed peoples’ experiences, often reproducing colonial power dynamics through seemingly objective scholarship. The epilogue presents a future academic symposium where scholars analyze Offred’s narrative with detached intellectual curiosity, focusing on questions about Gilead’s administrative structures and the identity of her Commander while displaying minimal emotional engagement with her suffering (Atwood, 1985). This academic distance mirrors colonial and postcolonial scholarship that treats oppression as historical curiosity rather than ongoing trauma, and that privileges institutional analysis over individual testimony. The symposium chairman’s occasional jokes and condescending tone toward Offred—whom he never names, instead calling her narrative “The Handmaid’s Tale” as if she were merely a stock character—demonstrates how academic discourse can dehumanize historical subjects while claiming to study them objectively. This critique resonates with postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?”—even when oppressed peoples’ testimonies survive, those in power may misinterpret, dismiss, or appropriate their voices rather than truly hearing them (Spivak, 1988).
The epilogue also raises critical questions about historical narrative authority and whose interpretations of the past become accepted truth. The academics acknowledge their inability to verify many aspects of Offred’s testimony, revealing how historical knowledge always remains incomplete and interpreted rather than purely factual. Their attempts to identify the Commander and establish dates demonstrate how academic historical practice often focuses on powerful individuals and institutional chronologies while treating ordinary people’s experiences as secondary evidence (Atwood, 1985). This methodological preference mirrors colonial historiography that centered European administrators, missionaries, and merchants while marginalizing indigenous voices and perspectives. Furthermore, the epilogue reveals that even in the future society where scholars discuss Gilead as finished history, gender inequality persists—the symposium chairman makes sexist jokes and the panel appears male-dominated, suggesting that overthrowing one oppressive regime does not automatically eliminate underlying prejudices and power structures. Atwood’s epilogue thus functions as metafictional commentary on the politics of historical representation, warning readers not to assume that future or outside observers will better understand or more ethically engage with oppression than those complicit in creating it. The postcolonial insight here proves sobering: surviving oppression and having one’s story preserved does not guarantee that story will be understood, respected, or used to prevent future injustice.
What Does Postcolonial Reading Reveal About Canadian National Identity?
A postcolonial reading of The Handmaid’s Tale reveals complex dimensions of Canadian national identity, particularly Canada’s relationship to both American imperialism and its own colonial history. Atwood, a Canadian writer, sets the novel in what was the United States, with Canada functioning as potential refuge where escaped Handmaids might find freedom. This positioning reflects Canadian national mythology that constructs Canada as America’s more liberal, tolerant neighbor—the final stop on the Underground Railroad and a haven for draft resisters during the Vietnam War (Howells, 2006). However, postcolonial reading complicates this comfortable national narrative by recognizing Canada’s own colonial foundations built on indigenous dispossession, cultural genocide through residential schools, and ongoing systemic discrimination against First Nations peoples. While Canada may function as Gilead’s “other” in the novel, Canadian readers cannot simply congratulate themselves on their nation’s comparative liberalism without confronting their own colonial legacies and contemporary injustices.
The novel’s setting in the former United States also enables Atwood to explore American imperialism and exceptionalism from an outside perspective. Gilead represents an extreme manifestation of tendencies already present in American culture—religious fundamentalism, patriarchal attitudes, militarism, and the conviction that American values should dominate globally (Atwood, 1985). By depicting American society’s transformation into totalitarian theocracy, Atwood challenges American exceptionalist narratives that position the United States as uniquely committed to freedom and democracy, instead suggesting that America contains within itself the seeds of tyranny. This critique resonates with postcolonial analysis of how imperial powers justify domination through claims of moral and political superiority while actually perpetrating violence and oppression. However, Atwood avoids positioning Canada as simply superior alternative; the novel’s ending leaves ambiguous whether Canada truly provides sanctuary or merely represents another form of control. This ambiguity reflects postcolonial understanding that national identities are constructed and contested rather than essential, and that all nations participate in complex power relations that include both resistance to and complicity with imperial domination. The postcolonial reading thus reveals how The Handmaid’s Tale functions not only as critique of American fundamentalism but also as meditation on Canadian national identity, settler colonialism, and the relationship between neighboring nations with asymmetrical power.
Conclusion
A postcolonial reading of The Handmaid’s Tale reveals the novel’s sophisticated engagement with themes of empire, domination, and resistance that extend beyond its immediate focus on gender oppression. Gilead’s totalitarian regime employs colonial strategies of territorial conquest, cultural erasure, linguistic control, and hierarchical classification to maintain power, while resistance operates through preservation of memory, underground networks, and refusal of complete psychological subjugation. The novel demonstrates that internal colonization can operate within national boundaries using identical mechanisms that characterized historical imperialism, and that various forms of oppression—based on gender, race, religion, and sexuality—intersect and reinforce each other. Atwood’s work also interrogates how historical narratives and academic discourse can reproduce colonial power dynamics even when apparently documenting oppression. The postcolonial perspective enriches understanding of The Handmaid’s Tale by revealing how Gilead’s misogyny cannot be separated from its racism, how resistance strategies mirror anticolonial movements, and how the novel participates in complex negotiations of Canadian and American national identities. This reading demonstrates that Atwood’s dystopia addresses not merely gender politics but broader questions of power, domination, and liberation that remain urgently relevant to contemporary postcolonial struggles worldwide.
References
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart.
Howells, C. A. (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, C. (2003). Resisting autobiography: Out-law genres and transnational feminist subjects. In S. Smith & J. Watson (Eds.), De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (pp. 115-138). University of Minnesota Press.
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). University of Illinois Press.