Jonathan Bignell

Territories, Boundaries, Identities

NOTE: This chapter was originally published as Bignell, J., ‘Territories, boundaries,
identities’, in C. Howells and C. Vevaina (eds), Margaret Atwood The Shape-Shifter,
‘Creative New Literatures’ series (New Delhi: Indian Association for Canadian
Studies & Creative Books, 1998), pp. 9-25. That book is now out of print so I am
making my work available myself.

This essay will argue that The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel which
problematizes identities by representing them in spatial terms.1 National identity,
gender identity, and the identity of a particular temporal moment, are represented in
the text by means of discourses about space and territory, insides, outsides, and the
borders which mark off one identity from another. It might seem that a discourse
about space provides a way of describing the wholeness and self-sufficiency of
identity, by distinguishing between one space and another, between an inside and an
outside divided by a recognised border. But then one identity and the other which is
outside it and different to it would be mutually defining.2 For instance, masculine
would be defined by its difference from feminine, the other which borders it.
Furthermore, in The Handmaid’s Tale the border between one identity and its other is
often difficult to place, or becomes the site of a contamination of the inside by what
ought to be outside it. The effect of these border disputes is to render problematic the
wholeness and self-sufficiency of identities.
My discussion of territories, boundaries and identities begins by identifying
the significance of physical space and its boundaries in the novel, and then moves on
to the use of languages of space in the novel’s representation of time and gender. But
before beginning this analysis, it is important to state the obvious, to point out that the
spatial identity of Atwood’s book is itself significantly divided into different regions.
It is composed of pages that are of course spaces inscribed with writing. But the
space of the book is divided into discrete parts; the page of epigraphs which precedes
the Contents page, the text of Offred’s journal, and the text of Historical Notes.
These three internal textual spaces are not homogenous, since like any piece of
writing they deploy a mixture of linguistic codes and discourses. Furthermore, each
of the separate parts that make up the wholeness of The Handmaid’s Tale will reflect

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on the others for the reader, each retrospectively inflecting the meanings of the others.
The novel is divided up by internal borders across which its meanings are deferred
and put in play.
The identity of the novel is not only dependent on the writing inside its pages.
It is intertextually linked to the various ‘territories’ of a number of literary forms. The
novel can be described as, for instance, dystopic science fiction, women’s writing,
and Canadian literature, and parts of the text could be described as, for instance,
journal, quotation, parody, fantasy or literary criticism. The novel adopts a range of
different identities, and belongs in several places at once. Such a situation must apply
in differing degrees to every text, but this chapter argues that The Handmaid’s Tale
self-reflexively foregrounds the questions of identity which are its manifest content,
by posing questions about the frameworks to be applied to the text by the reader,
questions about the territory in which it belongs. I shall return at the end to these
issues, which are bound up with the place of the reader in the novel, and its literary
genre, but it is necessary first to establish the significance of territories, boundaries
and identities in the text.

Physical Space and Identity

The significance of borders between nations is important to the story of The
Handmaid’s Tale, and is part of the narrative’s reflection on the relationship between
identity and space. As a novel about a dystopia, a concrete physical setting and a
degree of verisimilitude in the description of Gilead establish a minimum level of
coherence for the reader. In Offred’s discourse in the journal section of the novel, and
later by means of information given in Historical Notes, the novel outlines the
geographical space of Gilead and establishes it as a fictional territory. It is situated
within the borders of the present United States, though the strength of Gilead’s grip
on its territory seems to vary according to the progress of military conflicts fought on
its borders and within the nation. Like any actual state, the fictional Gilead engages
in struggles to establish these borders, and to maintain control within its geographical
area, not always successfully. National identity is partly created by the securing of
geographical space within which state power can be legitimately exercised.
The confinement of Offred in Gilead is spatial, psychological and sexual, and
the impossibility of escape seems remote because of her restriction at the centre of the

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nation’s geographical space. ‘This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot
intrude except on television. Where the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according
to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the centre, where nothing moves.’ [33]
Offred is resistant, a potential rebel inside the state, and her contact with other rebels
demonstrates that even in ‘the heart’, the identity of Gilead is contaminated by an
enemy within. She is perpetually dreaming of being outside, and Historical Notes
informs the reader that Offred’s narrative was discovered near Gilead’s northern
border. This suggests the possibility of her eventual escape to the outside. But the
journal is said to be the only evidence of her existence, and Professor Piexoto makes
it clear that the audiotape of her story was buried and not transmitted, at least in its
current form, to anyone else in Gilead. Offred’s is a story of an insider, and remains
inside Gilead’s borders, to be transmitted to the reader only by being displaced in
space outside Gilead to the scholars of Cambridge University, England, and displaced
in time by more than a century. Offred’s story of life in ‘the heart of Gilead’ can only
be told when she is positioned at the geographical and ideological edge of the nation,
and can only be read outside it.
As Offred gradually reveals the story of her attempted escape from Gilead in
remembered fragments of her past, the reader learns that the physical borders of
Gilead to the north (probably with Canada) were the site of events crucial to the
present of the story and to her emotional state. She, her husband Luke and her
daughter made a dash to the border, pretending to be on a day trip. But at the border
crossing the guards’ suspicious behaviour convinced them that their plan had been
discovered, and they fled back into Gilead. The skirmish with Gilead’s security
services left Luke shot and their daughter captured. It is a border incident that breaks
up Offred’s family and delivers her into the role of Handmaid. The enforced identity
which Offred describes in her narrative was imposed as a result of capture at the
border, and from attempting to cross to the outside of Gilead, she is instead positioned
at the heart of its ideological and spatial inside.
As a theocratic nation, Gilead engages in battles with other groups, like
Baptists for instance, who are perceived as different and therefore threatening to the
ideological and geographic security of the state's identity. Gilead’s military activities
do not only take place at the edges of the state, but also within it. The front lines at
the edge of the state ‘are not lines, really: the war seems to be going on in many

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places at once.’ [92] Offred is at the centre of Gilead in the sense that she is at the
heart of its political and ideological powerbase, but it also has internal edges. Gilead
spatializes its division of the population into favoured and oppressed groups, moving
black people, the ‘Children of Ham’, into ‘National Homelands’, deporting Jews from
the nation, and moving homosexuals and infertile women to ‘the Colonies’ as slave
labour. The securing of Gilead’s ideological space is represented spatially by the
creation of internal territories inside whose borders groups perceived as different can
be contained. Nevertheless, while Gilead turns political and racial difference into
spatial difference, the borders around these spaces are not secure. The presence of
resistance movements, the ‘Underground Femaleroad’ and the ‘Mayday
Underground’, shows that Gilead’s control of physical space is fissured by
oppositional forces within it.
The authority of the totalitarian regime is represented as depending on the
enforcement of internal borders, so that freedom of movement within the space of the
nation is replaced by restricted movement within the spaces allocated for particular
groups and particular activities. Freedom to move and constraints on movement are
part of a system of control that expresses social hierarchies. This control of internal
space is evident in the roadblocks and divisions between the districts of the city that
Offred encounters. She exists in a compound patrolled by guards and swept by
searchlights, and the social limits imposed on her are physically represented by these
spatial limits. Offred describes these restrictions in terms of laboratory experiments.
‘A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.’ [174] Her
dehumanization and subjection to the state’s control are experienced as spatial
confinement and disorientation. But Gilead is as much a psychic territory as a
physical one, which depends on the colonisation of consciousness by indoctrination,
repression and fear. ‘The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds.
Gilead is within you.’ [33] The identity of Gilead, physically and ideologically,
depends on the colonisation of physical space and the subjection of the physical body,
where the state’s control of the body and of space are metaphors for each other.
Gilead’s inability to completely control physical space is parallel to its inability to
indoctrinate its citizens fully.
Although writing and reading are prohibited to the Handmaids, one of the
minor resistances to the regime savoured by Offred is the writing on the interior of her

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wardrobe that she discovers inside her room. A previous Handmaid had scratched
‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum’ (‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’) on the
internal surface of the wardrobe, inside the room allocated to her, inside the
Commander’s house, inside the compound. However, this secret palimpsest, or
writing-over of a space controlled by her oppressors, is incomprehensible to Offred
because it is in Latin. The significance of this secret writing lies not in the meaning
of the words, since she does not know it, but in the fact of inscription itself. For the
ability to write over the surface of space in Gilead is at least a small negation of the
regime’s power to do the same on a much larger scale.
Transgression of the regime’s elaborate rules of conduct is represented
spatially when the Commander appears, having transgressed into the Handmaid’s
room, her allocated space. His presence is a mystery. ‘Like the flag of an unknown
country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill, it could mean attack, it could mean
parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory.’ [59] The incident is a
forerunner of Offred’s later spatial transgression inside the house, when she enters the
Commander’s study. This room functions as a separate ‘territory’ within the
imprisoning house, in which a restricted freedom is allowed to Offred. ‘Behind this
particular door, taboo dissolved.’ [165] In the study, the constraining rules of Gilead
are partially suspended. There she is able to converse more normally, to read
magazines and apply handcream.
The activity she enjoys most is playing Scrabble, where the board is a space
on which she is allowed to manipulate language, subject to the rules of the game, and
where even the constraints of the rules of Scrabble can be suspended to create
nonsense or obscene words. Since the counters can be re-used over and over again,
and the writing Offred produces leaves no mark which could incriminate her, the
Scrabble game represents a freedom that is determined by the impermanence of the
writing on the board, and by the Commander’s ultimate control of the game. The
Scrabble game functions as a spatial metaphor of the freedom and restriction existing
for Offred in the novel, for she can write, but not communicate by writing, and choose
her moves, but only within the confines of the board and the Commander’s room,
with his complicity.3
As the novel progresses, Offred enters further illicit spaces, like Jezebel’s and
Nick’s room, though in each case her movement is ultimately sanctioned by someone

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with authority over her, and is not a matter of choice. Even Offred’s eventual
departure from the Commander’s house is ambiguous, since she is apparently arrested
by the Eyes and put into a van. When she enters this new confined space, its meaning
is again ambiguous, like her entry into the Commander’s study, and could potentially
lead to her death. ‘The van waits in the driveway, its double doors stand open. ...
Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given
myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped. And so I step up,
into the darkness within; or else the light.’ [307] While the Eyes may be members of
the Mayday Underground helping her to escape, the journal’s final words show that
the future may be either light or darkness, freedom or death. Entering the van is the
final movement from one space to another in Offred’s journal, and maintains the same
doubleness with which territory is described throughout the narrative. Physical space
is used as a concrete representation of social and psychological oppression, but
Gilead’s control of space and of psychology are similarly fissured by pockets of
resistance, otherness, or indeterminacy which demonstrate the impossibility of
securing the borders between inside and outside, control and freedom.

Time as Space
The borders between one time and another, between past and present, are blurred in
Offred’s narrative, and time is very frequently represented in terms of the
transformation of space and of objects in the physical environment. Gilead re-uses
slogans, films, and physical objects from the previous regime as building-blocks and
raw materials in the erection of its new ideology, displacing these objects from their
former position in pre-Gilead society and replacing them in Gilead with a different
value. The result of the presence of the past in the space of the present is for Offred
to experience sudden displacements that reveal the simultaneous similarity and
difference of Gilead from the United States. ‘Dishtowels are the same as they always
were. Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes.
The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.’ [58] Physical objects become
vehicles which link one time to another.
For Offred, these ‘reminders’ are represented as existing in the margins of her
experience, at ‘the side’, and noticing them is therefore surprising to her. Different
times appear to co-exist in these objects, and they cross the boundary between

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Offred’s past life and her life as a Handmaid in Gilead. The reminders of the past
divide Offred’s self-perception, simultaneously presenting her with an image of
herself in the past and in the present. Her identities in the two times are brought
suddenly together as the experience of one and the same individual subject. The
continuity of her identity is both challenged and preserved by the shifts in her
consciousness from one time to another.
The narrative time of Offred’s journal moves back and forth in jumps
occasioned by these triggers of memory or by metaphorical connections between one
event and another, so that the reader of the journal is frequently shifting from one
temporal frame to another as well as from one location of action to another. The
effect of this textual organisation is to represent Offred’s consciousness as
characterised by displacement. Just as she has been displaced from her identity as
mother, wife, lover, worker, to the identity of Handmaid, she both copes with her
situation and tries to escape its reality by shifting in thought from time to time and
from place to place. She can occasionally ‘step sideways out of my own time. Out of
time. Though this is time, nor am I out of it. But the night is my time out. Where
should I go? Somewhere good.’ [47] Memory offers her a displacement of
consciousness, which is a kind of freedom to gather up her past as a form of security
and nostalgia, but it also reminds her of the very different reality she is now so
painfully experiencing. The past is a different place, a territory of the mind that can
be glimpsed underneath the harsh contours of the present.
Gilead could be described as a palimpsest, a document written over a
previously inscribed page, rendering the writing underneath invisible or hard to read.
Traces of the United States are still evident in the margins of the nation Gilead has
‘written’ over the top of it, for instance in the letters ‘US’ on the blankets Offred slept
under in the Rachel and Leah Re-education Centre. But one of the features of
Gilead’s control of physical space is its attempt to ‘write’ over the physical
environment, turning the University into a base for the secret police (the ‘Eyes’) and
its sports field into the location for public executions. The regime changes the names
of shops, then at a later stage removes alphabetic writing altogether in favour of
iconic signs representing the products sold inside. But Offred notes the shapes of
letters that can still be seen under the erasing paint, and remembers the buildings’
former uses. Offred records an epoch in which Gilead’s rewriting over the page of

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the United States is still incomplete. The narrative is set in what is still a temporal
border region between the possible wholeness and self-sufficiency of Gilead’s
identity, and the United States which it is erasing and rewriting differently. The half-
readable marks of the previous order represented in physical space represent the
temporal border that Offred’s narrative inhabits.
Offred thinks of the past and its relative freedom in terms of her marginality to
the social hierarchies of the United States. While she now plays out the role of Bilhah
the Handmaid in one of Gilead’s crucial Biblical stories, she had previously been, she
says, in the marginal space at the edge of the page, at the edge of public roles, one of
those who ‘were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of
print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories’. [66-67]
Gilead writes over the blank page of Offred’s previous identity in order to turn her
into a Handmaid, one of the roles played in the story of Rachel. Offred’s past and
present identities are represented through a metaphor of writing on the space of a
page, and she shifts from being outside stories into the compulsory performance of
Bilhah’s role in a story imposed by Gilead’s ‘rewriting’ of gender identity.
The Gilead elite’s sexual desire and desire for the past are contained in the
guarded and normally invisible space of Jezebel’s. The description of Offred’s visit
there shows that the past is not absent from Gilead, but contained spatially for the use
of particular groups. Gilead retells the story of the past which existed before it,
establishing the nation’s unifying and controlling ideology by patrolling the border
between then and now, before and after, in order to justify and promote its repressive
social system. The Aunts indoctrinate the Handmaids into the belief that because of
its sanctioning of sexual desire, the United States had allowed freedom to commit
‘crimes’ against reproduction, and to exploit women as sexual commodities. By
contrast, Gilead offers a freedom within the borders of a morality that denies desire,
and which is enforced by terror and patrolled by the secret police. Gilead constructs
an ideological territory, but inside it the desire for the past is allowed expression
within a particular internal and protected space. Jezebel’s is like a kind of interactive
museum to which only elite men are admitted.
To the historians of Historical Notes, Offred’s narrative is itself a museum
piece. They place it within the genre of historical evidence, and not literature. For
them it is an entry-point back to the time and place of Gilead, and their interest in it

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focuses on where it was written, at what time, by whom and for whom. Their
preoccupation is to establish the narrative’s position in time and space, but Professors
Piexoto and Wade were themselves responsible for the artefact they study, since they
organised the parts of Offred’s taped journal into the sequence in which they appear
in the novel. The temporal sequence of the journal on the page space is the result of
their intervention, and Professor Piexoto admits that the sequence is difficult to
establish and possibly erroneous. Offred’s tale of confinement within the containing
spaces and rules of Gilead is subject to, and the result of, a further containment within
the assumptions and procedures of reading controlled by the historians. The historical
truth about Gilead’s identity as a culture is therefore at least partially dependent on an
identity for Offred’s narrative which they have literally and generically constructed.
Piexoto compares historical truth, in particular the historical truth of Offred’s
narrative, to the mythological figure of Eurydice. In this myth, Orpheus descended to
the Underworld to rescue Eurydice after her death, and she almost completed her
journey back to the land of the living. Successful rescue depended on Orpheus not
looking at her until their return to the surface, but Orpheus could not resist looking
back at Eurydice, and she was whisked back to the Underworld forever. For Piexoto,
truth is represented as a figure who crosses a physical border between life and death,
past and present. Piexoto is Orpheus, rescuing truth from the past, but following the
narrative of the myth, his attempt to rescue her ultimately consigns her to death.
Piexoto describes his encounter with Offred-truth-Eurydice as the interrogation of a
captured suspect,
but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse
her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all
historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices
may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of
the matrix out of which they come... [324]
The past becomes the Underworld, the dark land of the dead that Piexoto associates
with the enigma of femininity, ‘matrix’ or womb (reminiscent perhaps of Freud’s
‘dark continent of female sexuality’). The historian’s discourse locates Offred, her
journal, the past, and femininity in the territory of the other, beyond the borders of
earthly life. Offred, the journal, the truth about Gilead and the truth about the past are
assigned to a separate and lost space. The rhetorical figure is parallel to Gilead’s

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spatial, legal and psychological confinement of women, and its confinement of the
past within the borders of its revisionist ideology. In the final discursive space in the
novel, the Historical Notes, Piexoto calls Offred back from invisibility and death by
his discovery of her journal, only to replace her there again as an emblem of otherness
and obscurity.

Gender Identity and Space

Gender identity in Gilead, as in contemporary societies, is dependent on dividing one
identity from another, primarily men from women. The territory of masculinity is
given coherent identity by establishing a border that divides masculinity from
femininity. In Gilead this gender border is patrolled with the same ruthlessness as the
nation’s spatial borders. Homosexuality is perceived as ambiguous existence on the
borders of the gender divide, and such ‘gender treachery’ is punished by death, as is
any other perceived threat to Gilead’s insistence on regulated reproductive activity
and compulsory heterosexual marriage. The familiar patriarchal system whereby
women become the property of men is extended by Gilead into the dividing up of the
attributes associated with femininity, so that elite men are served by several women,
each performing different functions. The feminine roles and activities that define the
social territory of women are apportioned to separate groups. Gender therefore
becomes a spatialized construction that allocates a place, both literally and
metaphorically, to every citizen.
Handmaids are reproductive vessels in the ownership of elite men for a limited
period, after which they are either killed or transferred to another man, depending on
their reproductive success. Handmaids are defined, Offred says, by the invisible
interior space of their reproductive organs, for which the rest of their bodies functions
only as a support. Offred thinks of the space inside her body as a dangerous natural
environment, a place; ‘a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous
ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the
future.’ [83] What happens in this internal territory (pregnancy being the most
important event there) is literally a matter of life and death. Offred describes her
body as an other place, a ‘swamp’ which is separated from her sense of self, and
which may be the cause of her exile from life itself.

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 Rather than an instrument fitted to carry out her wishes, her body is a
dangerous static space determined by others’ will, and the only value her body has
depends on what happens inside her womb. Her sense of self is a fragile and
nebulous entity in comparison to the reality of the bounded and concrete space of her
reproductive organs. ‘I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a
pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent
wrapping. Inside is a space, huge as the sky at night...’. [84] While Offred considers
her body to be an alien internal territory out of her control, male organs are described
as external objects which are similarly alien, existing independently of their
possessor. She considers a Handmaid’s ritual penetration by a Commander to be a
visual and tactile invasion of the woman’s dark interior space by ‘his extra, sensitive
thumb, his tentacle, his delicate stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces,
and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a
little at the tip, travelling forward as if on a leaf, into them, avid for vision.’ [98] Her
body is a territory probed by an alien and bestial invader, but the Commander’s right
to do this is given by virtue only of the social roles allocated to each of them by
Gilead’s theocratic power-structure. As a Handmaid, Offred has no unique personal
identity, and no personal name. She is named as the property of Fred, her identity
given by her reproductive organs and the social position to which they consign her.
The same social space had been occupied in the past by at least one other Handmaid,
who would also have been named Offred. Offred is the name of a position in Gilead’s
social territory, a legal, social and political position.
Handmaids’ social position is marked and their bodily activity physically
limited by the costumes over their bodies. They wear headdresses (‘wings’) that
impose limits on their vision, and social constraints also encourage them to look
down, so that their delimited role in the society is signified physically by a border
around their visual field. This simultaneously prevents them from being looked at by
others. ‘Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen - to be
seen - is to be - her voice trembled - penetrated.’ [39] Gilead uses surveillance to
enforce its power over its citizens and its territory. The Eyes patrol exterior space,
and the ‘slug’s eye’ of the Commander's penis invades the interior space of Offred’s
body. Offred’s experience of life in Gilead is an experience of repeated penetration,
where the interiority of her psyche and her body, and the exteriority of her body and

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her movement, are continually subject to control by the state and its representatives.
Offred is unable to secure the borders of her self. Suicide would be the only escape
from this imprisoning spatial confinement and confinement of identity, and Offred
describes this as a penetration that opens her bodily space. Stabbing herself is one of
‘those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.’ [18]
Self-destruction is imagined as a transgressive penetration of her bodily space,
parallel but opposite to what is already happening to her.
But Offred does manage to transgress the limits imposed on her body and
behaviour, as she also does in terms of physical and temporal space. Sexual
approaches to her, which depend in part upon her person and her personality rather
than her reproductive potential, are foreign to her social place and are evident at
Jezebel’s when the Commander and Offred spend the night together, and when her
doctor offers to impregnate her. Offred sexualises her account of her meetings with
Nick, though the status of her account is in doubt since she repeats and changes it, and
the meetings are arranged by Serena Joy simply to make her pregnant. Nevertheless
these encounters are transgressive because they disrupt the system of positions
allocated to the actors of sexed roles in Gilead’s subdivided gender territory. Offred
takes the place of Serena Joy when the Commander transfers his sexual feelings to
Offred rather than his Wife. Nick takes the place of the Commander by potentially
fertilising Offred. Nick’s sexualised relationship with Offred is entirely outside of
any social position allowed by Gilead. Offred’s journal tells a story of displacements
that cross the borders between gendered roles and the boundaries of social rules.
Gilead’s gender territory is open to disruption and transgression.
Once Offred enters the Commander’s room, she exceeds her gender role and
intrudes into his Wife’s, a transgression expressed by Offred in terms of space.
‘I felt I was an intruder, in a territory that ought to have been hers. Now that I was
seeing the Commmander on the sly, if only to play his games and listen to him talk,
our functions were no longer as separate as they should have been in theory.’ [170]
Traditional functions of companionship and domestic control in the territory of
femininity are the province of elite women, the Wives, who have authority only over
domestic space and those within it like Handmaids and Marthas. Within the territory
of the house, Marthas rule the kitchen and Handmaids have no domestic
responsibility. Outside the elite, Econowives seem to be ‘maids of all work’ who

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perform the functions that are separated and assigned to different women in the
Commanders’ houses. It appears that Econowives perform the traditionally feminine
roles of food preparation and cleaning, done for the elite by Marthas, as well as the
functions of Wives. The indoctrination and socialisation of Handmaids is performed
by the Aunts, who are responsible for conditioning women for this role. Female
biology and feminine social roles are used by Gilead in familiar ways, but women as a
population group are subdivided into cadres who perform parts of the total feminine
role. Gender identity in Gilead is a symbolic and social territory, which has been
divided into internal spaces within whose borders particular women are imprisoned
and where their psychic, social and political identity can be policed. But these
divided territories of female identity are subject to disruptions like those that Offred is
able to carry out.
The gender positions in Gilead derive from the story of Rachel. This story of
Jacob, Rachel and Bilhah is placed on the borders of the novel, before page numbers
begin, and before the Contents page. It has an ambiguous position, both inside and
outside the novel.4 As well as being ambiguously placed in the space of the text, it is
a story about displacement. When Rachel complains that she is childless, Jacob
replies that she is positioning him wrongly, ‘”Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld
from thee the fruit of thy womb?”’ Rachel’s solution is for Bilhah to be in her own
‘stead’, to take her place by having children for her. The arrangement breaks the
borders between masters and servants, since Jacob puts Bilhah in the place of his
wife. It also disrupts the borders around Jacob’s and Rachel’s marriage by including
Bilhah in it as a third party. There are multiple displacements in this story, and of
course the Gilead regime displaces the story out of its Biblical time and context, using
it as a justification for pragmatic and repressive social practices that displace the
family structures inherited from the past by its citizens.
The only spaces within Gilead in which gender is unmarked are the Colonies,
where politically undesirable people are exiled to work on the land or in toxic waste
zones. But even here where gender is not used to determine status, men are
apparently forced to wear dresses, depriving them even of the ideological superiority
over women that is given by Gilead to males. For the Gilead regime, personal
identity is determined by function, and especially gender functions. To be a person is
to inhabit one of these categories. But within Gilead’s borders, in the Colonies,

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Unwomen and other undesirables are forced to carry out functions that are not gender-
differentiated: everyone works until they die. So Gilead’s system of functional
differentiation by gender is enforced by the threat of being declared ungendered, an
Unwoman for instance, and sent to these unmarked Colony territories. The people
who are outside the ideological territories of Gilead’s gender identities exist within
the nation as condemned and exiled others. The threat of this internalised outside,
this incorporated otherness, guarantees the stability (literally and psychologically) of
the regime’s logic of differentiation.
By informing the reader about the different societies of pre-Gilead, Gilead,
and the nations represented by the international community of scholars in Historical
Notes, the novel argues that gender division is central to the construction of social
identity. In Gilead, the use of gender difference as the basis of a totalitarian state is
foregrounded by dividing the territory of gender, especially feminine gender identity,
into unfamiliar sub-categories. Gender is shown to be a structure of social
differentiation, and not an essential reality proceeding from biology or behaviour.
Instead, real differences between people are given hierarchical value, and are used as
the basis for divisions of function in the society. The academic culture of the
historians in Historical Notes retains a less harsh but no less illegitimate gender
culture, as shown by Professor Piexoto’s sexist address to the female chair of his
session, who he compares to the tasty fish eaten at dinner the night before, and by
Professor Wade’s punning sexual title for The Handmaid’s Tale manuscript.5 The
novel as a whole suggests that identity is constructed by establishing delimited
terrains in which power and differentiation can operate, but the spatial discourses
through which this is represented show that the edges, the internal coherence and the
stability of this terrain or territory are necessarily unstable. Such an instability
demonstrates both how tyranny can be imposed, but also how difficult it is to
maintain.

The Spaces of Writer and Reader

Offred is permitted neither to write nor to read, though as we have seen she does
savour these activities in the Commander’s study for instance. Her journal is not
writing, since she transcribes it by means of an audiotape machine. She has no reader
or listener either, ‘I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you

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can’t.’ [50] Sometimes this listener ‘you’ appears to be her husband Luke, or her
daughter, and Offred’s production of her text is a way of maintaining her belief that
they are alive. But the reader is often not a particular person for her, but instead
simply an other, a place to which she directs communication.6 Offred’s address to her
reader as ‘you’, creates a position for a sympathetic listener, and the position is empty
but still necessary as the defining other for her own ‘I’. Her identity has to be
constituted by its difference from another identity, so she imagines an other for
herself. ‘Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you
are.’ [279] Her story is told to this absent other who defines her as ‘I’ and maintains
her sense of self. ‘A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a
name.’ [50] The reader learns in Historical Notes that the journal tapes were enclosed
in a box, apparently buried, and sealed with postal packing tape. Offred’s narrative is
a huge buried ‘letter’ sent from her to the other.
The ‘letter’ was then read by Professors Piexoto and Wade, but their reading is
done from the place of an historian, rather than of a sympathetic listener. What
interests Piexoto and Wade is not Offred’s ‘I’ and her experience of Gilead, but the
truth of her account and the light it sheds on Gilead’s political and social history. The
text arrives at the ‘wrong place’. The gap in time and space between Offred and the
historians is a representation of the necessary possibility that every text will be
decoded by a reader against the intentions of its author, just as Gilead decoded the
Biblical story of Rachel, written in a different place and time, as the pretext for its
oppressive system. Since writing and reading involve the separation of the writer and
reader in space and time, the meaning of what is written is always constructed beyond
the capacity of either to fix and determine it. Every piece of writing is like an
undelivered letter whose origin and destination are retrospectively established.
Margaret Atwood’s identity as an author places her in a border region, as
Frank Davey has pointed out. While her work has been read as critical of patriarchal
and imperialist conditions, a reading that can be confirmed by The Handmaid’s Tale,
she is also positioned within the commercial and ideological structures of publishing,
where her work has been highly successful. She is both inside and outside the
establishment, a situation Davey parallels with Offred’s in the novel, ‘she must write
and be published from within the discourse she mistrusts and opposes, and perhaps
unwillingly, add to its credibility - much as Offred can only bear an “official” child

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within the codes of Gilead, or author an “official” text through the academic
decorums of Professors Piexoto and Wade.’7 Atwood’s work is outside the space of
canonical literature and its politics, but can only address its readers from within that
space. This is thematised in the novel by the fact that its title is said to be the choice
of Professor Wade, which distances Atwood from authorial control of her material.
Atwood is at once inside and outside, and Davey’s point about this is itself made by a
comparison that crosses the border between the inside and outside of the novel.
The role of the three interrelated parts of The Handmaid’s Tale (the story of
Rachel, Offred’s narrative, Historical Notes) is to debate questions about the borders
around the meaning of texts. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, each of
the parts is separated in the space of the book, but each affects the meanings of the
others, crossing the border between the parts of the novel and contributing to the
identities of each part and of the book as a whole. It is of course the reader who
constructs the meanings of the text and the sense of its coherent identity. But the
novel shows that ‘misreading’ will be to some degree the fate of every text, and the
limits placed around the identity of a text are insecure. A text is a territory that cannot
be definitively controlled by the author who produces it, or by a context in whose
territory it apparently belongs. The notion of a correct or legitimate reading depends
on drawing a border around language and meaning, so that some readings can be
deemed legitimate and others deemed illegitimate, but The Handmaid’s Tale shows
that such a border can never be properly enforced, and will change over time.
However, constructing meaning depends upon drawing borders of some kind
around what is perceived, as Offred describes using the metaphor of the frame around
a painting.
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the
arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise
there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed
against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the
weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a
diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise
you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be. [153]
For Offred, an understanding of the significance of her experience and her sense of a
coherent identity are simultaneously possible once there is a frame around events.

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The frame gives her a point of view (like the position for a transcendent spectator
marked out by Renaissance perspective) from where shapes take on the identities of
recognizable objects, and from where she herself has place and position in relation to
what she perceives. Frame and point of view are the supports for meaning and
identity.
Similar issues of frame or border are evident in the positions that readers and
critics have adopted in relation to the novel as a whole. To perceive it precisely as
whole, with a coherent identity and with a position marked out for its reader, depends
on establishing a frame around its textual territories, and every reader works to
construct a frame and a position. Criticism about The Handmaid’s Tale has come
from a range of positions, and places the novel in a range of frames and literary
territories; for instance feminist criticism, and related work on women’s writing, work
on Canadian literature, dystopias and science fiction. The fact that it has been
possible to read the novel through these various frames, and to place it in the generic
territories of these different literary forms, shows that the novel neither offers a single
perspective, a dominant position of reading, nor a placeless multiplicity of frames and
fragmentary narration. Frame and identity are invoked and thematized, but are not
resolved, so that the reader inhabits a border region between them, finding a place in
one or another position, or in several at once, paralleling the ambiguous status of
territories and identities in the text. This reflexivity about the text’s identity
demonstrates the absence of mastery for the reader or critic over the territories of its
writing. The final line of Historical Notes, ‘Are there any questions?’ [324] both
declares that there is no more to be said, but simultaneously leaves the borders of the
novel open for the reader.

Notes
1. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986).
Page references of quotations from this edition are given in the text.
2. The function of the linguistic sign as determined by difference is one of the
central insights in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, and
the deferral of meaning in the sign because of its dependence on the system of
all other signs is elaborated in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

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 3. Offred’s marginal relationship to a restricting patriarchal language could be
further explored in relation to, for example, Julia Kristeva’s work. See for
instance ‘La femme, ce n’est jamais ça’, Tel Quel 59, Automne 1974, pp.19-
24.
4. Another text on the borders of the novel is its dedication, discussed in Mark
Evans, ‘Versions of History: The Handmaid’s Tale and its Dedicatees’, in
Colin Nicholson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity (London:
Macmillan, 1994).
5. The historians’ significance is more fully discussed in Arnold E. Davidson,
‘Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Nicholson, Ibid.
6. I have discussed issues of writing and communication in the novel in greater
depth in my article, ‘Lost Messages: The Handmaid’s Tale Novel and Film’,
British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol.8 no.1 (1993), 71-84.
7. Frank Davey, ‘Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics’, in his Reading
Canadian Reading (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1988), p. 84.

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