The extract from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale portrays Offred’s notion of love. Through instability in tone she conveys the two-sided face of love, while diction and imagery show her feelings towards love and men.
The ironic tone in this extract shows the relationship Offred makes between love and religion. She says that she ‘believed in it’, the past tense indicating that she no longer does. The extract states that God is love, but that they reversed it and love, like heaven, was always around the corner. The tone implicated here is almost sarcastic, indicating that she can’t believe that she once fell for that because she was let down and she had to realize that love, like God does no good. The fact that it was ‘always around the corner’ brings a negative tone to it, if not boredom. She writes ‘love’ with a capital L, like ‘God’. Love is comfort, God gives you comfort but at the same time it is hard to remember when it’s over, like pain. This idea is one of the main ideas in this extract. She mentions that sometimes she would look at a man one day and think I loved you. This reminded me of her hope that’s lost because she doesn’t believe in God, and neither does she believe in Love. Her love is gone.
The chosen diction portrays Offred’s instability and struggle with her own feelings. The first paragraph shows repetition of the words ‘I don’t’ and ‘I could’ and then ‘so far’. Even in these few lines there is a mood change going on. First she says that she doesn’t want to tell the story, then she says that she doesn’t have to (twice) and she considers her possibilities by saying what she could do, and the words so far show how she’s losing hope. This loss of hope is to be seen in the next line with the words “Why fight? That will never do”. Speaking of love, Offred says that it was so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. She describes her positive and adventurous feelings towards it, but then it the last paragraph she talks about the man next to her, sharing her love, with very negative diction using words like shadow, darker and cavernous, representing her doubts. The last sentence of this extract is a question: What if he doesn’t love me? That shows how insecure a woman gets when she falls in love. In that paragraph the narrator talks about a man, showing that women are practically lost without men and love. This simple question shows her instability and her reliance on men. What does a woman do when he doesn’t love her?
The third and last devices Atwood uses in this extract is imagery even though it’s closely related to diction, it shows us a whole other side of Offred’s feelings towards love by suggesting that love is like a fall. In this extract much imagery is considered to describe love. Love is pain, love is heaven (always around the corner), love is a fall. From these three comparisons, the last one is the most important to Offred. Through the extract we see a pattern of repetition of the verb falling. Falling in love, falling into it, I fell for him, falling women, still falling. To her, love is a downward motion. It’s great when you’re on top of the hill, up so high looking down at the sky, but then when she starts to fall in love, she seems to scream don’t let me fall. Love is like flying, but since you have to come back on earth eventually, it hurts when you hit the ground. Offred was let down by love.
This extract of the Handmaid’s Tale is one of the best to portray Offred’s feelings for love. Through the book we can see her trying to hang on to those memories she has with her lost husband, but we see eventually that there weren’t just good sides to that marriage and that she felt suppressed sometimes by him in a way that she didn’t allow herself to ask or say the things she wanted to.
What a woderful and precise analytical approach to the extract. Jorina, you have certainly hit the nail on the head with your commentary and insightfulness on this piece. I agree with all the comments you have made. However I am still undecided whether Offred really looks back on her marriage as really bad. Yes, she was in love with Luke and felt at a loss when she lost her job and her bank account and he dismissed this and told her he would take care of her. She realizes that ultimately men want to have power over and control women and after all he has broken vows with his wife and could do so with her.So like most women in love she has suspicion and self doubt. However, beyond this I feel that she is trying to justify her new predicamemt. We need to realize that Offred is a married woman who still beleives her husband is alive. And yet she craves for a man's touch and embarks in loveless relatinships with the Commander and Nick. She is committing adultery in her surrupticious affairs and yet to bring reason to her guilt ridden state of mind to herself and to the audience she must convince herself that love is a worthless emotion where all she feels is betrayal and pain, and yet says she does not need to explain herself but contradicts herself by pouring her heart out. She realizes that she must embark on business relationships which she can benefit from and use men the way men often use women.
ReplyDeleteJorina, please remember to include some context to the extract. Otherwise, I found this to be insightful and well organized.
ReplyDeleteJorina,
ReplyDeleteI found your commentary to be very informative and analytical. You went into great detail when analyzing Atwood's use of diction and imagery.
I like how in your commentary you don't only focus on specific lines from this extract, but you discuss Atwood's use of these literary features to show the progress of emotion from the beginning to end in this extract.
You discussion of how diction is used to portray Offred's hopelessness in the novel was quite descriptive, and I thought that you explained your thoughts very well (for sometimes when reading commentaries, I find it hard to understand an author's analytical viewpoint).
You mentioned that "The tone implicated here is almost sarcastic, indicating that she can’t believe that she once fell for that because she was let down and she had to realize that love, like God does no good. The fact that it was ‘always around the corner’ brings a negative tone to it, if not boredom."
I found this analysis quite interesting, for I interpreted this metaphor in a different manner. When she said 'always around the corner', I too thought it brought a negative tone, however I got the feeling that Atwood was trying to show how love is unpredictable and exciting, perhaps even scary (because it is always right there, waiting to catch you), rather than boring.
I would love to hear more on your interpretation of this metaphor, for it it the one part of this excerpt that I took a while to analyze and understand.
Sabrina,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that she might not look back at her marriage being completely bad, since it is clear as glass that she still misses him. But the fact that she was in self-doubt and suspicion, supports my thesis of love being a downfall. Offred lost confidence in herself, she was suspicious: an unstable person. Just like a fall is very unstable indeed. I completely understand the points you've made and I found them to be very insightful and completing to my argument, thank you!
Pooja,
I thought that you're disagreement was very interesting, and it gave me another perspective from which to look at the sentence/tone used. 'Always around the corner' might have been meant to illustrate that it was scary, but since she said that all women fell in love, and that it was abnormal not to, I believe that she wouldn't be scared of it. She talks about love like it was an old habit, not an exciting rush of emotions.