The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us.

they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.

This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except on television.

There are no lawyers anymore, and the university is closed.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then.

We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom.

Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated.

What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.

There is a silence. But sometimes it’s as dangerous not to speak.

Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human fetus. They were doctors,

It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive.

They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples, for the rest.

No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth, should she be...

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Gender Treachery.

All flesh is weak.

They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked.

Try to pity them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Such songs are not sung anymore in public, especially the ones that use words like free.

They are considered too dangerous. They belong to outlawed sects.

Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or filthy

or horrible to pass her lips.

Such things do not happen to ...

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew

it.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable.

We were the people 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.

God to Adam, God to Noah. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Give me children, or else

die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, ...

and they

left things out, too, but there was no way of checking.

We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important.

They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.

They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.

A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.

We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

For him, I must remember, I am only a whim.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.

Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said.

I’m sorry, he said, but it’s the law. I really am sorry.

Any account with an F on it instead of an M. All they needed to do is push a few buttons. We’re cut off.

Women can’t hold property anymore, she said. It’s a new law.

And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped.

If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Love is not the point.