Survival & Language -Quotes

• "I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."

"By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being."

• The Handmaids can only speak to each other in accepted Biblical phrases:
  • "Blessed be the Fruit"
  • "Under his eye").
• These phrases remind them of their reproductive role and the threat of surveillance/punishment.

• Offred uses language in a very creative and satirical way when recalling moments from her past. She subverts the patriarchal ideology that influences most language in Gilead.
  • "The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it."

• When Offred plays Scrabble with the Commander, the reader sees the joy and delight she feels when she is given access to "making" her own words. Atwood uses gustatory (taste) imagery to show how starved of language and intellectual stimulation Offred is:
  • "I would like to put them in my mouth...The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious"

• "LARYNX"
  • Refers to the voice box which makes noise in the human throat. Offred may be suggesting that she, as a Handmaid, is voiceless and is limited to what she can say.
• "ZYGOTE"
  • When a sperm and an egg fertilise in the first stages of conception - ironically, the only time Offred and the Commander create a Zygote is on a [Scrabble] board.