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    Religion in The Handmaid's Tale: A Brief Guide
    Religion in The Handmaid's Tale: A Brief Guide
    Religion in The Handmaid's Tale: A Brief Guide
    Ebook105 pages2 hours

    Religion in The Handmaid's Tale: A Brief Guide

    By Colette Tennant

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    About this ebook

    Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale captivates readers with its disturbingly prescient vision of the future and haunting insights into the world as we know it. Religion--especially elements of the Christian faith--pervades every inch of the world as Atwood imagines it. Gilead's leaders use perverse forms of Christianity to sustain their authority and privilege, making understanding religion an integral part of understanding Gilead. In the face of the inextricable role of religion in the novel, readers are left to puzzle out religious references and allusions on their own.

    From the significance of names to twisted uses of religion to the origins of the Ceremony, this book answers all the questions you might have about religion in this prophetic novel. For anyone who's ever googled a biblical precedent or religious phrase after encountering Atwood's dystopia, this essential guide explains it all and gives readers a fascinating look into the novel and its world. Read it and understand The Handmaid's Tale like never before.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFortress Press
    Release dateSep 3, 2019
    ISBN9781506456317
    Religion in The Handmaid's Tale: A Brief Guide
    Author

    Colette Tennant

    Colette Tennant is an English professor in Oregon. She has two previous books of poetry: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015). Her Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale: A Brief Guide was published in September 2019 to coincide with publication of The Testaments. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Poetry Ireland Review.

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      Book preview

      Religion in The Handmaid's Tale - Colette Tennant

      Index

      Introduction

      Sometimes a character in a novel will escape its pages and take on a life of her own. Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is one such character. She has traveled beyond the bindings of Atwood’s novel and is traveling on her own now, not unlike Mary Shelley’s Monster or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Offred is a fixture in today’s popular culture, so popular that Hulu has promised many more seasons of the show, and Margaret Atwood has written a sequel to the original novel, set fifteen years in the future. Offred is on the move.

      Offred knows the Bible well. In fact, she knows it so well that she sometimes catches Aunt Lydia misquoting it. Many of Offred’s readers and viewers might not know the Bible as well as she does. This book will help readers and viewers familiarize themselves with the Bible references and echoes saturating both the novel The Handmaid’s Tale as well as the Hulu series. Recognizing the biblical and religious references that abound in the imaginary dystopia of Gilead, both in the novel’s pages and on the television screen, allows readers to understand Gilead in a new way that reveals even more depth and meaning in this powerful story.

      By mandate, Offred lives in the newly formed country of Gilead, which calls itself a theocracy. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, a theocracy is a government ruled by or subject to religious authority. Those in power in Gilead claim divine authority by calling it a theocracy, but readers know that Gilead is actually a dystopia. The American Heritage Dictionary defines dystopia as an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror. The founders of Gilead are men who focus only on the Bible passages (mostly from the Old Testament) that further their agenda: to make themselves as powerful as possible and to subjugate and oppress women.

      In a complex way, Atwood uses scriptural references to indict various forms of chauvinism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity, traditions that persistently misread the Bible in defense of their own self-serving stance. At the same time, Atwood uses Scripture to highlight the hypocrisy of the entire Gileadean regime. However, both the novel and the TV series also show characters who are sincere in their faith and use religious names and symbols in significant ways. Understanding these biblical references will help the reader with this kind of multifunctional use of Scripture. The Bible verses quoted in this book, unless otherwise noted, come from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible as that’s the version Gilead quotes or uses most often. Occasionally, a reference comes from the New International Version (NIV), and verses from that translation are identified when they appear.

      This book serves as a bridge from the novel and TV series to their biblical references. It focuses on the novel—the foundation of Gilead—but also gives the reader a sense of how the novel’s use of religion expands as the Hulu series moves beyond the novel and grows June’s story and Gilead’s imaginary world. A reader can choose to read this entire book before or after reading The Handmaid’s Tale and/or watching the Hulu series. Or, thanks to the headings and the index, this book can serve as a reference guide when readers or viewers suspect there is more to be said on a particular subject. We’ll move through the religious significance of people and place names, biblical allusions that fill the novel, how religion goes awry as Gilead appropriates and misuses the Bible for its own purposes, the way religion impacts gender and politics in this dystopia, and how the Hulu series depicts Gilead’s perverted use of religion. Dive in and understand the world of The Handmaid’s Tale like never before.

      1

      Religious Significance of People and Place Names

      It was the language again, I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

      ~ Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

      People and Titles

      Offred

      In the introduction to the 2017 Anchor Books edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood comments on the decision to name her main character Offred: This name is composed of a man’s first name, Fred, and a prefix denoting ‘belonging to,’ so it is like ‘de’ in French or ‘von’ in German. . . . Within this name is concealed another possibility: ‘offered,’ denoting a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice (xv). As Atwood explains in this introductory comment, the name Offred is full of religious significance. In the second part of her comment, Atwood indicates the name denotes a religious offering. Though the manipulative Aunts attempt to coerce the Handmaids into believing that their new role is heroic, Offred is a victim forced to sacrifice her name, husband, daughter, life, body, and freedom for Gilead’s religious society and its desire for children. Each month, she is continually forced to surrender her body in a rape described as a religious ceremony. Significantly, Offred is not associated with biblical women who voluntarily offer themselves and their lives, such as Ruth, who willingly follows her mother-in-law Naomi into a new life, or Esther, who risks death to save the Hebrew people from slaughter. Instead, through her role as a Handmaid, Offred is associated with enslaved women also forced to surrender their bodies and bear children—Bilhah and Zilpah, the biblical handmaids from whom Gilead takes the name and role (more on them later).

      Luke

      Offred’s husband, Luke, shares a name with the author of one of the four Gospels (narratives of the life of Jesus). The Luke of the Bible is the author of the third Gospel as well as the book of Acts. In the novel, we only know Luke through flashbacks. The word gospel in English means good news. It makes sense that Luke is named after a Gospel, then, because his character—the memory of his character—is a constant source of love and comfort for Offred. The novel takes care to tell us, though, that Offred’s Luke isn’t identical to the biblical Luke. The Luke of the Bible is believed to have been a physician (and is referred to as the beloved physician in Colossians 4:14); however, Offred tells us that her Luke wasn’t a doctor. As she walks past the Wall and sees the dead bodies of executed doctors, Offred feels relief, because none of these men is Luke. Luke wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t (33).

      Serena Joy

      Serena Joy’s name reflects two of the gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in Galatians: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law (Galatians 5:22–23 NIV). The gifts of the Holy Spirit are considered to be outward attributes of a person with sincere inner beliefs and a model for how people of faith should live. Serena is derived from the word serene, which means peaceful or calm. Atwood was being darkly humorous when she chose this name because Serena Joy is anything but peaceful and joyful, and the combination of the two names is incredibly ironic. At their first meeting, when Offred arrives for her new assignment, she looks at Serena Joy’s face and sees nothing like a look of joy: Two lines led downward from the corners of her mouth; between them was her chin, clenched like a fist (15). Throughout the novel, she is far from peaceful or joyful as she cries during the Ceremony, intentionally causes Offred pain, and seems filled with sorrow and anger at her lack of children and her assigned role in life.

      Before the establishment of Gilead, she had been a TV evangelist and a well-known speaker who starred in a television program called the Growing Souls Gospel Hour, which suggests an origin for her religiously significant name. Offred

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