The Handmaid’s Tale

A. “I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or
maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn’t know any
Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered.
Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next.

It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman. For she
is unknown; or if known, she has never been mentioned to me. It pleases me to know that her taboo message made it
through, to at least one other person, washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me.
Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me a small joy. When I imagine the woman who wrote them, I
think of her as about my age, maybe a little younger. I turn her into Moira, Moira as she was when she was in
college, in the room next to mine: quirky, jaunty, athletic, with a bicycle once, and a knapsack for hiking. Freckles, I
think; irreverent, resourceful.

I wonder who she was or is, and what’s become of her.

I tried that out on Rita, the day I found the message.

Who was the woman who stayed in that room? I said. Before me? If I’d asked it differently, if I’d said, Was there a
woman who stayed in that room before me? I might not have got anywhere.

Which one? she said; she sounded grudging, suspicious, but then, she almost always sounds like that when she
speaks to me.

So there have been more than one. Some haven’t stayed their full term of posting, their full two years. Some have
been sent away, for one reason or another. Or maybe not sent; gone?

The lively one. I was guessing. The one with freckles.

You knew her? Rita asked, more suspicious than ever.

I knew her before, I lied. I heard she was here.

Rita accepted this. She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground of sorts.

She didn’t work out, she said.

In what way? I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.

But Rita clamped her lips together. I am like a child here, there are some things I must not be told. What you don’t
know won’t hurt you, was all she would say” (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)

Questions

1. Do you know the meaning of Nolite te bastardes carborundorum? Why do you think there was such a
message there?
2. Why do you think the main character is so happy to ponder the message?

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Exercises

1. Explain the meaning of the underlined words.

2. Fill in with words from the text:
a. It pleases me to think I’m ……………..with her, this unknown woman.
b. It pleases me to know that her taboo message…………….. to at least one other person.
c. Some haven’t stayed their full……………………, their full two years.
d. Rita……………. her lips together.
3. Identify all the Relative Clauses in the text and specify their type (free, dependent: defining, non-defining).
4. Fill in the following sentences with the correct WOMAN idioms: a woman of many parts, the thinking
women’s crumpet, a woman for all seasons, a woman’s work is never done, a woman of one’s word

a. Bob, I'm a……………. If I tell you I'll be at your housetomorrow morning at 10, then that's when I'll
be there.
b. Ruth is ……….. -she's a loving mother, a successful industry leader, and a great cook.
c. Judy paints, does photography, and writes novels. She's a…………………
d. Of course I come home from work to a messy house and starving kids because………………
e. It's clear that she's trying topresent herself as ………………, always carrying around those books.

5. Identify which terms are positive and which terms are negative: femme fatale, Lolita, dumb blonde, dolly
bird, sex kitten, fox, temptress, a blonde bombshell, a bit of skirt/ fluff, totty

Discussion

To what extent do you think a woman is a prisoner of her home/ society?

B. “That night I was expecting everything to be the same, including the good-night kiss. But when we’d finished the
second game, he sat back in his chair. He placed his elbows on the arms of the chair, the tips of his fingers together,
and looked at me.

I have a little present for you, he said.

He smiled a little. Then he pulled open the top drawer of his desk and took something out. He held it a moment,
casually enough, between thumb and finger, as if deciding whether or not to give it to me. Although it was upside-
down from where I was sitting, I recognized it. They were once common enough. It was a magazine, a women’s
magazine it looked like from the picture, a model on glossy paper, hair blown, neck scarfed, mouth lipsticked; the
fall fashions. I thought such magazines had all been destroyed, but here was one, left over, in a Commander’s
private study, where you’d least expect to find such a thing. He looked down at the model, who was right-side-up to
him; he was still smiling, that wistful smile of his. It was a look you’d give to an almost extinct animal, at the zoo.

Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fishbait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the
ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I’d taken such
magazines lightly enough once. I’d read them in dentists’ offices, and sometimes on planes; I’d bought them to take
to hotel rooms, a device to fill in empty time while I was waiting for Luke. After I’d leafed through them I would
throw them away, for they were infinitely discardable, and a day or two later I wouldn’t be able to remember what
had been in them.

Though I remembered now. What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an
endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on,
replica after replica, to the vanishing point. They suggested one adventure after another, one wardrobe after another,

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one improvement after another, one man after another. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and
transcended, endless love. The real promise in them was immortality.

This was what he was holding, without knowing it. He riffled the pages. I felt myself leaning forward.

It’s an old one, he said, a curio of sorts. From the seventies, I think. A Vogue. This like a wine connoisseur
dropping a name. I thought you might like to look at it.

I hung back. He might be testing me, to see how deep my indoctrination had really gone. It’s not permitted, I said.

In here, it is, he said quietly. I saw the point. Having broken the main taboo, why should I hesitate over another one,
something minor? Or another, or another; who could tell where it might stop? Behind this particular door, taboo
dissolved.

I took the magazine from him and turned it the right way round. There they were again, the images of my
childhood: bold, striding, confident, their arms flung out as if to claim space, their legs apart, feet planted squarely
on the earth. There was something Renaissance about the pose, but it was princes I thought of, not coiffed and
ringleted maidens. Those candid eyes, shadowed with makeup, yes, but like the eyes of cats, fixed for the pounce.
No quailing, no clinging there, not in those capes and rough tweeds, those boots that came to the knee. Pirates, these
women, with their ladylike briefcases for the loot and their horsy, acquisitive teeth.

I felt the Commander watching me as I turned the pages. I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t have been
doing, and that he found pleasure in seeing me do it. I should have felt evil; by Aunt Lydia’s lights, I was evil. But I
didn’t feel evil. Instead I felt like an old Edwardian seaside postcard: naughty. What was he going to give me next?
A girdle?

Why do you have this? I asked him.

Some of us, he said, retain an appreciation for the old things.

But these were supposed to have been burned, I said. There were house-to-house searches, bonfires …

What’s dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough
for those whose motives are …

Beyond reproach, I said.

[…]

On the third night I asked him for some hand lotion. I didn’t want to sound begging, but I wanted what I could get.

Some what? he said, courteous as ever. He was across the desk from me. He didn’t touch me much, except for that
one obligatory kiss. No pawing, no heavy breathing, none of that; it would have been out of place, somehow, for
him as well as for me Hand lotion, I said. Or face lotion. Our skin gets very dry. For some reason I said our instead
of my. I would have liked to ask also for some bath oil, in those little coloured globules you used to be able to get,
that were so much like magic to me when they existed in the round glass bowl in my mother’s bathroom at home.
But I thought he wouldn’t know what they were. Anyway, they probably weren’t made any more.

Dry? the Commander said, as if he’d never thought about that before. What do you do about it?

We use butter, I said. When we can get it. Or margarine. A lot of the time it’s margarine.

Butter, he said, musing. That’s very clever. Butter. He laughed.

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I could have slapped him.

I think I could get some of that, he said, as if indulging a child’s wish for bubble gum. But she might smell it on
you.”

Exercises

1. Why do you think magazines have such a powerful effect upon the character? Do you agree with her
opinion of magazines?
2. What do you think is the function of fashion and make up? What is their role? How does the text present
them?
Comment upon the difference between how the text envisages these and the following fragment:

"Women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect. One of the
many things I was tired of was the constant judgment of women. The constant stereotyping through every
medium that makes us feel like being a normal size is not normal, and heaven forbid if you're plus -size. Or
the constant message that being sexy means being naked. […] Every time I left the house, I would be worried
if I didn't put on makeup: What if someone wanted a picture?? What if they POSTED it??? These were the
insecure, superficial, but honest thoughts I was thinking. And all of it, one way or another, was based too
much on what other people thought of me. […] It's great to not wear makeup, but it's great to wear makeup
too, if it makes you happy. If you like how you look with a full face, contour and s ome serious lashes, you do
that, and SLAY. But if you like yourself bare-faced, go forth and slay like that too. You do you. […] I don't
want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, n ot my dreams, not my
struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.” (Alicia Keys on giving up make-up)

3. Give synonyms or explain the underlined words.

4. Translate the fragment into Romanian.
5. Fill in with the correct BUTTER expressions/ idioms from the list: fine words butter no parsnips,
butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, to butter up, to know which side one’s bread is buttered on, to
butter one’s bread on both sides, a butter-and-egg man, butterfingers, butter, bread always falls on
the buttered side, like a hot knife through butter, a bread-and-butter letter, a hair in the butter

a. I ………………., so I was very nice to the

recruiter and promptly sent her a thank you card after our interview.
b. The CEO………..secretly investing in oil companies while publicly backing green energy initiatives to
gain popular support.
c. Now that you're back from your stay with Auntie Jean, be sure to write her …………….
d. She's so cool, definitely ……. You'll love her.
e. I was running late this morning and naturally gotcaught in a major traffic jam. ….., doesn't it?
f. Sam always wants to show off his money when he comes to visit us in the city, but he can't fool me—
I know he's really just…………………..
g. Sure, he looks as if ………………………………when he's around people he doesn't know, but stay a
while and you'll see what he's really like.
h. Things were going smoothly until we found out every hotel was booked for the night. Talk
about….!
i. My sister is practical. She would steer through a situation like ours ……..
j. I tried to …… father by mowing the lawn before I asked to borrow the car.
k. Fred: Sweetheart, I'm very sorry I've been so short-tempered. I'll never, never be like that anymore.
Ellen: ……….
l. I dropped another plate! I guess I just have ………today.

C. “He lifts the sheet. The lower part of his face is covered by the white gauze mask, regulation. Two brown
eyes, a nose, a head with brown hair on it. His hand is between my legs. “Most of those old guys can’t make it
any more,” he says. “Or they’re sterile.”

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 I almost gasp: he’s said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not
officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.
“Lots of women do it,” he goes on. “You want a baby, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. It’s true, and I don’t ask why, because I know. Give me children, or else I die. There’s more than
one meaning to it.
“You’re soft,” he says. “It’s time. Today or tomorrow would do it, why waste it? It’d only take a minute,
honey.” What he called his wife, once; maybe still does, but really it’s a generic term. We are all honey.
I hesitate. He’s offering himself to me, his services, at some risk to himself.
“I hate to see what they put you through,” he murmurs. It’s genuine, genuine sympathy; and yet he’s enjoying
this, sympathy and all. His eyes are moist with compassion, his hand is moving on me, nervously and with
impatience.
“It’s too dangerous,” I say. “No. I can’t.” The penalty is death. But they have to catch you in the act, with two
witnesses. What are the odds, is the room bugged, who’s waiting just outside the door?
His hand stops. “Think about it,” he says. “I’ve seen your chart. You don’t have a lot of time left. But it’s your
life.”
“Thank you,” I say. I must leave the impression that I’m not offended, that I’m open to suggestion. He takes
his hand away, lazily almost, lingeringly, this is not the last word as far as he’s concerned. He could fake the
tests, report me for cancer, for infertility, have me shipped off to the Colonies, with the Unwomen. None of
this has been said, but the knowledge of his power hangs nevertheless in the air as he pats my thigh, withdraws
himself behind the hanging sheet.” (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)

Questions

1.What do you think is a woman’s function? Do you think it is breeding?

2. What do you think “unwomen” are?
“In this dystopia called Gilead, women are split into five “castes”: wives, handmaids, marthas, aunts and
“unwomen.” The wives are highest in rank, married to “commanders” in the Gileadean government.
Handmaids are “walking wombs” who give birth to the commanders’ babies. Marthas are kitchen servants,
and aunts are like prison guards: they train handmaids and snap all the women into obedience. ”
(https://www.writingonglass.com/content/margaret-atwood-feminism)
What about unwomen?
1. Listen to A Woman’s Work by Kate Bush. Pay attention to the lyrics. Why do you think the song is called
like this? Who is addressing whom in the song? What is it about? What is a woman’s work?