The Handmaids Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1, the lone segment of Section I, introduces a gymnasium scene in which Alma, Janine, Dolores, Moira, June, and other Handmaids-in-training sleep in a barracks arrangement beneath flannel sheets and army blankets and contemplate their yearnings for freedom. Like girls at a restrictive camp, they reach out to their sisters to learn their names and to touch hands. The women, doubly protected by Aunts, armed with electric cattle prods and whistles, and Angels, or guards, outside the building, receive a brief privilege — twice-daily walks in pairs on an adjacent football field. The inmates fantasize about making deals with the guards, employing sex as a bartering medium.

Analysis

This spare introduction sets up powerful motifs that permeate the novel. Floating through the grim, Byzantine setting are afterimages of the past, when teams played basketball on the court. Gilead's hierarchy, for all its repression of the past, fails to eradicate normal human activities of the pre-war period. Atwood infuses the scene with sights and smells and sexuality of teenagers of the past era by emphasizing sense imagery. Harking further into the past to medieval times, when women were immured in convents, the reference to palimpsest recalls the copyists' method of erasing old …show more content…
Like the stripes and circles that outline the basketball court, the rules that govern Gilead create an inflexible, authoritarian environment in which punishment for infractions is swift and arbitrary. In later scenes, Offred contemplates the circle on the ceiling over her bed, where a chandelier once provided light. After her predecessor's suicide, the family removed the light fixture, leaving only an empty, but meaning-packed