Offred can play Scrabble only because the Commander invites her to break the rules he benefits from. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, that small permission exposes a particular cruelty of linguistic control. Gilead makes a woman’s name announce her assignment and makes an ordinary greeting advertise her reproductive function. Then a powerful man can offer access to words as a personal favour. The familiar account of censorship explains what women lose. It leaves less explained how the prohibited activity acquires a new owner: the person who can suspend the prohibition. Offred’s pleasure in language becomes entangled with dependence on its gatekeeper.
The review of The Handmaid’s Tale and theocratic hypocrisy describes the subterfuge practised even by the regime’s successful men. The Commander’s word game gives that hypocrisy a precise domestic form.
01
Offred’s name makes assignment sound like identity
The name Offred attaches the speaker to a man through the possessive suggestion of being of Fred. This is a designation of placement, not an adequate biography. Yet it occupies the place where a personal name should stand. To address her correctly under Gilead’s rules is already to repeat the regime’s account of who she is.
The distinction matters because a personal history need not disappear for its public expression to become difficult. Offred remembers life before Gilead. The assigned name makes those memories irrelevant to the social transaction of naming her. A person can retain an inward account of herself while being required to answer to another account at the door.
Mihaela Gavrilă’s study in Open Linguistics connects the novel’s patronymics to possession and its official vocabulary to social authority; the narrower consequence here is that Gilead can conscript even routine recognition into its system, so that someone acknowledging Offred’s presence also names the relationship that confines her.
02
A greeting supplies the topic before conversation begins
The greeting ‘Blessed be the fruit’ makes fertility the opening subject of an encounter. Its religious vocabulary presents that subject as benevolent. The speaker need not issue a threat. Repetition can make a political assignment sound like ordinary politeness, and refusing the formula becomes more conspicuous than speaking it without conviction.
‘Under His Eye’ introduces another pressure. The phrase permits surveillance to accompany an apparently pious exchange without requiring anyone to specify who is watching. These formulas do not prove that every speaker believes Gilead’s theology. They let speakers demonstrate compliance while withholding the much harder information of what they actually think.
That gap limits the argument. Formulaic language cannot abolish private meaning, as Offred’s remembered life and verbal reflections demonstrate. The regime controls the safest public utterance more successfully than it controls interpretation. Its language therefore produces uncertainty as well as obedience: a familiar greeting cannot establish whether another person is trustworthy.
03
Scrabble gives the Commander something to grant
The secret Scrabble meetings exploit that gap between public restriction and private appetite. Offred’s intellectual activity becomes possible inside an arrangement controlled by the Commander. The game supplies an intimacy unavailable under the official rules, but its availability still depends on his invitation. The restriction has made an ordinary pastime scarce.
This is more specific than hypocrisy. The Commander receives the benefit of appearing generous through an exception to a deprivation that his social position sustains. Offred can enjoy the encounter without its becoming equal. Pleasure is no evidence that the conditions producing it are free, especially when one participant controls permission to begin.
The locked Bible makes a related inequality visible in the publisher’s reading guide. Gilead invokes a text while restricting access to it. Whoever controls reading can decide which words count as authority and which uses of words count as transgression. Scrabble briefly changes the permitted activity; it does not transfer that power.
04
The historians inherit an authority the voice cannot answer
The Historical Notes move the problem beyond Gilead’s household. Offred’s account reaches its later audience through recordings transcribed and arranged by scholars. Her words survive, but survival introduces another set of decisions about presentation. The speaking woman and the people organising her testimony occupy different positions of authority.
The analogy has limits. Transcription is necessary to the narrative’s transmission, and scholars examining evidence are not equivalent to Commanders enforcing captivity. Yet the change of frame requires attention to who can question whom. Offred’s account becomes an object of discussion in a setting where she cannot reply to the discussion’s terms.
That produces a final difference between possessing words and controlling their use. Gilead fails to prevent Offred from leaving a voice behind. The later conference can nevertheless make that voice serve questions chosen by someone else. Atwood places the reader between the testimony already heard and a new authority explaining how it should be heard.
Sources
- primaryThe Handmaid’s TaleMargaret Atwood, 1985; Anchor edition and reading guide, Penguin Random House.
- criticismMargaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the borders of Romanian translationsMihaela Gavrilă, Open Linguistics 9.1, 2023, article 20220260.
- referenceLanguage in The Handmaid’s Tale Teacher NotesReadWriteThink, references to the 1998 Anchor edition.
- referenceThe Handmaid’s TaleWikipedia, publication, plot and character entries.
Questions about The Handmaid's Tale
Is June confirmed as Offred’s original name in the novel?
No. June is a reader inference from the names exchanged by the women. The novel does not explicitly identify it as Offred’s original name.
Does the novel identify the Commander beyond doubt?
No. The Historical Notes consider possible identities. Treating the television version’s identification as settled novelistic fact removes that uncertainty.
When was the novel first published?
The Handmaid’s Tale first appeared in 1985. The Penguin Random House guide refers to its subsequent 1986 publication context.
Why does the publisher’s guide mention Chaucer?
It explains that Atwood intended the title to recall The Canterbury Tales as well as folktales and fairy tales, placing an individual teller’s account within a larger literary tradition.