SE2421 Contemporary Women’s Writing
Week 5: 1 November 2011
Dr Becky Munford (munfordr@cardiff.ac.uk)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Language, bodies, desire

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Word games

(1) ‘I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in….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.’ (chapter 9, p. 62)

(2) ‘So that’s what’s in the forbidden room! Scrabble!...Now it’s forbidden, for us. Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s indecent. Not it’s something he can’t do with his Wife. Now it’s desirable…We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would also taste of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious.’ (chapter 23, p. 149)

(3) Offred uses [scrabble] as a mirror for herself, as a way of hearing her own voice in an otherwise engulfing, enforced silence. Atwood uses it, I would suggest, as an image of the text, as a mise en abîme, in which one can see this autobiographical ‘tale’ as a Scrabble board on which we must also play. If we have trouble with the plotting of the narrative or the structure of the text, we can think of it as a Scrabble board on which we must also play. If we have trouble with the plotting of the narrative or the structure of the text, we can think of it as a Scrabble board which grows (one step, one letter, one word at a time) in a seemingly haphazard manner in several directions at once around the invented, constructed centre: OFFRED. And the combination and