This Is Way Too Long

For some reason I got the urge to put up my big english essay. Its on The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

“Surviving The Present Without The Past”
In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Offred is forced to limit her interactions with people. The only thing keeping Offred from killing herself throughout the novel is her few chances to interact with the only people she can, not the family she left behind. To yearn for a former time is to be helpless, but to live for her interactions with Nick and the Commander is to be a survivor.
Throughout the novel, Offred, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, refers to the life “before”. In this past, her existence was that of a typical working wife and mother in the 1980’s. Her husband, Luke, left his wife for Offred and had a little girl by her. These people at first glance seem extremely important to Offred, but a second look may tell a different story. Offred states that “right now, the only way [she] can believe anything” is to believe that her family is well, despite the separation (Atwood, 1). This could give the impression that she puts her life in the hands of these beliefs, yet the feelings don’t directly correlate with survival. They seem unattached from her heart; or more accurately, Offred has disconnected herself from her own heart in order to cope with her current tragedy.
The instances in the book where Offred brings up Luke display the longing one would expect, but she doesn’t hope to see him. The tone demonstrates, rather, that she has given up the idea of meeting Luke again, and speaks of him as a long lost myth. “In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke still hope?” (Atwood, 1). Offred may not force back her emotions or memories of her family in the “before”, but she does not live for those memories. Her attention is constantly focused upon the time she spends secretly with the Commander in his study, and the sexual tension between herself and Nick. The way Offred describes Nick, “stretch[ing] in the sun…feel[ing] the rippling of muscles [that] go along him”, exhibit her lust for him and her disregard for Luke completely. She longs for Nick; longs “to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy” (Atwood, 1). These thoughts and wishes go directly against what a woman living for her husband would think and wish.
Offred’s time with the Commander also keeps her from killing herself. The prospect of learning about the state of the country and the way in which the United States was overthrown was, for her, reason enough to return to the Commander’s office night after night. Offred takes the Commander’s gifts and keeps looking for more contraband that might hint at the situation outside of Gilead, the city she is confined to. At one point, the Commander takes Offred to a whorehouse of sorts, where Commanders like himself can bend the rules they made for themselves a bit. There, Offred finds her best friend Moira, and the “before” and the “after” of her world cross. This however, is the last time Offred has any connection with the outside during her confinement. Offred didn’t hope for this brief escape, or any other faux freedom she experienced. The example of her survival tactics stress how far apart her loved ones remain from her priorities.
When Offred and Nick begin sleeping with each other, Offred starts to lose interest in finding out more about the whereabouts of Luke and her daughter. Ofglen, Offred’s walking partner, recognizes the change in her behavior, and becomes upset with Offred’s lack of involvement in a resistance the Handmaids have formed, when she could be such a large asset due to her Commander’s high ranking status. Acting to glean information to help the resistance would show how badly she would like to find Luke again, but Offred instead neglects her opportunities and remains focused on her secretive love affair with Nick.
It is not that Offred does not love Luke or her daughter anymore. The idea is that those things, people, myths-whatever they may be to Offred-aren’t the reason why she keeps her neck from the noose and her hands from the matches and fire. The hope to be with Nick and to be given information and illegal material from the Commander is what gets Offred from day to day. Her undeniable want for Nick is spelled out over and over again. “Nick. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger” (Atwood, 1). Offred comes to the conclusion that she cannot substitute Nick for Luke in her new situation. “One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. Should does not apply” (Atwood, 1). The society Offred lives in drains the hope to see her loved ones again right out of her. As Harold Bloom says, “Gilead, at bottom, is a vampiric realm, a society sick with blood” (Bloom, 2). Another critic, Amin Malak, disagrees with Bloom, stating that, “Atwood's heroine constantly yearns for her former marriage life with Luke” (Malak, 3), though Bloom returns with the idea that “[Offred’s] double-crossing the Commander and his Wife, her choice to hazard a sexual affair with Nick, and her association with the underground network, all point to the shift from being a helpless victim to being a sly, subversive survivor” (Bloom, 2).
Occasionally, Offred has trouble recollecting her husband, in which case the impression is given that her lack of memory may be cause to her lack of devotion to him. It is clear that Offred is concerned with other things to survive by. Roberta Rubenstein points out, using text from the book, that “when Offred tries to recall her visceral connections to the husband and daughter from whom she has been so abruptly separated, she mourns, "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.” (Rubenstein, 4).
Offred lives with Luke and her daughter close to her heart, despite the fact that she may not be close to her heart. The interactions she had and remembers with her family are a disconnected part of her life that don’t have any bearing on whether she wants to live or not. Offred recognizes that she has to remove herself from that past in order to survive the present. The way she copes with this involves the ability to reconstruct the past in a way that helps her come to terms with it. Offred can’t use the past as a crutch in a world where even her own name is forbidden. Therefore, she can only find solace in the thought that maybe the next day, or the next week or month, she can see Nick, lay with him, or get a chance to play Scrabble and read in the Commander’s study.
The transformation that overtakes Offred during her imprisonment, allowing her to go from “a helpless victim to being a sly, subversive survivor”, was necessary to stop her from committing suicide. The way in which Offred returns to the past is reminiscent of one who enters a daze and mumbles old and forgotten times. She doesn’t put herself inside of that old world, because to do so would cause the depression she already is feeling to push herself over the edge and end it all. Instead Offred lives outside of the “before”, and hopes for the few interactions she’s allowed in the “after” that she’s forced to live in.