Atwoods use of puns shows Offreds ability to not be flattened by the doctorial system of Gilead. An example would be when sitting in a chair alone in her room she thinks about the word ‘chair’ and how it may refer to ‘the leader of a meeting’ or ‘a mode of execution’, even working across language barriers where the word has an entirely different meaning where it is the word for ‘flesh’. Such world play is evidence of Offreds sharpness of mind as well as refusal to flatten out language as Gilead does.
Atwood language gives the novel a comic dimension. Even in the Ceremony – ‘There’s something hilarious about this’ and when Offred is invited by the commander to play a game of scrabble with him it is all she can do not to ‘shriek with laughter, fall off my chair’. The language at this point displays a disturbing mixture of fun and panic tinged with irony. The images Atwood uses to describe Offreds laughter are not simply about loss of control however specifically about splitting, breakage and damage, to the point where she explodes ‘Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth’. Standing in the cupboard, she is aware of her predecessors message, and her laughter is tinged with an ironic awareness that she, like the other Handmaid is trapped ‘There’s no way out of here’. However Offreds slightly changed circumstances give her cause for hope, which is cautiously signaled in her last word of the chapter not ‘open’ but ‘opening’
Throughout The Handmaids Tale’ Atwood presents a small amount of recurrent images which form pattern throughout Offreds narrative. They stem from the human body also non-human nature for example flowers, gardens changing seasons, colour and light – especially moonlight. The images all relate to nature and organic processes which works in opposite with Gilead’s ideology.
Offreds role as a Handmaid defines her in biological terms as a breeder a ‘two-legged womb’. Yet she manages to survive psychologically and emotionally by resisting Gilead’s definition as Atwood writes about Offreds body in term significantly different from patriarchal perceptions. On the evening of the monthly Ceremony (when her body would seem least of all to be her own), Offred refuses to be subdued by the Commanders violation and instead she becomes the explorer of her own dark inner space ‘ One detaches oneself. One describes’. The imagery used by Atwood transforms Offreds body into a fantasy landscape ‘where only I know the footing. Treacherous grounds, my own territory. I become the earth’ She imagines it first as an unknown continent which she is trying to map, and later a cosmic wilderness. This suggests an out of body experience, for anywhere is better than Gilead. The imagery of the out of body experience is again revisited to describe the rhythms of Offreds menstrual cycle the images of the night sky ‘Pinpoints of light as well, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars’ and traversed by the moon shining and vanishing. Accurate as analogy however also a transforming metaphor, as the dark womb space expands until it assumes cosmic proportions. When the moon disappears, leaving the sky empty, Offred, not having conceived, is also left empty and drained of hope. This is her own dark female space where time is kept by the body ‘ I tell time by the moon Lunar, not solar’.
Through Offreds romance for natural beauty and fertility she shows heroic resistances to being subjugated by Gilead’s sterile patriarchal power. In the grim circumstances of Gilead, Offred still manages to believe in love and desire and the delights of the flesh. As she says ‘I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance’. Offred is particularly attracted to the Commanders wife’s garden, which, though it is enclosed by a brick wall and not available for her to sit in, represents a different space outside. This serves as an emblem or beacon of hope in such a grim and suppressed society. Offred displays her fascination of the garden as an image of the natural world which celebrates the beauty and fertile lost in the public world of Gilead and reminds her of her own garden in her past life. Chapter three for example when Offred talks about the garden she always says ‘we’ and ‘our’, signaling her private sense of possessing beauty. The flower imagery with its sexual suggestiveness provides an image of Offreds own repressed desires, but more than that, the garden becomes suddenly a space of romantics fantasy, ‘a Tennyson garden’, ‘the return of the word swoon’, where traditional images of femininity breathe through the prose as the garden itself ‘breaths’ in the light and heat of the summer.
The garden is represented as a feminized emblem of sexual desire. Offreds imagination is not attached to the Christian image of the enclosed paradise presided over by the Virgin Mary as the image of female virtue, even though Serna Joy, whose garden it is, ironically wears a blue gardening dress, the virgins colours. Instead, for Offred it is a pagan garden, and being in the garden evokes a heady combination of feelings filtered through a literary imagination, which enacts it own magical transformations. It is a kind of nature mysticism where Offred herself undergoes a ‘metamorphosis’, changing from Handmaid to ripening fruit like a ‘melon on a stem’ attached to a natural life-giving source, as she becomes for a moment a part of this pulsating world filled with a yearning for love and the energy desire. This shows Offreds characteristic mixture of lyricism and irony, as she knows that this erotic fantasizing is an escape from her real circumstances, which are bleak. However Offreds impressive energy defies Gilead’s master narrative of phallic power underpinned by the bible. Used their own brand of ‘bible-based’ religion as an excuse for the suppression of the majority of the population.
The use of flower and garden imagery suggests a different way of relating to the world forms an escape for Offred from the repressive official discourse of Gilead. The use of more exotic language when describing memories and when talking of natural beauty and even language for example when Offred is playing Scrabble with the commander she say ‘ I would like to put them into my mouth… the letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious’ this suggests Offreds love for language and Scrabble is a form of her to exploit this love just as the garden is for her fertility and energy.
Atwood, in writing about Offreds body shows how a feminine voice can find a way of speaking even when silenced by the dominant male order. Offreds intimate narrative is as rebellious as the flowers in the Commanders Wife’s garden ‘whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. This suggests that regardless to how much Gilead’s society is pushed there will also be one voice that speaks out. The imagery of which is consistent throughout the novel through the use of flowers the body.