Offred may be the heroine of her own story but there are many other heroines in the narrative. Discuss three of them and their function in the novel 'The Handmaid's Tale'.

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Charlotte Moore
Offred may be the heroine of her own story but there are many other heroines in the narrative. Discuss three of them and their function in the novel.


In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ the main theme of the novel is gender and the way power is unequally distributed, this is explored in an extreme circumstance of a theocracy in a time of revolution. There are different methods of heroism demonstrated in the novel such as defiance through thought and action.
Offred is quite a passive woman that one could describe as selfish so you could dispute whether she deserves the title of heroine at all. She herself recognises that she is submissive yet we see random acts of disobedience from her throughout in her thoughts. Offred’s way of rebellion may not be through physical action yet she tries to remember things from the past and continues her own sense of individuality. She hangs on to memory and idealises the past which makes the current regime seem all the more unreasonable yet the recollection helps make the time more bearable for her. As the narrator Offred is defying the routine and she feels it is her duty to record events and not get emotionally attached she says ‘One detaches oneself. One describes.’ This emotional distance enables her to accept that the responsibility of being a handmaid has been unavoidably imposed on her and that she has no other choice so the only thing she can do is record the unreasonable conditions. Offred feels like her life is a performance and I think that the fact that she can bear to live like that makes her a heroine in her own way. In an echo of Simone de Beauvoir Offred states that ‘my self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.' Offred took for granted all the freedoms that femenists won and now pays the price even though she still feels apparently uncomfortable towards her mothers activism.

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We see at the end that she doesn’t tolerate the regime all the way through as she visits Nick on several occasions endangering both of them. You may say that this action is stupid but it is another way of going against routine. Offred speaks for the disempowered and as we can see from the historical notes she must have escaped as her account was recorded and because of this she has helped the future generations learn of how life was even though she may or may not have taken direct action at the time.
Moira is a completely different ...

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