References to Literature in The Handmaid's Tale

“The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It's one more thing I would like to steal.” (183)

            Writing, literature, and storytelling are constantly referenced throughout The Handmaid’s Tale. All these things are in fact forbidden to Offred ever since she became a handmaid. The forbidden nature of these things gives them a new light in her eyes and a new type of excitement. This is extremely evident when the commander invites her to play a game of scrabble for the first time.

“To be asked to play Scrabble, instead, as if we were an old married couple, or two children, seemed kinky in the extreme, a violation in its own way. As a request it was opaque.”

She addresses how mundane this would have been in a world before she was banned from writing. However, the act of telling stories is not always a positive one.  She considers the life that she’s currently living to be a giant story. This means that despite the allure of telling stories, there are still some that she would rather not tell, those of her own life. “I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one.” (60). Does this mean that she despises her own life? Is she telling her story not because she wants to but because she believes that she has to? There is so much depth to the writing references in the book that she makes us question the story being told to us. “When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out.” (144)

Storytelling, writing, and literature are all reoccurring themes in the Handmaid’s tale, and give us another perspective to look at the book through.