Symbolism In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood relates a story taking place in a dystopian society where Christian fundamentalists enforce their beliefs. Their society shows what family values might look like if they were enforced. Women stay at home gardening and having babies. If women are unable or refuse to do so they are marginalized and sometimes executed. Throughout the book Margaret Atwood uses flowers as a symbol of life or fertility, to describe the women in Gilead and to disguise terrifying things, overall giving a meaning to the book as a whole.
Margaret Atwood uses flowers as a symbol of fertility, representing the female body as a flower. Atwood gives special attention to the flowers as objects that can bloom, at a time where only a few women can. After the scene of the Ceremony Offred wants to take something from the house as a “souvenir”, she wants “Something that will not be missed”(98). She finds “ In the wood at midnight, a magic flower. A withered daffodil, not one from the dried arrangement”(98). “[Offred] finds the daffodils, crisp at the edges where they’ve dried, limp towards the stems” (98). This
“The red of the smile is the same as the red of the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden, towards the base of the flowers where they are beginning to heal. The red is the same, but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa” (33). This fragment uses the color red as a different symbol representing the beauty in a woman with red lipstick and the death of hung men with blood coming out of their mouths. Offred says “the red is the same”, she relates the two scenes together, however, she says “there is no connection”. The quote helps give a meaning to the book as a whole as it represents aspects of women and power in Gilead’s