Like a portion of modern fiction writers — Ray Bradbury, Fred Chappell, and Toni Morrison — Margaret Atwood is, by nature, training, and profession, a poet. Her facile expression of thought processes and manipulation of language to probe the psychological perversions in Gilead produce fascinating, multi-level rhetorical maneuvers, often juxtaposing weakness with power or cruelty with vulnerability. For instance:
Simile
We would exchange remedies and try to outdo each other in the recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs.
His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.
Symbol
I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do.
The camera moves to the sky, where hundreds of balloons rise, trailing their strings: red balloons, with a circle painted on them, a circle with a stem like the stem of an apple, the stem of a cross.
Humor
There's a wad of cotton attached to the back, I can see it as she half turns; it looks like a sanitary pad that's been popped like a piece of popcorn. I realize that it's supposed to be a tail.
Is anything wrong dear? the old joke went.
No, why?
You moved.
Alliteration
In the curved hallway mirror, I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke.
As for us, any real illness, anything lingering, weakening, a loss of flesh or appetite, a fall of hair, a failure of the glands, would be terminal.
