To set the tone of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood opens with three disparate epigraphs, or introductory quotations.
The first, from Genesis 30:1-3, cites the crux of the scriptural love story of Jacob and Rachel. Having promised to work seven years in exchange for marriage to his uncle Laban’s daughter Rachel, Jacob is tricked into marrying the elder daughter, Leah, who bears him two sons. In her jealousy and self-abasement, Rachel, Jacob’s second and most beloved wife, insists that he bed her handmaid, Bilhah, who also bears two sons. This biblical event forms the justification for twentieth-century Gilead’s Handmaid system as well as a prophecy: women who fail to conceive are devalued.
The second epigraph comes near the end of “A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift’s caustically satiric essay, published in 1729. Swift s incredibly objective speaker proposes the raising of children for sale as a food and commodity item in order to alleviate the poverty of poor families who produce more infants than they can afford to rear. The controlled, sincere tone of the unnamed proposer of this mad scheme parallels the earnest fanaticism of Atwood’s Gilead.
The final epigraph, taken from an Islamic proverb, suggests that there need be no laws against the obvious. Because people were not meant to eat stones, a traveler in the desert would not expect to see a prohibition against such a meal.
