The motif of rescue is a common thread in books by and about women—for example, Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, Farewell to Manzanar, Beloved, and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Atwood, who is too determined, too realistic a feminist to accord all the credit to male characters, follows Charlotte Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan in emphasizing the main character’s reliance on self rather than on a fantasized savior—that is, Superman swooping down to save Lois Lane or Dudley Do-Right rescuing the hapless Nell. For Offred, the way out comes from within. While she chafes at her powerlessness and remains candid about her chances of survival, she allows her mind to fondle and caress memories of Luke, but concerns herself with the loss of love rather than with the absence of a protector.
Analyzing the torpor that immobilizes the spirit of Gilead, Offred concludes, “Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.” Her mental anguish repeatedly frames her imagined pictures of Luke. She toys with her beliefs—that Luke died instantly; that he survives in prison and can feel her thoughts, which she transmits telepathically; that he will some day get a message to her, urging her to be patient and that he will one day reunite their family. In a simulation of the Christian Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—the three-in-one vision of Luke impels Offred to “believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke.” Her ambivalence torments her in shifting contradictions: “This also is a belief of mine. This also may be untrue.” Her mind fastens on standard Puritan gravestone symbolism: an anchor and an hourglass and the words In Hope. Offred ponders who did the hoping, the survivors or the corpse.
