Owning a name or being owned?

Names and namelessness in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Abstract

Owning a name or being owned? Names and namelessness in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Margaret Atwood’s well-known dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019), are both set in the fictional state of Gilead, which replaced the former United States of America in a coup. One of the principal challenges facing the country is a declining birth rate. In response, the leaders of Gilead, known as the Commanders, have attempted to solve the problem by establishing a version of Christianity that aligns with their own values and by creating a society in which women and men are divided into distinct classes based on their earlier adherence to the regime’s principles, their role in the coup, and, in the case of women, their fertility. This paper analyses what the names of the different classes, the names, renamings or, in some cases, the namelessness of the characters tell us about the world of Gilead; what connotations the different names of the characters and classes have; how names are used to connect every institution of Gilead to religion; and how the plot is structured by the names that are used by the main characters in different parts of The Testaments.