Keyword Guide · character-analysis
This guide covers the core cast of The Handmaid's Tale, their narrative roles, and how their choices drive the story’s central conflicts. It is tailored for high school and college students prepping for class discussions, quizzes, or literary essays. All content aligns with standard high school and early college literature curriculum expectations.
The Handmaid's Tale centers on a core cast of characters whose conflicting motivations expose the hypocrisy and violence of Gilead’s authoritarian regime. Offred serves as the narrator and audience proxy, while figures like Serena Joy, the Commander, and Moira represent different positions of power, resistance, and complicity within the state. Side characters highlight the varied impacts of Gilead’s rules across different social groups.
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The Handmaid's Tale characters are categorized by their assigned social roles in Gilead, each designed to uphold the state’s gendered hierarchy. Key figures represent distinct stances toward the regime: open resistance, quiet compliance, active participation, or gradual disillusionment. Their interactions reveal how power operates at both institutional and personal levels.
Next step: Write a 1-sentence note next to each core character in your book marking their primary stance toward Gilead as you read.
Action: Look up the definition of Gilead’s social role categories before you start reading, and create a chart to log character details as you go.
Output: A blank character chart with columns for name, Gilead role, core motivation, key actions, and thematic ties.
Action: After reading half the text, review your chart and add 2 new observations per character about how their actions align or conflict with their stated beliefs.
Output: A partially filled character chart with notes on internal contradictions for each core character.
Action: Group characters by their stance toward Gilead, and write 1 short paragraph explaining how each group contributes to the novel’s central message about power.
Output: A 3-paragraph character group analysis you can reuse for discussion responses or essay outlines.
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Action: For each core character, list 3 stated goals and 3 unstated, implicit goals you can infer from their actions.
Output: A 2-column chart for each character separating stated and implicit motivations, which you can use to support analysis points.
Action: Draw a relationship map linking each core character to others, marking each connection as cooperative, adversarial, or complicated.
Output: A visual relationship map you can reference to quickly explain character conflicts during discussions or essay drafting.
Action: For each core character, write 1 short paragraph explaining how their arc supports or challenges one of the novel’s central themes.
Output: A set of theme-character links you can directly adapt into body paragraphs for essays or short answer responses.
Teacher looks for: Correctly names character roles, pre-Gilead backstories, and key actions without mixing up details between characters.
How to meet it: Cross-reference your character notes with your book text twice before submitting work, and flag any details you are unsure of to verify.
Teacher looks for: Acknowledges character contradictions and avoids reducing complex figures to one-dimensional archetypes like 'hero' or 'villain'.
How to meet it: Include at least one example of a character acting against their stated beliefs for each analysis point you write.
Teacher looks for: Explicitly links character choices and arcs to broader novel themes, alongside describing character actions without context.
How to meet it: End every character analysis paragraph with a 1-sentence link to a theme like bodily autonomy, power, or complicity.
Offred is the novel’s first-person narrator, a Handmaid assigned to the Commander’s household. Her narration alternates between her present-day experiences in Gilead and flashbacks to her life before the regime, including her husband, daughter, and friend Moira. Use this before class: Jot down 2 of Offred’s flashbacks that you think most shape her choices in the present day to reference during discussion.
The Commander is a high-ranking Gilead official who helped design the regime’s rules and social structure. Though he benefits more than almost anyone from Gilead’s hierarchy, he regularly breaks his own rules to engage in forbidden activities with Offred, from reading to informal meetings. Add a note in your character chart listing 2 small details that reveal the Commander’s dissatisfaction with the world he built.
Serena Joy is the Commander’s Wife, a former conservative public speaker who advocated for the anti-feminist policies that laid the groundwork for Gilead. Under the regime, she is confined to the home and barred from working or participating in public life, a restriction she resents deeply. Write down 1 example of Serena Joy acting to help Offred and 1 example of her acting to harm Offred to track her contradictory motivations.
Moira is Offred’s closest friend from before Gilead, a bold, outspoken queer woman who openly resists the regime from the moment she is forced into the Red Center. She escapes the center once, is recaptured, and is later forced into sex work for Gilead’s elite, though she retains her sharp, critical attitude toward the state. Note 1 way Moira’s resistance contrasts with Offred’s approach to survival to use in a compare/contrast essay.
Ofglen is Offred’s assigned shopping partner, another Handmaid who initially presents as a devout follower of Gilead’s ideology. She later reveals she is a member of the underground resistance, sharing information with Offred and inviting her to participate in secret opposition activities. Add a note to your study guide explaining how Ofglen’s hidden identity highlights the difference between public performance and private belief in Gilead.
Nick is the Commander’s driver, a low-ranking Gilead guard who lives in the household’s garage. He has secret ties to the resistance, and begins a forbidden relationship with Offred at Serena Joy’s request, to help Offred conceive a child. Write down 2 ambiguous actions Nick takes that make his true loyalties unclear, to use in a discussion about character morality.
The choice to withhold Offred’s real name emphasizes that Gilead reduces people to their assigned social roles, stripping them of their individual identities. It also lets her represent the experiences of all people trapped in Handmaid roles, rather than framing her as a unique, isolated case.
Serena Joy is both. She actively helped build the oppressive system that now restricts her freedom, making her complicit in Gilead’s violence, but she also suffers greatly under the regime’s rules, including the loss of her public career and the ability to control her own household. Most teachers encourage you to address this contradiction in analysis alongside picking one label.
The last time Offred sees Moira, she is working at a secret brothel for Gilead elites, and has given up on escaping the regime. The novel’s ambiguous ending does not confirm what happens to her after Offred is taken away from the Commander’s household.
No. The Commander at the center of the story breaks rules regularly for his own pleasure, and other Commanders are shown visiting the brothel or engaging in other forbidden activities. Their loyalty to Gilead is often tied to the power it gives them, not a genuine belief in its ideology.
Editorial note: This page is independently written for educational support. Verify specifics with assigned class materials and the original text.
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