‘In Burning Red’ – Red as the Color of Female Shame in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

This paper explores the color symbolism employed in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. It argues that the color red is used to mark the female protagonists – the handmaids – as shameful, sinful outcasts, and compares and contrasts them to the other color-coded women (mainly, the ‘blue’ wives) in the novel, shedding light on how this color-coding reflects connotations of red that tie it to the female body and female sexuality. This is achieved by playing on the ever-so-prominent social and cultural construction of women being trapped in a caste system, in which they are either ‘sacred mothers,’ ‘sinful sexual objects,’ or no ‘real women’ at all. The essay furthermore demonstrates that The Handmaid's Tale, which depicts a Christian fundamentalist regime, employs (post-)biblical imagery to support the association of lust and sin with the color red. Finally, the article outlines that The Handmaid's Tale unearths the hypocrisy inherent in female denunciation by showing how the color red is used in the story to highlight the discrepancies that define a society in which women are reduced to their bodies and their functions as sexual beings.