Red In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale from Margaret Atwood is the tale of a woman named Offred who now serves the purpose of only bearing children. Her story has a lot of different kinds of symbolism and archetypes that serves to the reader how a simple object or thing is different in Offred’s eyes now that her life has changed. .
The color red appears constantly in the novel. Red is the color of the Handmaids, a color associated both with shame and fertility. Offred expands the color’s symbol by using it to describe blood, sometimes as the life force that courses through her body, and sometimes as a marker of violence and death, like the blood on the executed women. One of the most common uses of the color is to describe the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden.

Offred seems envious of the color of Serena Joy’s clothes by saying, “Her dress is crisp cool cotton. For her it’s blue, watercolour, not this red of mine that sucks in heat and blazes with it at the same time.” She’s also jealous, of Serena Joy’s additional freedoms and her higher place in the hierarchy of women, noting that Serena Joy could, at any moment, have her reassigned. Occasionally Offred refers to the blue of the sky as protective perhaps a reference to the protection offered by the Wives because of the signs of their status. Serena Joy’s flowers, also reflect the contrast of blue and red; “Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light

In chapter 36 Offred thinks the following; “For a moment I think i won’t remember how to do any of this, and my first try with the eyeliner leaves me with a smudged black lid as if i’ve been in a fight,” It signifies femininity, the past, and Offred’s lost freedom to control her appearance. But others, like the Commander, think that the lack of makeup is actually a source of freedom, since women now don’t have to use their appearances to compete for men. Still, the Commander enjoys going to Jezebel’s, where every woman wears makeup with the hopes of attracting business. Handmaids shouldn’t attempt to be beautiful, as it would add another layer of difficulty for the Wives and Commanders they serve. Yet Offred does her best to maintain her appearance, carefully saving her butter as moisturizing lotion and later the lotion given to her by the commander, even using it in a house with no