known as Offred who has been kidnapped by her government and separated from her husband and child. She is forced into slavery as a Handmaid, or surrogate mother, for a powerful couple that cannot have children of their own. This story is set in a future where such arrangements have become commonplace. Offred encounters not only the enormity of the demand placed on her to be a surrogate mother but a number of other indignities as her society imposes a code upon her, forcing her to dress and behave in a certain way in order not to be punished. Atwood develops here a vision of the place of women in society and uses an extreme situation to comment on the secondary position women occupy in Western society today. The feminist issues this raises have ben addressed by a number of writers and commentators in recent years, and many would not find the nightmare vision offered by Atwood to be that
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