A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Handmaid’s Tale: Playing Scrabble, Reading, and Writing as Phantasying in Freudian Terms

Year 2026, Issue: 5, 11 - 17, 26.01.2026

Ercan Tugay Akı

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale represents the struggle of women physically and mentally imprisoned in a phallogocentric and totalitarian state called the Republic of Gilead. Even though the novel has been subjected to many readings from various vantage points, no study has so far offered a thorough psychoanalytic analysis of the novel from a Freudian perspective which focuses on the activities carried out by Offred and the Commander in the Commander’s study. This article analyses Atwood’s novel within a psychoanalytic context by incorporating such concepts as phantasy, pleasure principle, and defence mechanism from Freudian terminology. It specifically focuses on the time that Offred and the Commander spends in the Commander’s study in private, where they read, write, and play games together, and argues that these activities function as phantasying and that Offred and the Commander create a space of phantasy together in private in Freudian terms.

Keywords

Margaret Atwood , The Handmaid’s Tale , phantasying , space , pleasure principle , defence mechanism , Freud , psychoanalysis

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