Romantic Love in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood In her novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood addresses the concept of different expressions of romantic love through the eyes of Offred, a woman who has lost almost all her freedom to a repressive and dystopian society. Throughout her struggle with oppression and guilt, Offred's vision evolves, and it is through this process that Atwood demonstrates the nature of love as it develops in the most austere circumstances. The first glimmers of romantic love seen in this novel are the fragments of Offred's memories of Luke, her husband from whom she was separated. Mostly they are sensory memories - she remembers mostly images of comfort: of lying in her husband's arms, of his scent, and of small details of his appearance - but also a sense of connection that gives her identity. And that's exactly what she misses most. "I want Luke to be here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be appreciated, in ways I'm not; I want to be more than precious" (125-126). Yet already the person as a whole begins to slip away. The life he is leading now is taking him away from his reality: he says, “Day after day, night after night he drifts away and I become more and more unfaithful” (346). Her love for her husband is marked by guilt and remorse even at the beginning: she misses all the little characteristics of him that she never took the time to appreciate when she was with him. She even misses arguments and wonders, “How could we know we were happy?” (67). The memory of her love for Luke and the guilt of having betrayed him with other men, particularly with Nick, for whom she develops a genuine affection, is a significant psychological factor throughout... middle of paper... .ing previous relationships. Perhaps it is what can be seen as the only remaining spark of a healthy bond between man and woman in a society that seems to have forgotten that such a thing could exist. Only they among the victims of this dystopian society have learned the truth that "we must love each other or die." The student may want to begin the essay with the following quote: "All I have is a voice / To undo the bent lie / The romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual man on the street / And the lie of the Authority / Whose buildings they grope the sky / There is no state / And no one exists alone / Hunger allows no choice / For citizen or police / We must love each other or die.” --WH Auden,"September 1939"Works Cited:Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. New York: Ballantine, Fawcett Crest, 1987.