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Plot summary

The Handmaid's Tale is set in the Republic of Gilead, a country formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America by a racist, chauvinist, nativist, theocratic-organized military coup motivated by an ideologically-driven response to the pervasive ecological degradation of the land, widespread infertility, and attendant social dislocations. Beginning with a staged terrorist attack killing the President and ousting Congress, the coup leaders launched a revolution which overthrew the United States government and abolished the US Constitution. The new theocratic military dictatorship, styled "The Republic of Gilead", moved quickly to consolidate its power and reorganize society along a new militarized, hierarchical, compulsorily-Christian regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious orthodoxy among its newly-created social classes.^{[citation needed]}

The story is presented from the point of view of a woman called Offred (not her real name; it is a patronymic slave name that means "Of Fred", referring to the man she serves). The character is one of a class of individuals kept as a concubine ("handmaid") for reproductive purposes by the ruling class. In the novel's fictional epilogue, the events of the novel occur shortly after the beginning of what is called "the Gilead period." The epilogue itself is a "transcription of a Symposium on Gileadean Studies written some time in the distant future (2195)," and according to the symposium's "keynote speaker" Professor Pieixoto, he and "a colleague" Professor Knotly Wade discovered Offred's narrative recorded onto "thirty" supposedly unnumbered "cassette tapes," placed these tapes in a "probable order" and transcribed them, calling them collectively "the handmaid's tale" -- a reference to the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Offred's narrative is disjointed in a grim, internal stream of consciousness style, out of order, and unfinished, ending abruptly when she indicates that she is about to be escorted away in a van to an unknown fate.^[4][5][6]