Fred Waterford

Background

Fred wants more contact with June than the law allows between a Commander and his Handmaid, and starts inviting her to play Scrabble with him at night. He likes to come across as gentle, even as a victim of Gilead himself, but underneath he is cruel and aggressive. After Commander Pryce dies, Fred becomes head of the Council, a post roughly like a prime minister's. At the end of season 4 June and other former Handmaids beat him to death, and his body is hung on a wall in no man's land.

Did You Know?

• The name 'Offred' is a patronymic constructed of 'of' and the first name of the head of her household; Handmaids' names change as they change households.
• The novel's title echoes Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories such as 'The Merchant's Tale' and 'The Parson's Tale'.
• The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.
• Atwood has said that all of the scenarios in The Handmaid's Tale have actually occurred in real life, and she carried newspaper clippings to interviews to support her fiction's basis in reality.
• Atwood dedicated the novel to her ancestor Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England but survived her hanging.