About 50 pages still left to finish the book and I’ve noticed several mentions of the oblong shape in Handmaid’s Tale. I did a quick a search on verbalworkout.com revealed a total of 8 mentions throughout the novel.
I’m so hung up on it. It’s such an odd thing to repeat so much.
Is there some symbolism? Does it mean anything?!
by cakethekitten
4 Comments
Margaret Atwood did an AMA here [you might want to take a look](http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2qprzk/i_am_margaret_atwood_author_of_the_handmaids_tale/) 🙂 [Here’s a link to all of our upcoming AMAs](http://www.reddit.com/r/books/wiki/amafullschedule)
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She was active on twitter as of a year or two ago; no joke you might be able to just ask her straight up.
It’s most likely not related to the show: The Oblongs
One definition of oblong is:
> Deviating from a square, circular, or spherical form by being elongated in one direction.
From this you could have the interpretation that the frequent reference to the oblong shape is an analogy to Gilead being a deviation of the United States pre-revolution.
Before, there was a balance of church and state. They formed a circle, perhaps a square if you will. However, the revolution has caused a shift in power, one where fundamentalist Christians are in control. The oblong then represents the tyranny of the church and its domination of government power, just as the longer side of the oblong dominates the shorter.
This, or maybe Atwood just likes the word oblong.