Under His Eye in The Handmaid's Tale holds layers of meaning beyond its surface

In The Handmaid's Tale, a motto as innocent as Under His Eye is so serious. Employed daily as a greeting or farewell by the Handmaids and the other residents of Gilead, it sounds like a humble title, nearly harmless religious motto, reminding all that God is everywhere and always watching. But beneath the disguise of religiosity is an even more sinister, tyrannical reality.

"Under His Eye" is not merely a religious reminder. It's a threat, a warning, and a tool of psychological manipulation that embodies the totalitarian spirit of Gilead itself. And it is not simply fiction that this sentence has its roots in recorded history, a history Atwood herself carefully researched when she penned Gilead.

The phrase Under His Eye in The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just dystopian fiction, it echoes real surveillance tactics used by 20th-century religious authoritarian regimes.

In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, where each word matters and every glance may be observed, Under His Eye reveals how authoritarianism and theocracy can distort faith into fear.

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Where does the expression Under His Eye come from in

The Handmaid's Tale?

The phrase Under His Eye is full of religious and dictatorial connotations. It could be interpreted as a biblical allusion to the all-seeing eye of God in Psalms or Proverbs to the eye of the Lord, watching, but it has a much more sinister flavor to it in the world of Gilead.

In The Handmaid's Tale, His power could just as easily be the state, the Commanders, or the ever-vigilant Eyes, the Eyes of Gilead, the secret police. Like most totalitarian states throughout history, Gilead blurs the line between God's will and state surveillance and employs religion as a tool of social control.

Margaret Atwood has insisted repeatedly that everything in The Handmaid's Tale is based on history. In an interview with Literary Hub in 2018, she said:

"I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time."

Under His Eye, then, reflects real practices used in 20th-century totalitarian states, most famously those that blended religious fundamentalism with state control.

From N*zi Germany's zealous policing of deviant behavior to the surveillance deployment of the Soviet Union to quash opposition, governments have long watched their citizens in the interest of ideological purity.

In both cases, religious identity, sanctioned or demonized, was a rationale for total control. Jewish populations in N*zi Germany were demonized and persecuted through methodical surveillance and persecution, and religious populations in Soviet Russia were spied upon, exiled, or killed.

Both governments employed neighbors informing on neighbors, secret informers, and the overall atmosphere of fear that somebody, somewhere, was always watching them.

Gilead's Eyes, a clandestine police force in literal reality, borrows directly from this earlier precedent.

Under His Eye, called both hello and ubiquitous threat, inspires secret paranoia among its citizens. It is Gilead's rendition of Orwell's "Big Brother is watching you", but with religious zeal in The Handmaid's Tale.

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Why Under His Eye from The Handmaid's Tale is still relevant today?

Under His Eye continues to echo far beyond the imaginary streets of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale. Over the past few years, the spreading popularity of actual debates about reproductive freedoms, surveillance technologies, and religious fanatics has made Atwood's story less a futuristic speculation and more a prophetic warning.

In 2022, political decisions like the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States re-ignited public discourse around bodily autonomy and state control. Atwood herself responded to this shift with alarm.

In her essay collection Burning Questions, she penned:

"Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is.". It is slavery: the taking of possession and mastery over another person's body, and gain by virtue of that taking of possession.

Her words address the grotesque realism of Gilead's imagined world and, by extension, the dangers of the present moment to which Under His Eye refers.

The expression encapsulates the psychological pressure of surveillance wrought by theocracy. Whether enforced by divine accountancy or governmental terror, Under His Eye ensures even in silence to be watched. That very awareness keeps revolt in check.

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What is The Handmaid's Tale about?

The Handmaid's Tale is not just a dystopian drama, it's a cautionary tale of how power, religion, gender, and control by the state merge. The novel takes place in a near-future society called Gilead that emerges after a second American Civil War that destroys democratic institutions in the United States.

In Gilead, birth has disintegrated, and women of childbearing age who are fertile are slaves and forced to bear children for the elite class. Such women possess limited rights taken away from them: they cannot read, they cannot own property, nor can they manage their bodies in The Handmaid's Tale.

June Osborne, alias Offred, is the central character in the series. A career woman with a family and a past where she lived her life independently, she's abducted while trying to flee Gilead and brought down to Handmaid slavery.

The Handmaid's Tale focuses on a woman’s journey from helpless victim to strong resister, as she fights to reunite with her husband and daughter. Atwood’s story isn’t just imagined—it’s based on the real history of gender oppression.

In Gilead, women have no freedom, and the rulers use the Bible to justify making women surrogates, like Bilhah. Even the color-coded outfits—red for Handmaids, blue for Wives, brown for Aunts—show their social rank, like a caste system.

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Interested viewers can watch The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu.