Offred (Handmaid 2)

The narrator of the book, a woman in her early thirties who is caught off-guard by the sweeping revolution, seems to stand in for women under the Gilead system. She is lowered from her pre-revolution status as a wife and mother and forced to go from master to master with the task of bringing a child into that household which the barren lady of the house will then adopt as her own. She is an object to her fellow humans, a recepticle for sperm and nothing more. Her value goes up when she produces a child, but so far she has been unsuccessful.

The means by which she navigates this totalitarian society are interesting. Always fearful of surveillance, she hesitates at first to entertain the idea that there was a time before this, even though she remembers it in vivid flashbacks. She remembers Luke and her daughter, both lost during a botched escape attempt to Canada. She recalls Moira, her strong-willed friend from college who nearly got away from Gilead's handmaid squads. And when she lies with Nick, the driver, she remembers the physical embrace of sex for love, something that she's lost thanks to the impersonal method proscribed for her nights with the Commander and Serena Joy.

The technology that exists in this future world is crude, seeming to be a reaction against advancements in the previous era (much as the paternalistic society is a reaction against strides made by women previously). There are computers, but everything else seems like relics from an earlier era rather than a new, more advanced one. The Handmaid might not have been privy to the developments of technology in Gilead, but she reports that the society around her reverts to much simpler times. It's an attempt to put technology in its place, as the men feel threatened by all the changes around them.

In the novel, I think the message is one of warning against the society that was emerging at the time that Atwood wrote the novel. Men in America felt threatened by the gains that women earned in the Seventies, and such a reactionary future didn't seem so easy to laugh off if you were a modern woman. Even today, there is a sense that the people who espouse "family values" would like to see women put "in their place" for upsetting the pre-Seventies society. Atwood doesn't preach against this directly, but addresses it as if it has already happened, as if society is now about the propogation of the ruling class via impersonal, desexualized means.