How identifiable is The Wall in The Handmaid's Tale?

Question

This is a somewhat peculiar question, and I recognize that it may end up being closed. However, it concerns something that has been puzzling me for some years about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. (Atwood's well-known feelings about SF notwithstanding, this novel is clearly science fiction.)

Early in the book, there is the first description of The Wall:

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it's red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top.

Aside from the sidewalks being made of the same brick as the wall, there seems to be very little that marks this wall as specifically identifiable. And yet, from the first time I read this passage, I knew this wall. Having lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I could tell that this was the wall of Harvard Yard, which I walked beside some many times over the years. Reading on in the novel, it quite clear that I was quite correct in my identification of the wall.

What I a wondering is whether this was a particularly lucky flash of insight on my part, or whether there was something in the text that pointed to Harvard Square as the location of the book. Is there something, early in The Handmaid's Tale, that points specifically to its geographic setting?

Answer 1

Lots of the things mentioned point to it being Harvard Square. E.g., "we used to be able to walk freely there, when it was a university."

However the word Harvard is absent the entire book, and Cambridge (England) only appears in the notes at the end (assuming this is a full transcript: www.novelas.rodriguezalvarez.com).

Memorial Hall is mentioned.

"large old building on it; ornate late Victorian, with stained glass. It used to be called Memorial Hall"

(page 238 of 375)

Maine is mentioned twice.

“I almost made it out. They got me up as far as Salem, then in a truck full of chickens to Maine."

(page 303 of 375)

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This item—I hesitate to use the word document — was uncurl hod on the site of what was once the city of Bangor, in what, at the time prior to the inception of the Gileadean regime, would have been the state of Maine.

(page 357 of 375)

Is there early PROOF? No. Not unless describing the white staircase of the library counts. I'm assuming it looks exactly like this:

The Library is like a temple. There’s a long flight of white steps, leading to the rank of doors. Then, inside, another white staircase going up. To either side of it, on the wall, there are angels. Also there are men fighting, or about to fight, looking clean and noble, not dirty and bloodstained and smelly the way they must have looked. Victory is on one side of the inner doorway, leading them on, and Death is on the other. It’s a mural in honor of some war or other. The men on the side of Death are still alive. They’re going to heaven. Death is a beauti- ful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare; or is that Victory? I can’t re- member.

(page 195 of 375)

If so, you're not lucky; just like the author you've been there, and that's cheating.