From the beginning of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood builds the world of Gilead around a central metaphor: the palimpsest. By imposing rigid controls, Gilead has swept away nearly all forms of women's freedom – reproductive rights, independence, and choosing when and how to die – with remarkable success. Yet, like the vague outlines of older texts on a palimpsest, hints of all these constructs and desires persist. Atwood uses the extended metaphor of a palimpsest to illustrate the dual nature of freedom: while it can be easily eroded by fear and exploitation, it cannot be truly eradicated from the human spirit or society. Atwood establishes the extended palimpsest metaphor in the book's opening pages. , setting the stage for his exploration of freedom and the true nature of love. Gilead denies the Handmaids makeup and lotion and forces them to wear restrictive uniforms and veils. Bans contraception and turns sex into the soulless act of "fucking" that "has nothing to do with passion, love or romance" and "is a serious matter" based only on reproduction with ceremony banal and emotionless (94). It reduces marriage to a state function, removing all choice, even for “privileged” wives, and subjugates women who have “sinned” in the past by turning them into vessels given to high-ranking commanders as slaves to bear children. In the book's first scene, the narrator describes the gymnasium where she is held, saying, "I thought I could smell, faintly, like an afterimage, the pungent odor of sweat...the [dance] music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sounds" (3). Even in the re-education center for captured women, Gilead fails to completely erase the nuances of sex, passion, and music, the very things it set out to... middle of paper... under Gilead's control. artificial surface. In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood warns the reader that the freedoms enjoyed by today's society have enemies and that they can easily be, have, and be taken away. The original writing on the palimpsest can be easily erased, but it survives beneath the surface, undermining the new message. Again and again, Atwood reveals that freedom and the desire for freedom – over sexuality, over autonomy, over life and death – cannot be erased. Human beings, in Atwood's conception, thrive on the freedom of love, intimacy, and death, and no amount of social control or authoritarian government can totally undermine human attempts to live fully. All of Gilead's authoritarian controls fall in one way or another by the end of the novel. Gilead sets out to achieve impossible goals by eliminating entire swaths of human nature and, inevitably, fails.