In Hope

In Hope is a gravestone inscription that Offred encounters in the old churchyard and later recalls during her private prayers, crystallizing the novel's central tension between despair and the will to endure. The phrase appears twice in the narrative, each time in a context that forces the reader to ask whether hope belongs to the dead or to the living, and whether it is a genuine possibility or a cruel illusion.

The Gravestone and the Churchyard

During her daily shopping walks with Ofglen, Offred stops at a small church, one of the first erected in the city, hundreds of years old. The church is no longer used for worship except as a museum; inside, paintings show women in long somber dresses with covered hair and upright, darkly clothed, unsmiling men. Offred and Ofglen do not enter but stand on the path, looking at the churchyard. The old gravestones are still there, weathered and eroding, bearing skulls and crossed bones, memento mori, dough-faced angels, and winged hourglasses meant to remind viewers of the passing of mortal time. From a later century, the stones also carry urns and willow trees, symbols of mourning. Among these stones, one bears an anchor, an hourglass, and the words "In Hope." Offred reads the inscription and immediately questions its meaning: "Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?" The question is left unanswered, but it establishes the phrase as a riddle about the location of hope in a world of systematic cruelty.

The Prayer and the Question of Survival

Later, alone in her room at night, Offred sits by the window looking out at the empty garden and prays without closing her eyes. She addresses God with a mixture of familiarity and doubt, asking for help to get through whatever is coming, acknowledging that she has enough daily bread but that the problem is getting it down without choking. When she reaches the part of the Lord's Prayer about kingdom, power, and glory, she admits it takes a lot to believe in those things right now. Then she adds: "But I'll try it anyway. In Hope, as they say on the gravestones." This second invocation of the phrase transforms it from a historical curiosity into a personal, almost defiant act of will. Offred is not claiming to feel hope; she is choosing to act as if hope were possible, using the gravestone's words as a script for her own endurance. The phrase becomes a kind of minimal creed, stripped of theological certainty but retained as a necessary fiction.

The Ambiguity of the Inscription

The gravestone's anchor and hourglass, combined with "In Hope," create a dense symbolic cluster. The anchor, a traditional Christian symbol of hope (from Hebrews 6:19), suggests stability and safety; the hourglass, a memento mori, insists on the relentless passage of time and the approach of death. Together they imply that hope is not a feeling that floats free of mortality but a stance taken in full awareness of finitude. Offred's two encounters with the phrase frame her entire narrative: the first, an external observation that she can analyze and question; the second, an internal appropriation that she uses to sustain herself. The shift from observer to participant mirrors her broader trajectory from a woman trying to understand her situation to one who must actively construct meaning within it. The phrase never promises rescue or justice; it only marks a decision to continue. In a regime that systematically destroys every other source of meaning, that decision itself becomes the only form of hope available.