Offred (The Handmaid's Tale)
Offred is the unnamed protagonist and first-person narrator of The Handmaid's Tale, a woman in her early thirties forcibly made a Handmaid in the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead after the U.S. government was overthrown by a radical religious regime. Her real name—believed by many readers to be June, though never confirmed in the novel—is erased, and she is reduced to the patronymic Offred, meaning "of Fred" (the Commander who owns her), symbolizing her identity as property.
