Marrying The Hangman - Analysis

The bargain: survival bought with someone else’s death

Atwood’s central claim is stark: in a world built by men’s laws, a woman’s easiest route to life can require her to collaborate with the machinery that kills women like her. The poem opens like a legal footnote turned nightmare: a condemned woman can escape hanging only by marrying the hangman, yet there is no hangman, so her death becomes indefinitely postponed. That postponement is not mercy; it is a drawn-out captivity. From the first paragraph, the tone is coldly factual, almost bureaucratic, and that chill matters—it mimics the impersonality of official death, the way violence can be administered as procedure rather than cruelty.

The argument tightens as the poem insists twice, This is not fantasy, it is history. Atwood isn’t using history as costume; she’s pointing to a repeatable pattern: the law makes a woman’s life contingent on attaching herself to a sanctioned male role—even when that role is executioner.

Life “without mirrors”: the voice as the first captivity and the first tool

The poem’s first crucial image is the absence of mirrors: To live in prison is to live without mirrors, and therefore without the self. The woman’s isolation is not just physical; it’s an enforced erasure. When she finds a hole in the stone wall and hears a voice that has no face, she accepts it as her mirror. That’s a desperate, ingenious substitution: she can’t see herself, so she makes herself through being heard.

But the mirror is also a trap. A voice without a face can be anyone; it can be tender or predatory; it can be a future husband or a future hangman. The poem holds that uncertainty in suspension. The woman’s selfhood returns through the voice, yet her return depends on another person who remains unseen—already a rehearsal for the marriage bargain, where her survival will depend on a man’s willingness to become something monstrous.

Making the hangman: love as the manufacture of a mask

The poem’s most unsettling turn is that the woman must not only find a hangman; she must create him. Atwood describes this creation as a kind of moral surgery. The man must renounce his face and accept the impersonal mask of death, a mask with eyes but no mouth. That detail—eyes without a mouth—captures the whole system: seeing without speaking, witnessing without accountability, power without explanation.

The work is also intensely physical. She imagines transforming his hands so they will twist the rope around throats, throats other than hers. Here is the poem’s central tension laid bare: she escapes only if someone else is executed, and the husband she needs is precisely the person who makes that transfer of violence possible. The line She must marry the hangman or no one carries a bitter shrug—Who else is there to marry?—as if the marriage market under patriarchy offers only different uniforms of harm.

Her “crime”: beauty treated as theft, desire treated as illegality

Atwood refuses to let the reader romanticize the condemned woman as a grand outlaw. The crime is humiliatingly ordinary: she stole clothes from her employer’s wife because she wished to make herself more beautiful. The sentence that follows—This desire in servants was not legal—is a devastating summary of class and gender control. The poem implies that what’s punished is not property loss but aspiration: a servant wanting the signs of value that are reserved for her betters.

This detail also makes her marriage bargain even crueler. She is condemned by other men for wanting beauty, then saved by a man whose job is to enact the state’s ugliness. The poem’s tone here is dry, almost reportorial, but the moral outrage leaks through the precision: a society that criminalizes a woman’s wish to be seen will also make her salvation depend on being chosen by the man who embodies sanctioned violence.

The narrator’s afternoon: when “history” reaches the table

Midway, the poem jolts into the present tense of the speaker’s life: My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, stories which cannot be believed and which are true. The tone becomes intimate and shaken, and the setting is deliberately banal: it is afternoon, they sit at a table. That ordinariness is the point. The friends’ horror stories are described as not happening, not yet happening, and also having happened—an echo of trauma’s time warp and of the poem’s opening postponement of death.

The detail about not having time to put on glasses—without them I’m blind as a bat—quietly rhymes with the earlier without mirrors. Not seeing, not being able to identify who it was, is part of the violence. Then Atwood lands the line that makes the personal political without slogan: there is more than one hangman, and some are unemployed. The hangman is no longer a single historical figure; he becomes a type, a surplus created by systems that keep producing conditions for harm.

Two promise-lists: freedom’s “apple” versus the body’s “eyes”

Twice the poem stages a strange exchange of vows as inventories. The first time, he offers a pastoral exit: the opening of doors, a field, the sun, an apple. It sounds like a children’s-book version of freedom, tangible and clean. She answers with flesh and appetite: nipple, lips, wine, belly, ending on eyes, eyes. If his list imagines a world outside institutions, hers insists on the body as the first home and the first risk.

Near the end, his second list hardens into tools and control: order, fist, knife. Her second list sinks into elements associated with burial and rope: night, willow, rope hair, shroud, blood. The repeated refrain, They both kept their promises, turns ominous: promises can be fulfilled and still be disastrous. The shift between the two exchanges suggests that what begins as rescue curdles into domination, and what begins as erotic affirmation slides back toward execution imagery.

Domesticating the hangman: the refrigerator, the spill, and the “locked room”

One of the poem’s sharpest moves is to bring the hangman into the kitchen. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he spills. This is not redemption; it’s normalization. Atwood shows how easily a society can fold violence into ordinary male entitlement: he wants a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him with admiration and fear and gratitude if possible. The hangman’s ideal partner is a woman whose life he has “saved,” because gratitude can be demanded forever.

Others call her clever and him a fool, using ensnare—as if her survival strategy is seduction rather than coercion. But the poem’s most heartbreaking question undercuts that gossip: what happens when she removes her veil and he sees she is not a voice but a body, finite? And what happens when she realizes she has left one locked room for another? The tone here is bleakly knowing: they talked of love, naturally, but love is not enough to cancel the power relation the law created.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If the only legal way for her to live is to marry the hangman, is her “choice” anything more than a story other people tell to feel comfortable—like the friends at the afternoon table trying to finally believe? Atwood’s repeated insistence on history makes that discomfort the point: the scandal isn’t that she bargains; it’s that the world offers bargains shaped like nooses.

History can’t be erased—and neither can the pattern

Late in the poem, the speaker admits there are no stories that will make her friends feel better, because History cannot be erased. Speculation—Perhaps there were no female hangmen—doesn’t soften the reality; it sharpens the asymmetry. Men may escape by becoming the hangman; women may escape by marrying him. The law imagines male agency and female dependency as natural facts.

By ending with the darker second exchange of lists and the same line, They both kept their promises, the poem refuses a clean moral. It leaves us with a marriage that is both rescue and captivity, with a woman saved precisely because the system can redirect the rope to throats other than hers. The final chill is that this is not a singular gothic plot. It is, as Atwood keeps saying, history—and therefore repeatable.