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Analysis Of The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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Grade 11 English and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Literature has the power to teach, inform and affect those who read it.A novel is an author’s way of sharing their message and ideas with world.Youth especially take a great deal away from what they read. In high school the grade 11 University English (ENG3U) course studies several powerful and influential works; the tragic play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the Gothic and theme rich novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and several poems and short stories written by iconic authors such as Edgar Allen Poe. The novel The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood should be included in the grade 11 University English course because of its relation to other studied works, author, and relevance …show more content…

He kills his one and truest friend and is left with none but his wife who, shortly afterward, takes her one life. Before Lady Macbeth takes her one life, she and Macbeth become distant, as she becomes insane and he becomes consumed by power.Throughout the novel The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, it can be noticed that isolation and loneliness are themes prominently displayed, mostly through the protagonist, Offred. Offred is a young woman serving as a handmaid, one of the few fertile females still remaining, in the post-apocalyptic land of Gilead. In the this position she is forbidden from human contact, emotion, eye contact and interaction. She spends a great deal of her time alone with her thoughts and dreams. She is isolated from human contact and interaction. Therefore, Offred spends a great deal of her time alone without friends or family to comfort her. A second theme from the two novels studied in class that is also shown in The Handmaid's Tale is discrimination and oppression. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth, once he becomes king, is an evil tyrant who suppresses his kingdom, murdering men, women and children with no remorse or regret. His Kingdom cowers in fear beneath him.The

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