Handmaid's Tale: A Literary Analysis

A genuine identity and individuality is not possible in an oppressive environment especially when one’s daily life, actions, and thoughts are dictated by domineering societal expectations. Oppressive environments such as regimes controlled by a dictatorship and that run off a totalitarian government system strip an individual of their civil rights as a human being in order to gain ultimate control over its citizens. A government such as the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s work, The Handmaid’s Tale, controls their citizen’s lives to the extent to where they must learn to suppress their emotions and feelings. In the Republic of

Paula Hawkins, a well-known British author, once said, “I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.” In Margaret Atwood’s futuristic dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman named Offred feels she is losing control over everything in her life. Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead. A group of fundamentalists create the Republic of Gilead after they murder the President of the United States and members of Congress. The fundamentalists use the power to their advantage and restrict women’s freedom. As a result, each woman is assigned a specific duty to perform in society. Offred’s husband and child are taken away from her and she is now forced to live her life as a Handmaid. Offred’s role in society is to produce a child

The Handmaid's Tale, a film based on Margaret Atwood’s book depicts a dystopia, where pollution and radiation have rendered innumerable women sterile, and the birthrates of North America have plummeted to dangerously low levels. To make matters worse, the nation’s plummeting birth rates are blamed on its women. The United States, now renamed the Republic of Gilead, retains power the use of piousness, purges, and violence. A Puritan theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, with its religious trappings and rigid class, gender, and racial castes is built around the singular desire to control reproduction. Despite this, the republic is inhabited by characters who would not seem out of place in today's society. They plant flowers in the yard, live in suburban houses, drink whiskey in the den and follow a far off a war on the television. The film leaves the conditions of the war and the society vague, but this is not a political tale, like Fahrenheit 451, but rather a feminist one. As such, the film, isolates, exaggerates and dramatizes the systems in which women are the 'handmaidens' of today's society in general and men in particular.

Can human live without love? The answer is evidently no. Love can be defined as: the most spectacular, indescribable, deep euphoric feeling for someone. Margaret Atwood, the author of the outstanding dystopian fiction the handmaid 's tale (1985) had once in her book said: " nobody dies from lack of sex. It 's lack of love we die from.” In this novel, Atwood specifically depicts a society where relationships have been altered, undermined and in many ways forbidden. The key word in the issue of relationships is love. In the Republic of Gilead, a form of theocratic government, women had lost their ability to love. The protagonist Offred is a handmaid whose sole purpose in life is to reproduce a child. Gilead expects its handmaids to have faith in its commandments, but has removed love and hope from them. Women became objects and sex slaves to men. Therefore, the relationships of the protagonist Offred are unhealthy as well as abnormal, yet they are source of hope for Offred to survive from this theocratic form of government. Her relationship with the commander is strained but profitable, her relationship with Serena Joy has lots of tensions and conflicts; and her relationship with Nick is subtle as well as controversial.

Serena Joy is the most powerful female presence in the hierarchy of Gileadean women; she is the central character in the dystopian novel, signifying the foundation for the Gileadean regime. Atwood uses Serena Joy as a symbol for the present dystopian society, justifying why the society of Gilead arose and how its oppression had infiltrated the lives of unsuspecting people.

Imagine you get woken up by guards they split you and your family up. These guards is soon to escort you to a place but you don’t know where. You get there you see the world is changed, you have a different name and you’ve been placed with a man that you now call commander and his wife. You soon find out that you have to have sex with this commander in a ceremony to make a baby but you cannot keep it when you have your baby you are sent to another “commander” and you have to repeat the same process over and over.

In The Handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood uses repetition in her writing to emphasize meaning. For example, on page 72, it says, "Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison." This event occurs when the handmaids are in

In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaids Tale’, we hear a transcribed account of one womans posting ‘Offred’ in the Republic of Gilead. A society based around Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practises. In a society of declining birth rates, fertile women are chosen to become Handmaids, walking incubators, whose role in life is to reproduce for barren wives of commanders. Older women, gay men, and barren Handmaids are sent to the colonies to clean toxic waste.

Treloar's outward air of confidence was mostly a facade; an attempt to keep Lexi's spirits buoyed whilst and his own from plummeting. The past two days, being cooped up in the hotel room, where the walls had slowly seemed to creep closer and closer in on them, and the knowledge they were being hunted by Huntington's goons had lowered his spirits. At times, although he hadn't dared speak it out loud, he'd even begun to wonder if Lexi would have been better off if he'd never snuck into her Father's mansion that night to reconnect with her.

When a high school jock with the perfect life, wakes up one morning with a beast that only he can see chained to his wrist, he must learn to adapt to creature bent on destroying his life, or give into its fiendishness and give up his once perfect life.

Q.U.E.S.T Literary Analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian society emerges. The USA has been overrun and reformed into the Republic of Gilead. Offred, the narrator and main character is in a category of women known as Handmaids; women who wear red and are valued only for their ovaries. The story follows Offred as she’s in service to her third Commander, and continues until her “arrest”.

In both novels, the government uses their power to change history to sway it in their favor, leaving only the memory of what once was. The party controlled all information to make themselves all powerful. They rewrite anything that could go against their views no matter when it happened, "...the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished. If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them..." (p. 162). To the party any piece of information from any point in the past can be rewritten to help them control how anything is viewed. This point of view allows the party to omit of add whatever they feel necessary in their quest of being seen right in the public's eye. Eventually everything has been

The character Lila is unique and complicated because the way she thinks and behaves different than everyone. I think with only the background of Lila is already unique because she was kidnapped by Doll when she was a child, but the reason for the kidnapped is to save Lila from dying. From then on, Lila lived a very harsh life and surrounded herself with people and things that a child at her age shouldn’t experienced it. Lila is also unique because she asked Reverend Ames to marry her and she makes the first move on their wedding night. In which, women during that time would not do that.

The Handmaid's Tale is written by Margaret Atwood and was originally published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985. The novel is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Handmaid's Tale explores themes of a new totalitarian theocratic state society that is terrifying and horrific. Its main concentration is on the subjugation of women in Gilead, and it also explores the plethora of means by which the state and agencies gain control and domination against every aspect of these women's lives. Restrictive dress codes also play an important factor as a means of social order and control in this new society.

A Critical Analysis of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” In this dystopia novel, it reveals a remarkable new world called Gilead. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood, explores all these themes about women who are being subjugated to misogyny to a patriarchal society and had many means by which women tried to gain not only their individualism and their own independence. Her purpose of writing this novel is to warn of the price of an overly zealous religious philosophy, one that places women in such a submissive role in the family. I believe there are also statements about class in there, since the poor woman are being meant to serve the rich families need for a child. As the novel goes along the narrator Offred is going between the past and