Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid Tale

Over the past 200 years sexual liberation and freedom have become topics of discussions prevalent within western culture and society. With the recent exploration of sexuality a new concept of sexual and gender identity has emerged and is being analyzed in various fields of study. The ideology behind what defines gender and how society explains sex beyond biology has changed at a rapid pace. In response various attempts to create specific and catch all definitions of growing gender and sexual minorities has been on going. This has resulted in the concept of gender becoming a multi- layered shifting hypothesis to which society is adapting. Since the 19th-century, philosophers and theorists have continued to scrutinize gender beyond biological and social interpretation. Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid 's Tale captures the limitations and social implications forced upon a set gender based on societal expectations. Gender is a social construct that limits the individual to the restrictions and traditions of a society, or if it’s an individually formed self-identification of sex and sexuality that is formed autonomously. Evidence of gender establishment can be seen within literary works and supported by various schools of gender and sexuality theory.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood exaggerates the situations that people are facing in present time. In this novel, Margaret created a world named Gilead that seems to have rules and regulations for everybody; but in reality, they are not applied equally. Narrator of this story is a handmaid. Her name is Offred. She shares her experience, that she was brought into a house as a handmaid by the commander to give birth to his child. This novel explores many themes, and one of them is that the world is ruled by people with money and power.

Throughout the course of world history on Earth, humans have always worked harder and harder in order to improve society and make it more perfect, although it still hasn’t been done quite yet, because it is merely impossible to achieve perfection in a world with close to seven billion people. There is a very distinct difference between a utopia, which can also be known as perfection, and a dystopia, which can also be known as a tragedy; and the outcomes normally generate from the people in charge or the authority that sets up the foundation, the rules, and the regulations for a society. In the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Republic of Gilead is created by a powerful authority group called the Eyes after a huge government take over and the assassination of the US president. It’s very strict rules and goals are set up to protect women, to increase childbirth, and to keep all violence, men, and powerful social media under control. The novel is set in a first person point of view and the narrator, Offred, tells her story to us readers about her experiences as a handmaid and how her life was completely turned upside down. Throughout the course of the novel Offred reveals many sides of herself; although her thoughts do not remain consistent, her personality and opinion tends to change revealing, that she is hesitant and strong because she learns to make the best of what she has and silently overcome the system of the Republic of Gilead.

The literary masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, is a story not unlike a cold fire; hope peeking through the miserable and meaningless world in which the protagonist gets trapped. The society depicts the discrimination towards femininity, blaming women for their low birth rate and taking away the right from the females to be educated ,forbidding them from reading or writing. These appear in Ethan Alter’s observations that:

In the book The Handmaid 's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the foremost theme is identity, due to the fact that the city where the entire novel takes place in, the city known as the Republic of Gilead, often shortened to Gilead, strips fertile women of their identities. Gilead is a society that demands the women who are able to have offspring be stripped of all the identity and rights. By demeaning these women, they no longer view themselves as an individual, but rather as a group- the group of Handmaids. It is because of the laws that have been established that individuality has been demolished. From these points that will be raised, it can be concluded that a handmaid’s role in Gilead is more important than their happiness, and mental wellbeing.

In her book, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood describes a dystopian society in which all of the progress in the feminist movement that was made during the twentieth century is reversed and the nation is reverted back to its traditional patriarchal ways. The story is told from the point of view of Offred, a woman who was separated from her husband and child and forced into the life of a handmaid. In this book, Atwood explores the oppression of women through her use of literary tools such as figurative language, symbols, and literary allusions.

A woman’s power and privileges depend on which societal class she is in. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale each group of women are each represented in a different way. The three classes of women from the novel are the Handmaids, the Marthas and the Wives. The ways in which the women are portrayed reflect their societal power and their privileges that they bestow.

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, power is emphasized multiple times throughout the text. The plot of the story consists of wealthy men being the overseers of the economy. Since the birth rate of healthy children has drastically decreased due to environmental problems, women are only wanted for their ability to reproduce offspring and replenish the world. Therefore, the poorer women are taken away from their homes and placed with wealthy couples to bear offspring for them. The main character, Offred, is one of the many women who was taken from her family and placed in the home of a Commander and his wife. Since the role of each societal class’ power has changed, different characters in the text have subtle ways of displaying power.

In Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the character of Offred is restricted by the severe regulations of her society. The once democratic United States of America with equality for all has been turned into the theocratic and totalitarian Republic of Gilead. When Offred is affected by the strict standards of this society, she responds in audacious, yet furtive ways in order to not attract the attention of the omniscient Eyes who control the society and punish offenders

Atwood uses dehumanisation throughout this extract as a form of control, by reducing someone to something lower than you would imply you had more power over them and could control them. When Offred referred to herself and the other women as ‘wild animals’, a creature that could not think for themselves, would suggest that they would be needed to be controlled. By using animals as a reference to women Atwood was indirectly foretelling Offred’s fate of fundamentally becoming a caged ‘animal’ who serves to breed. Alternatively, because this extract was a flashback it could suggest that men were still able to dehumanise women even before the regime, which therefore suggests that years’ worth of society conditioning men that they had superior power over women led to centuries of women under the control of men. An example of this conditioning would be when the unknown man replaced the ‘usual women’ at the shop, ‘you do that he said indifferently’ his apathetic response suggests he already had control over Offred’s because she could no longer use her card.

In a “A Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, readers see a world go from what it once used to be to total totalitarianism. In this now cruel world called Gilead, we see people stripped from their original identities, and no longer free. Furthermore, they are brainwashed to believe and abide by new regulations and rules, and the ones that rebel or no longer are of any use for the government end up dead. Besides the narrator who is now named “Offred” in this new society, her past friend “Moira” from the pre-totalitarian world, is a central figure of hope in the story. Moira becomes a rebel and fights to win back her freedom, but ultimately that thirst to outsmart the government, leads to her ultimate destruction.

Power: a simple five-letter word with numerous definitions. Power a noun. Power meaning the ability or right to control people or things (“Power”). Throughout the history of human existence it has been human nature to crave and want power. The feeling of being in control and not having to answer to anybody is an indescribable feeling. But being in power can also lead to undesirable decisions. In the 19th century, Lord Acton a British historian said “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, readers are exposed to a dystopic novel where individuals use the influence of their societal roles to manipulate others. There is no coincidence that Atwood’s novel can be considered a speculative fiction. Nor is it a coincidence that The Handmaid’s Tale is still relevant today. Abuse of power is relevant in not only Atwood’s novel, but also present in numerous societies today across the globe.

“On first days we are permitted front doors, but after that we're supposed to use the back. Things haven't settled down, it's too soon, everyone is unsure about our exact status. After awhile it will be either all front doors or back… Yours is a position of honor” (Atwood 18).

In her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood subliminally raises the question of how one’s personality is influenced by their role in society. This question is answered through multiple characters in the novel, specifically Offred, The Commander, and Moira.

Women’s equality is a constant struggle that is still an issue today. To this day, women are still not considered equals to men, which is shown in the workplace and at home. The inequalities in income, careers, roles in parenting and in marriage, and in relationships, are fixed problems that still do not have a resolution. These are regular issues that occur in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. This novel is about the superiority and governing of women by men.