Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid 's 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.

The main character, Julia is revealed as weak, and incapable of helping her self up as ‘she held out a free hand’ toward Winston

1984 is a classic piece of British literature that serves as the most prominent example of the dystopia genre. In this nover George Orwell tells the precautionary tale of what might happen if the society goes totalitarian. In this essay I would like to talk about the role of women in the novel.

Written by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in the near future where the United States is overthrown and a military dictatorship forms called the Republic of Gilead. Gilead is a society that reconsolidates power and creates a new hierarchical regime that limits women entirely of their rights. The rulers of this dystopia are centrally concerned with dominating their subjects through the control of their experiences, time, memory, and history. A woman called Offred narrates the story and works as a Handmaid for reproductive purposes only. In her storytelling, Offred describes flashbacks consisting of portions of her life before the revolution. These flashbacks are the only thing that keeps her going in this

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.

In a letter to Brenda Salkeld in 1933 Orwell considered a “fearful tribe” of feminists to be one of the threats to civilisation. He reflected on two directions toward which the world could move: a complete overthrow of the present order by means of a revolution or the continuing and consummate hegemony of business accompanied by the feminists’ coming into power (Csaszar).” Orwell had inflated his fear so much to where he believed that feminism will take over the world as if it was a dictatorship. Hegemony is the process of a woman coming into power at a business and that fact scared Orwell so much to where he felt that if they were given power in 1984 a revolution would start. “Winston finds himself cheated out of something that he feels he ought to have. Possibly even cheated out of a sense of masculinity that might come with having sex with a young woman like Julia (Meia).” Orwell wrote Winston as a man who would pursue younger women in hopes of seeming more masculine. In society a man is congratulated if he has sex with lots of girls, yet women are shamed for the same actions as men. When 1984 was written gender roles were very different from today’s time era and when we see women being written like this we are very astonished and want to know

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 American society, people deem it unjust to hinder someone due to their gender, race, religion, and more. However, in the past and presently, there are societies that restrict people due to these same characteristics. Atwood criticizes the idea of having these restrictions through her work, The Handmaid’s Tale. With this work, Atwood establishes connections between disparate historic events, which share similarities. Atwood’s book explicitly relates to slavery due her commentary on the power dynamic through her character, Offred. Offred resembles a slave during the 19th century through her emotional, physical, and mental conditions, commenting on the disregard society has for its imperious control over people.

he Handmaid’s Tale is a modernist novel by Margaret Atwood. It explores a dystopian future in which society has become an extreme hierarchy. Each individual has been assigned a role with it’s own regulations, which if not met lead to the person 's disposal. Offred, the main character, has known a time when life was still ‘normal’ but as society changed she had to take on the role of a Handmaid. A Handmaid’s purpose is to be impregnated and bear children for her superiors. Do not go gentle into that good night is a poem by Dylan Thomas. He too discusses the theme of purpose, but in a very different way. Both use structure, characterization, and imagery to provide a wide perspective on the theme of purpose.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a criticism and embroidery of modern issues regarding patriarchal, hierarchal, religious fundamentalist developments in history and the present. The Handmaid's Tale has been likened to renowned dystopian novels such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Analyzing the dystopian novel through the feminist lense, the reader can observe the portrayal of the relationships between the sexes, the roles they are expected to play, and the bounds of masculinity and femininity, the knowledge of which reveals rich social commentary and deeper meaning. Atwood's novel serves as an admonitory tale in which readers may be able to draw parallels between the Republic of Gilead and their own societies.

Women in today’s society are shown as classy, independent, fun-loving, quirky, glamorous and strong. Women nowadays are becoming lawyers, doctors, scientists, authors, first responders, CEOs of multimillion dollar corporations and so many other things. However in 1984 by George Orwell, women are perceived as slutty, weak, gullible, dull, square and incapable. This story makes women appear to be completely opposite of women in today’s society. In the novel 1984 , Orwell portrays a sexist society between males and females of the country.

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell’s 1984, both authors write dystopian novels about corrupt societies in which individuals have manipulated and forced to live under totalitarian rule. They create the novels to ridicule their own societies and as a warning to future societies. The central characters, Offred and Winston Smith are similar in ways they are presented living in dystopian societies. Margaret Atwood and George Orwell use their novels to showcase the importance of self-identity, and how simple it is to lose self-identity when one is expected to conform to the ideologies of society.