The Handmaid 's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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.

Furthermore, in the book Handmaid’s tale, abridgement of human rights, especially for women, is present. Offred, the protagonist of the book, is a handmaid. There is no equality in their world, especially for handmaids. Offred says, “We are given tokens with pictures of the food we are supposed to get.” Women are not allowed to read or write and are meant to be kept in their limited space. Men are allotted a disproportionate amount of personal freedom under this societal regime. The men hold the power to everything, including women; who are now their property. Offred says, “Our names are given by placing ‘of’ in front of the commander’s name. Property of Fred.” Women no longer have any rights, forced to live as bonded slaves. Handmaids are given their purpose in life, but they have no purpose in living. They are not allowed to have any sort pleasure in their life. “Kissing is not allowed during the ceremony.” There is no romance, no happiness, but men occupy all these. They go to clubs, stay with prostitutes and there is no one to stop them. The human rights of women no longer exist in this type of

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood describes the story of Offred, a Handmaid, that is a woman ascribed a breeding function by society, and who is placed with a husband and wife higher up the social ladder who need a child. Through Offred's eyes we explore the rigidity of the theocracy in which she lives, the contradictions in the society they have created, and her attempts to find solace through otherwise trivial things. The heroine is never identified except as Offred, the property of her current Commander, she was a modern woman: college-educated, a wife and a mother when she lost all that due to the change in her society. The novel can be viewed from one perspective as being a feminist depiction of the suppression of a woman, from another

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.

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.

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 Chapter 23, Margaret Atwood, in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, allows Offred to reflect on Moira's story and to realize how impossible it is to give a full and unbiased account of certain situations in life. In addition, Atwood incorporates a WWII flashback in chapter 24, where Offred recalls seeing a film about the mistress of a prominent Nazi, who just could not accept the truth that the mister was a monster. The woman, which Offred can now remember, is most of all “make-up” (Atwood, 146) and she has been hiding behind the concealer to prevent herself from being identified with the truth. A similar lesson, as from the WWII passage – that humans tend to construct a sense of self and slowly build a capacity for self-deception and self-creation – is enhanced and developed in the excerpt where Offred visits the Commander for the first time.

Margaret Atwood’s well-known novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is about a woman named Offred. She is a handmaid in Gilead, a theocratical state that has taken over the United States. Due to extinct reproduction rates, the handmaids are assigned to bear children for couples who no longer can conceive a child. The handmaid serves the commander and his wife. They are raped, and they have controlled freedom.

In the words of Erika Gottlieb "With control of the past comes domination of the future." A dystopia reflects and discusses major tendencies in contemporary society. The Handmaid 's Tale is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. The novel follows its protagonist Offred as she lives in a society focused on physical and spiritual oppression of the female identity. Within The Handmaid 's Tale it is evident that through the exploration of free will and femininity, the dystopian novel presents an understanding that the future is determined by the actions taken in the past and the present. These actions are closely related to the novel 's context and the characteristics that are present in the dystopian genre.

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.

Psychology Today states that women in Middle Eastern countries are often married young and forced to become property to their husbands. “They have no role at all in determining their own lives; they are seen as nothing more than a commodity, property of the males of the family, and as owners, the men have the right to make decisions for them.”. In Gilead, the women basically live their lives as prisoners just as a Westerner might compare to the women in the Middle East and other oppressed countries. These women are dehumanized and forced to think that this is a normal life to live. In the Handmaids Tale all of the handmaids are treated no greater than dogs.

Margret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaids Tale’ is a dystopian novel focusing on the totalitarian state of Gilead. Although the state of Gilead can be superficially seen as patriarchal where men are the only oppressors, considering the context from the time when the novel was written, we can see Atwood’s concerns for the future. The novel describes the life story of protagonist Offred through her first person narrative and use of flashbacks and Atwood primarily portrays gender roles through her use of language and symbolism throughout the novel, which reiterate the oppressive and authoritarian state that the handmaids are obliged to live in. Similarly, Atwood portrays largely negative attitudes towards hierarchy through the use of techniques such as

In The Handmaids Tale citizens must abide by the new rules, therefore they are in constant fear of punishment which includes death. “Abortion, possibly the key issue of the Christian political movement, also had its federal funding eliminated, even though attempts to limit or outlaw abortion itself were fought successfully on Constitutional grounds.” (Napierkowoski) Many people like to argue that men are also mistreated in the novel. Men, such as the Commander, may desire to experience a true connection, this can be seen between the Commander and Offreds’ secret affair. The difference between the Commander and the Handmaids is that the Commander gets to raise a child unlike the Handmaids which are just seen as sex machines. “My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved” (Attwood 94). Shows how they are only used as sex machines…. Gilead believes that women are valuable if they are fertile and can reproduce. It can be seen in history where it is seen as the women’s fault, with Henry the Eighth. He killed his wives because they were unable to give him a son, when in reality Henry the Eighths gene left him unable produce a