The Handmaid 's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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 first example of how a handmaid’s identity is erased is how by removing the handmaid’s name, their personal value as a person is reduced from people into objects. This is demonstrated when Offred says that her “... name isn’t Offred, she has another name, which nobody uses now because it is forbidden” (Atwood 84). The handmaids were stripped of one of the most important parts of their identities: their names. The connotation of the word forbidden, evoke a serious tone that causes the readers to see how much the society wants to do to strip these women of their own individuality. The handmaids are given new names based upon their commanders name: in Offred 's case she is “Of-Fred”. They have no identity without their commander.

One of Atwood’s bestselling novel is The Handmaid’s Tale, a disturbing dystopian fiction novel. The Handmaid’s Tale is a complex tale of a woman’s life living in a society that endorses sexual slavery and inequality through oppression and fear. The female characters in Margaret Atwood’s novel demonstrates how these issues affects women’s lives. Offred is the individual with whom we sympathize and experience these issues. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood addresses her perception of the ongoing feminism issues during her time; reproduction rights, workforce inequalities and gender discrimination. Atwood uses her talent to write The Handmaid Tale to express her view on past, present, and future women’s issues.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation” by Eudora Welty. In the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, the series of past and present events are not in chronological order like most books. The book is constructed like the mind, it is in no particular order. However, the passage at chapter 41, page 307-308 if read thoroughly with the use of texture can bring out new interesting findings. When studied with the use of literal content, plots and characters connect the passage. Analysing this passage critically, gives out insights into characters and the narrator’s life. Through an exhaustive deconstruction of textures, literal

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 the “The Handmaid’s Tale” a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, Atwood explains the reasons for domination over women that can be applied to todays’ male domination over women. Atwood throughout commentary disguise the ways male are able to preserve their higher status over women which is by executing unnoticeably oppressive language towards females combined with the absence of inquires about that language. Atwood uses Offred, the main character to show her observation of the time before Gilead became an oppressive regime. Offred observation’s show that women were oppressed by men even before the regime took over as well as they are in today’s society. Atwood is showing throughout examples that men use manipulation of women to gain self-interest which in turn oppresses women. Gilead new oppressive norms towards women in Gilead society depicts that the society is able to oppress women by the believes that such practices are the norm. Atwood book demonstrates that one of the leading reasons for oppression and domination of women is the lack of questions of the intentions from the society.

Literary Analysis In a world that is created of men and women, all must equally work together in order to achieve a functioning society on Earth. However, in the novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a dystopian society is created where men have complete authority over women. Thus, the women in The Handmaid’s Tale are not subject to any rights or freedoms. A matter of a fact, the only women that have any place in the society are the handmaids that reproduce children for the elite men of the Republic of Gilead.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel published in 1985 during a period of conservative revival. The story takes place in the Republic of Gilead, a society in which a theocratic regime has replaced the USA. This regime primarily oppresses women as they have been stripped of their sexuality and reproduction rights. Besides that, the women have been segregated into different classes or social groups, distinguishable by the role assigned to them. Our narrator, Offred, is a “handmaid”- a woman who is to be used by the Commander for reproductive purposes.

Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaids Tale, is a story of a dystopian society set in the land of Gilead. The premise of The Handmaids Tale is the creation a masculine dominated civilization in which not only are the rights of women oppressed, but the basic rights of humanity. Everything, even and up to sex, has been desensitized, which destroys the concept of family, as men have sex with and impregnate handmaids, not their wives, as a means of conception and reproduction. While the officials of the Republic of Gilead attempt to suppress all evidence of the past, it is impossible to do so. The novels main character, and narrative voice, is a handmaid named Offred. Early on in the novel, she describes her home in this future, tyrannical society. The glimpse she provides, through symbolism, demonstrates to the reader the main themes of the novel, and allows the reader to identify the failures of Gilead in upholding its principles. A closer look at chapter two of The Handmaids Tale foreshadows many of the thematic elements established throughout the novel. The idea of family, represented by the Late Victorian house, the necessity of both the wives and the handmaids, represented by the color of the flowers, and the notion of time, represented by the grandfather clock are the books integral themes.

In the novel, “The Handmaid 's Tale”, the author Margret Atwood introduces a dystopian America where everything that once was is no more. In this society there is a change in the state 's entire structure, it has returned to its traditional ways or in other words a religious trap; both women and men are sorted into categories, and each plays their part. Men can be Angles, Commanders or Guardians. Angles are unknown but they are the ones who run society, commanders are slightly lower in rank with wives, and the guardians are guards of the city and make sure the woman do not step out of line. The woman can either be Wives of commanders, Martha’s, who are domestic workers, and Handmaids who are the most fertile of women. In this developing

If utopia were conceived to depict infallible humanity, its antipodean dystopia acts as a characterisation of the vicissitudes of the human condition, epitomised by primal desires for self-actualisation. Therefore, the most effective dystopias draw upon socio-political anxieties in order analyse the individual’s role within a corrupted collective, whereby individuality is subverted by a markedly subhuman totalitarian regime. Margaret Atwood’s patriarchal anti-utopian text, A Handmaid’s Tale, presents a dire trajectory of her 1980s context, when “church-based groups…took stances that…opposed the sexual revolution.” (Rinfuss, 1998) Consequently, the oppressive Gilead is a theocratic state built by Neo-Conservatives, in which puritanical interpretations

The novel under discussion here is “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. It is a fictional story about a state of Gilead which formulated after the crises of birthrates decreasing dramatically. The United States of America has been replaced by Gilead. The state is governed by theocratic and totalitarian groups, which claim to take things under control. They use religion as a tool to imply what they wish.

Margaret Atwood’s text, The Handmaid’s Tale, centers around the potential outcome of a world ruled under an austere theocratic government, whose power is sustained through harsh violence, incessant observation of the people, and the re-educating of the people being governed. With the creation of this fictional, dystopian society, Atwood addresses prospective issues that would be related to a society such as the Republic of Gilead. One of the more significant issues that arises early in the novel and continues for the duration is the concern of females and their roles in society, from a highly sexual standpoint. Atwood touches upon a plethora of issues throughout the novel, as told through the viewpoint of Offred. Using a feministic approach to analyze the text, combined with research in regards to the major feminist movements taking place between the 1960s and 1980s in America—the time at which this book was written and published—Atwood magnifies and popularizes feminist rights in politics.

At the United Nations campaign launch of “HeforShe” on September 20, 2014, Emma Watson stated in her influential speech that, “Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong…It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals” (Duca 2014). Similarly to Emma Watson, there are countless women in our generation who strongly believe in feminism and preach about what they truly believe in. However, some women are trapped in controlled societies where they face oppression and struggle to get their voice heard on what is right and wrong. This particular society can be strikingly demonstrated in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. It is crucial for women to have fundamental human rights to express themselves in our society today because there cannot be any more injustice; due to the fact that women are not safe, must stand up for themselves and are incapable when it comes to certain circumstances.