The Handmaid 's Tale By Margaret Atwood

In today’s news we see many disruptions and inconsistencies in society, and, according to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, humankind might be headed in that direction. The deterioration of society is a concept often explored biologically in novels, but less common, is the effect on everyday social constructs such as the position of women as a item that can be distributed and traded-in for a ‘better’ product. The Handmaid’s Tale elaborates the concept that, as societal discrimination towards women intensifies, gender equality deteriorates and certain aspects of societal freedoms are lost. Offred’s experience with serving Gilead demonstrates a victim’s perspective and shows how the occurring changes develope the Republic.

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 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.

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.

As a rare and coveted fertile woman, Offred is forced to become a Handmaid and be passed from Commander to Commander. Each handmaid is renamed “Of,” signifying ownership, followed by the name of her commander, rebranding her as property. Renaming handmaids takes away their individuality and erases their former life, reinventing them as new people with a refocused purpose. It likewise makes her dispensable because a new handmaid can easily replace her and adopt the name Offred. She is obligated to partake in the “Ceremony” each month during which the Commander reads a bible verse before having sex with her as his wife encircles them. Offred struggles to define the act. As she explains, “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. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose” (94). She goes on to emphasize that no passion or love is involved for anyone, even the Commander: he is simply

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 Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale all of the women, in a new society called Gilead, are stripped from their everyday way of living. Their freedom, and most importantly their identity, is taken from them, and it is as if America has gone back in time to where there are no women’s rights. Now the women cannot think freely, read, or do as they please. The women cannot even wear their own clothes. They are all assigned to wear a certain color of robe all with a different meaning.

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.

In the beginning, Offred sees her body as important and views it as an instrument. The burdens of Offred’s daily life in Gilead eventually change the way that Offred sees things about herself. As she states, “[She] used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will,” (Atwood 73). Before she saw her body as different but since everything in Gilead changed, Offred no longer really cares which causes her to feel like an object. The idea that the handmaid’s are the ones that are used for getting them pregnant makes mainly Offred feel that she is in control. Offred states, “It makes me feel more in control, as if there is a choice, a decision that could be made one way or the other,” (Atwood 269). Offred describes the control of Gilead like if they made the choice for them. This put a lot of pressure on Offred as she is forced to things that she doesn’t want to do. It doesn’t only put pressure on her but it also subjects the other handmaid’s to do other things. The inequality makes the handmaid’s property of the commanders. As it states, “Give me children, or else I die,” (Atwood 61). It is basically dehumanizing them into simple sex objects. The life of the handmaid’s are restricted. This is a big inequality issue as the men

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.

The novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood, explores the role of women in a fictional patriarchal society. Women in the novel are seen as property of a man and they live under a strict set of enforced rules and guidelines that male society has deemed appropriate. These patriarchal beliefs are so entrenched in the society that many women either believe the ideals or have been subconsciously influenced by society. Most of the women in the novel were “products of society” with their personalities being heavily attributed into the culture that they were now immersed in. A major theme of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood, is the skewed sense of freedom and power that the women have developed; seen in the value placed on children, the women’s interactions with one another, and the clear presence of suicide.

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.

The theories we have studied in class include the feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and deconstructionist theories. The feminist theory is built on a male-dominated point-of-view that implies the weakness of women by portraying them as inferior, incapable, and inconsequential. Historically, the feminist theory has existed in three phases and dates back as far as 1792 to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “The Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” There was a second phase of the feminist theory in the 1960s and 1970s that aligned with the Women’s Liberation movement. The third phase, from 1990s to present, includes a focus on women of color and gay women, commonly disregarded in previous movements (Purdue Owl 2). The psychoanalytical theory is based on Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychology. In short, he believed that “people’s behavior is affected by their unconscious” (Purdue Owl 1). Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, expanded on Freud’s philosophy, “Jungian criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature … [and] the collective unconscious of the human race….[It] assumes that all

Gilead’s society is oppressive and unjust to the point that the oppression causes delusion for the women. Gilead, through extensive efforts, tries to simmer their civilians by claiming that the incessant restrictions are for their own good. No restrictions are more stringent than those bestowed on the women, and more specifically, the handmaids. Although, Gilead claims to be built on a principal set of values, its principles are ignored and challenged to ensure everything runs smoothly in the eyes of Gilead’s patriarchy. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead, a corrupt government adamant on supporting a better way of life for females, undermines their very own beliefs. "There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don 't underrate it" (24). Gilead presumes that they offer females with freedom from both sexual harassment and the indiscretion of men, but instead Gilead only supports the harassment and indiscretion.