The Handmaid's Day-Personal Narrative

He walks down the hall looking at the dirty and rusted lockers and the stained floors. Looking away from the nerds who are pushed into the lockers by the jocks. What a typical high school life anyone could have gone through. Bishop looks at the posters for the valentine's contest to see who would be the cutest couple. “Ugh even the sight of this makes my head hurt...,” He said aggravated. He looks down at his custom watch and touch an image on it and falls deep inside his mind. The bell rings loud and he notices he's late for class.

Serena Joy is the most powerful female presence in the hierarchy of Gileadean women; she is the central character in the dystopian novel, signifying the foundation for the Gileadean regime. Atwood uses Serena Joy as a symbol for the present dystopian society, justifying why the society of Gilead arose and how its oppression had infiltrated the lives of unsuspecting people.

Parents typically don’t want their children reading in depth books about sex; however, The Handmaid’s Tale offers great fictional examples that teach sexism and the mistreatment of women, yet these examples can lead some in the wrong way. Therefore depending on the view in society, The Handmaid’s tale should be banned or kept to certain areas of the world because of the unfair treatment of women.

traditional communities, particularly in the more remote villages, she is still expected to shave her head and live like an ascetic, sleeping on the ground, living only to fast and pray for her departed spouse. (50)

In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale, religion is presented as a controlling influence, which takes away freedom of individuals. In the 1980s, this was a time of social change, where extreme right-winged fascist regimes such as Moral Majority and Conservative Revival merged religion and politics into a binding precedent. Consequently, Atwood wrote The Handmaids Tale in order to show the male fundamentalist leaders use women as submissive sexual objects under the guidance of religious scripture as justification and created a bleak futuristic society if anyone of these cults became successful. Primarily in the epigraph, Atwood opens with three distinct references to introduce the rules in the society of

In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaids Tale’, we hear a transcribed account of one womans posting ‘Offred’ in the Republic of Gilead. A society based around Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practises. In a society of declining birth rates, fertile women are chosen to become Handmaids, walking incubators, whose role in life is to reproduce for barren wives of commanders. Older women, gay men, and barren Handmaids are sent to the colonies to clean toxic waste.

Notorious rapper Chris Brown has been recorded saying, “My mother taught me to treat a lady respectfully” (BrainyQuote). As much as irony as is contained in that statement, there is even more when it is applied to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian society so rife with the poisoning effects of radiation and so desperate for children that it treats fertile women as reproductive objects, with no care or concern about how this may affect their mental state. Analyzing this novel through the feminist and psychoanalytical theoretical lenses allows for a link between the way Offred was treated and her state of depression and resulting thoughts of suicide. The feminist theory is built on a male-dominated point-of-view that implies the weakness of women by portraying them as inferior,

Gawain lay on a cold, hard surface, daggers sticking into his skull, a flaming pike shoved into his midsection, and a dead rat stuffed into his mouth.

In addition, the narrator also mentions that the room she stays in used to be a nursery, “it was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children” (479). This is significant to the setting of the story, because we are able to connect the fact that he put her in a room that used to be a nursery, with the way he treats her. Throughout the story, we see that john treats his wife as a child and degrades her maturity level. He would call her “little goose” or “little girl” which often comes across as dismissive. He treats her like a child and nothing like his wife or even an adult; therefore it’s no surprise that the narrator’s bedroom used be a nursery with a bed nailed to the floor,

The oppression of women throughout Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, exists in a dystopian society, mirroring the climate of the period it was written, and in actuality, may not be too far off the path from where we are now. Atwood’s portrayal of this misogynistic culture that subjugates women to second class citizens is a book worthy of AP merit due to the social impact, universal appeal, and timelessness of Offred’s story that does not fail to seamlessly connect the issues of generations into a single reflective text.

Written in 1986, during the beginning of the feminist movement’s opposition, Margret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. This novel, which contemplates on the 1980’s political group, The New Right movement and it’s severe antifeminist messages, provides a bleak future on what might had followed if they had succeeded in getting power: Women getting reduced into being mere objects. Atwood wrote this novel as a warning to warn society about what females stand to lose if feminism was to fail. The masculine authority within The Republic of Gilead, assigns women to various classes and their functions: The Aunts, The Handmaids, The Martha’s, and The Econo-wives.

Treloar's outward air of confidence was mostly a facade; an attempt to keep Lexi's spirits buoyed whilst and his own from plummeting. The past two days, being cooped up in the hotel room, where the walls had slowly seemed to creep closer and closer in on them, and the knowledge they were being hunted by Huntington's goons had lowered his spirits. At times, although he hadn't dared speak it out loud, he'd even begun to wonder if Lexi would have been better off if he'd never snuck into her Father's mansion that night to reconnect with her.

As I read the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, I also thought of our previous lecture on “The Problem with No Name.” Friedan states that women in the past valued their life as being a good wife and mother, sharing power with her husband at home. According to her, most women had ignored the problem that had no name other than one’s wife or one’s mother, but became no longer possible to ignore their desire to find their true self outside of their house. The ignorance of their “name” and the desire to find their identities are aligned with the life of Offred and other handmaids. The Handmaid cannot have their real name which they were given from their parents. Instead, they should take their husband’s name. Because the name of Offred’s commander Fred,

In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, the idea of women’s bodies as political instruments and elimination of sexual pleasure is explored. The republic of Gilead “depicts a futuristic society in which a brutal patriarchal regime deprives women of power and subjectivity, enslaving them through a sophisticated, ubiquitous apparatus of surveillance” (Cooper 49). Offred is a girl who lives with her Commander within Gilead. She is surrounded by girls at his house. When one becomes a woman they have had a baby. Any time before they have a baby they are just girls. They are valued only by their ovaries and wombs. They have no freedom and

Pivotal Quotes: “We go along the corridor and through another flat gray door and along another corridor,softly lit and carpeted this time, in a mushroom color, browny pink.Doors open off it, with numbers on them; a hundred and one, a hundred and two, the way you count during a thunderstorm, to see how close you are to being struck. It’s a hotel then. From behind one of the doors comes laughter, a man’s and also a woman’s. It’s a long time since I’ve heard that” (234). -refers to the point where life changes for Offred, when she goes to the club with the commander. Shows the style and the thoughts of the narrator as time goes by in the