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.

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.

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.

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.

Throughout history, the debate of how much intervention the government should have in the lives of individuals has been prevalent in various countries. While some people believe the government should play a large role in the lives of citizens to ensure them protection and a more unified country, the government ultimately should have a small extent in regulating the rights of an individual in order to ensure free will in the actions and thinking among citizens. A large amount of government intervention in the rights of an individual often leads to a totalitarian state, where governments exercise great power over the people and expect them to abide by edicts rather than democratic laws. In The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the United States is overthrown by a totalitarian government called The Republic of Gilead, which uses doctrines inspired by the Old Testament as an example of how citizens should live and be treated. In Gilead, due to the low fertility rates, the bodies of women are seen as objects and are completely controlled by the government in hopes to increase the population.

“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 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.

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.

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 a “A Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, readers see a world go from what it once used to be to total totalitarianism. In this now cruel world called Gilead, we see people stripped from their original identities, and no longer free. Furthermore, they are brainwashed to believe and abide by new regulations and rules, and the ones that rebel or no longer are of any use for the government end up dead. Besides the narrator who is now named “Offred” in this new society, her past friend “Moira” from the pre-totalitarian world, is a central figure of hope in the story. Moira becomes a rebel and fights to win back her freedom, but ultimately that thirst to outsmart the government, leads to her ultimate destruction.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, explores the idea of physical and mental oppression through hierarchy, patriarchy, manipulation of history, surveillance and finally, community identity; hence the main character’s name “Offred” or ‘Of-Fred’ if you will. 1984, by George Orwell, covers this by including configuration of language; the characters have a new language called “Newspeak” and are also constantly watched by the government and the “Thought Police.”

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.

Additionally, author Ayden Lee did a good job with the detailing of scenes, the images she created were vivid descriptions. However,there is a point of contention; this book needs editing, there spelling and syntax errors, throughout the book , for example in chapter 1 ... “Without further civilities, they passed their hurry goodbyes by Dan’s ears ”. Unfortunately there are many instances of editing issues throughout the book, which would once addressed, would make this book a more dynamic