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.

In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale she explores the concept of a not-so-distant future where toxic chemicals and abuses to the body have left many men and women alike sterile. The main character, Offred, gives the reader a first person account about her submissive life as a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. A republic that was formed after a coup against the U.S. government. She and her fellow handmaids are fertile women that the commanders of Gilead ‘enslave’ to ensure their power and to repopulate their ‘society’. While the laws that govern the people of Gilead seem outlandish and oppressive, they are merely

Paula Hawkins, a well-known British author, once said, “I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.” In Margaret Atwood’s futuristic dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman named Offred feels she is losing control over everything in her life. Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead. A group of fundamentalists create the Republic of Gilead after they murder the President of the United States and members of Congress. The fundamentalists use the power to their advantage and restrict women’s freedom. As a result, each woman is assigned a specific duty to perform in society. Offred’s husband and child are taken away from her and she is now forced to live her life as a Handmaid. Offred’s role in society is to produce a child

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.

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

depending on the reader, but he uses his power to get what he wants. ,

In this brave new world, women are subjugated to the will and authority of men and divided into eight distinct classes. Wives are perched atop this government-mandated social strata, followed by daughters and then “handmaids,” a concubine class tasked with the job of continuing the human race, as sterility is on the rise. (Why ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is the Prestige Miniseries We Need Right Now)

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.

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

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.

The commander can be seen as a man torn between two worlds, he was one of the founders of Gilead yet still enjoys and yearns for the pleasures of the old society he managed to break. The commander is cool and collected on the surface but underneath he is bitter and corrupted for the world he has managed to create. The commander secretly longs for the world to be as it once was and this is why he savours his time with Offred because she may remind him of life before Gilead. It is also ironic how both characters feel under the surface an anger and repression of Gilead and they both want to break free. However on the surface when they play scrabble with

Although Offred accepts the standards and criterions of her society, she keeps her individuality and refuses to forget the past. She remembers having had an identity of her own and strives to hold on to it as best as she can. She puts a claim on her temporary room in her Commander's house; it becomes a sanctuary for her true self. Her room becomes a place of