The Presentation of the Commander in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

In a society where women are completely oppressed they have two choices: To conform and survive, or to rebel and risk execution. Conformity would entail suppressing their morals and their personal rights to adapt to Gilead’s social standards. Would one choose self-inflicted isolation by disassociating oneself as a human being to survive, or gain more rights and disregard all morals by working for the government? This society is represented in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead, a dictatorship, formerly known as the United States of America. The government controls all aspects of the lives’ of its citizens, with its harshest regulations directly affecting women.

Cultural criticism is a broad technique that puts emphasis on the culture that contributed to the production of a work. This approach is an eclectic, interdisciplinary study that utilizes a wide range of topics to analyze literature. Cultural criticism considers a variety of perspectives and branches of knowledge to discover the compilation of beliefs and customs that characterize a group of people. For a cultural reading of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, a cultural critic would consider the historical background paired with theories such as Marxism and feminism to make assumptions about what culture engendered the creation of this novel. (104 words)

From the outset of 'The Handmaids Tale' the reader is placed in an unknown world, where the rights and freedom of women have been taken away. We follow the narrative journey of a handmaid, named Offred.

A genuine identity and individuality is not possible in an oppressive environment especially when one’s daily life, actions, and thoughts are dictated by domineering societal expectations. Oppressive environments such as regimes controlled by a dictatorship and that run off a totalitarian government system strip an individual of their civil rights as a human being in order to gain ultimate control over its citizens. A government such as the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s work, The Handmaid’s Tale, controls their citizen’s lives to the extent to where they must learn to suppress their emotions and feelings. In the Republic of

It is hard to perceive Offred as a rebel. However if Offred is at all

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Offred recounts the story of her life and that of others in Gilead, but she does not do so alone. The symbolic meanings found in the dress code of the women, the names/titles of characters, the absence of the mirror, and the smell and hunger imagery aid her in telling of the repugnant conditions in the Republic of Gilead. The symbols speak with a voice of their own and in decibels louder than Offred can ever dare to use. They convey the social structure of Gileadean society and carry the theme of the individual's loss of identity.

In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the United States of America no longer exists. It has been overthrown and is now known as the Republic of Gilead. Due to an unknown disaster, women are desperately needed to keep the reproduction rate steady. They are too valuable in this time of crisis to be allowed to roam around as they please. The new government’s attempt to enforce this message and make it a known fact is through the use of propaganda. The propaganda is focused towards women because it is a male dominated society which eliminates education, uses selective television broadcasting, and contains the Red Center.

It is necessary for the government to impose a certain amount of power and control of its citizens in order for a society to function properly. However, too much power and control in a society eliminates the freedom of the residents, forbidding them to live an ordinary life. In the dystopian futuristic novel, The Handmaids Tale, Margaret Atwood demonstrates the theme of power and control through an oppressive society called the Republic of Gilead. The government established power and control through the use of the wall, military control, the salvaging, the particicution, and gender.

A woman’s power and privileges depend on which societal class she is in. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale each group of women are each represented in a different way. The three classes of women from the novel are the Handmaids, the Marthas and the Wives. The ways in which the women are portrayed reflect their societal power and their privileges that they bestow.

Offred's memories are a way for her to escape a society riddled with hopelessness. The authoritarian society of Gilead prevents her from

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

Psychological criticism has roots as far back as the fourth century BC, when Aristotle “commented on the effects of tragedy on an audience, saying hat by evoking pity and fear, tragedy creates a cathartic of those emotions” (Dobie 54). More recently, however, psychological criticism has been shaped and influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. He developed theories concerning “the workings of the human psyche, its formations, its organization, and its maladies” that, while further refined by other theorists, are still the basis of the modern approach to literary criticism (Dobie 54). Freud’s theory of the tripartite psyche is used to classify and define the conscious and unconscious mind into the id, ego, and superego. When examined using this theory, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a patriarchal totalitarian government that has replaced the United States of America, is particularly interesting.

Her relationship with the commander is transient--one of convenience and necessity. Her feelings for him are ambiguous, and confusing even to her. She muses: "I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn't what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don't know what to call it. It isn't love" (76). So we see that Offred sets up this relationship as the antithesis of romantic love--a foil for her relationships with both Luke and Nick. It is forced: a physical act devoid of desire, and in it she feels dominated and trapped. How she describes herself in relation to this situation, even at her most empowered (when she is with him in her office), is very revealing. Calling herself "an attentive pet, prick-eared and eager to perform" (238), she tolerates this relationship for the tiny bit of power it can afford her in this dystopic society. And yet, there is something more to this, because she admits to taking an interest in their social interaction: "I don't love the commander, or anything like it, but he's of interest to me, he occupies space, he is more than a shadow" (211). This last

In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood explores the role that women play in society and the consequences of a countryís value system. She reveals that values held in the United States are a threat to the livelihood and status of women. As one critic writes, “the author has concluded that present social trends are dangerous to individual welfare” (Prescott 151).

Offred's character is required because she gives flashbacks to the time before Gilead, giving the reader an idea of the events leading up to the beginning of the novel. How bad the world before Gilead sounds, the world of Gilead is much worse.