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Freedom In The Handmaids Tale

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Man needs only one thing from other men in order to live in harmony in the society, freedom. The freedom to live for oneself, neither sacrificing oneself to others nor sacrificing others to oneself. The freedom to pursue one’s own happiness, which is the key that unleashes the creative potential of man’s mind, resulting in a society of nationwide peace and continuous progress.

We are blessed with the ability to earn what money we can, to spend it as we choose and to own what we buy. We also retain the freedom to act, and we are therefore able to speak about our beliefs, which is a privilege that may otherwise be repressed. The freedom to act also consists of the right to pursue religious rituals and beliefs. Freedom of action does not mean …show more content…

It offers an insight into a not-too-distant future of the United States, now the Republic of Gilead, wherein the society is based on Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practices. Its citizens are controlled through a group of classes known as the caste system. It is created as a superficially designed way to simplify the lives of citizens by dividing them into classes with clearly delineated standards. 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 …show more content…

Information is power only when it is unequally divided between individuals. This is only one of many human rights violated by the regime of Gilead. They closed down every university and prohibited women from reading, nor were they allowed to speak freely. The Handmaids also weren't able to watch the news, tough the news in itself, wasn’t guaranteed to give knowledge since it was unknown how corrupted they were. Some scenes, or even all of them, were played by actors and weren’t currently in existence. This corruption and prohibition of knowledge imply to the regime’s effort to decrease the individual power. They robbed their citizens of their ability to express themselves through language and to create an understanding among people as well as for their society. They robbed their citizens from their ability to thrive individual within themselves, likewise as in society. The importance of language is also symbolized through Scrabble, which is a game, played between Offred and the Commander, where the winner is the one most cunning at creating words. This game resemblance the way that the Gilead authorities manipulate the people through language. Everything in their society is told as a reinterpretation of something else, nothing is an exact description of the

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Through the environment of the Handmaid’s Tale, where women lived in a constantly patrolled zone and an area where they are not even allow to communicate conveys how the government of Gilead controls individuality through restriction of language. By removing women from their past identity and rewriting it with a new identity, represents the symbolism of palimpsest. Just like a palimpsest even though women identity have overlapped with a new given character, leftover of their name still persist in their memory as you can see when they exchanged names, silently, to each other - ‘Alma. Janine. Dolores.

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What would become of the world, if our current societal flaws, such as sexism, racism, and classism were ingrained and executed at a systematic level? This is exactly what The Handmaid’s Tale set out to explore. The novel, which claims to be speculative fiction, is set in the theocratic Republic of Gilead (formerly the USA), where birth rates are rapidly declining and women have been marginalized by the patriarchal regime, forbidden to read, write or love and valued only if they are able to procreate. They are separated into classes, including Wives, Marthas, Aunts, Unwomen, and Handmaids, distinguishable only by the color of their clothing. The Handmaids are renamed by combining ‘of’ and the name of the Commander that they have been assigned to, stripping them of any individuality.

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