Gender Roles In A Handmaid's Tale

Margret Atwood is a Canadian author who mainly writes about gender, power politics, the dangers of ideology, and sexual politics. She writes novels primarily within the genres of historical fiction, dystopian fiction, and speculative fiction within the gothic style. Her prolific work, A Handmaid’s Tale, is found within her plethora of creations. Through A Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explores the unbalanced power dynamics between women and men and their effects on culture and female gender roles. This theme is accomplished through the details of spoken and unspoken language, sexual and religious metaphors, and the characterization of Moira throughout the novel.

Atwood utilizes implicit and explicit language to show how female gender roles are affected

To start, though it is never confirmed, it is conjectured that the center of Gilead, where Offred lives, is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge was the location of America’s most notable spiritual and bigoted institution, the Puritans, who were liable for the Salem witch trials, an event that particularly targeted women. With this background, Atwood is already making associations between Gilead and Puritanical America, with both being societies that deal severely with religious, political, or sexual divergence, especially if the said divergence is perpetrated by a woman. Furthermore, Atwood uses religious metaphors throughout the book to support the oppressed parts of females in Gilead. In chapter 4, Atwood writes, "Not all of you will make it through. Some of you will fall on dry ground or thorns. Some of you are shallow-rooted. She had a mole on her chin that went up and down while she talked. She said, Think of yourselves as seeds…"(Atwood, p. 16) The use of the aunt's comparison of the handmaids to seeds could be parallel to the biblical books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, specifically in the Parable of the Sower. In the Bible, Jesus tells his disciples about a farmer who put seeds in four different soils, all of different qualities, with only the best soil producing a yield of crops. Jesus compares this story to how people respond to the gospel. In A Handmaid’s Tale, the comparison of the handmaids to seeds implies that the handmaids are reduced to a seed that may fail or succeed based on how responsive they are to their training, whereas in reality the handmaid’s failures or successes depend on each one individually. Therefore, it expands on the idea that handmaids are oppressed and viewed as objects of the patriarchal culture of Gilead. These views cause the handmaids to have no sentient role other than being an