How Does Margaret Atwood Use Power In The Handmaid's Tale

It is language that both shapes worlds and how we perceive them, and Margaret Atwood uses language to do just that. Atwood’s dystopian novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, explores the journey of the Handmaid Offred, whose fertility causes her to be used as a reproductive object that the nation of Gilead exploits. Throughout her writing, Atwood showcases how the nation of Gilead is manipulative and controlling through the utilisation of language as a tool of control and through the corruption of religious ideologies. In 'The Handmaid’s Tale', Atwood explores language as a tool of power in Gilead for controlling its citizens. As seen throughout the novel, Gilead manipulates and invents vocabulary that suits its needs, and this engineering of language can be witnessed when Ofwarren, also

In Offred’s inner dialogue after Ofwarren’s successful birth, Offred states, "She [Janine]'ll never be sent to the Colonies, she'll never be declared Unwoman. That is her reward." Atwood creates the derogatory term "Unwoman" by manipulating the use of the prefix "un" to equate to ‘not’ rather than ‘opposite’, meaning that for a Handmaid to be an Unwoman suggests she is ‘not a woman’. This term insinuates that for a Handmaid not to be fertile, they lose their value as a human being. The threat of becoming an Unwoman, which targets one’s very humanity, crystallises the idea that to be a Handmaid is a reward in comparison, solidifying Gilead’s sexist system by threatening women towards the sole purpose of reproduction and demonstrating to the reader how Atwood uses language to showcase the effectiveness of Gilead in manipulating language to control the public. Moreover, it is the underlying thoughts in Offred’s inner dialogue that draw attention to how this manipulated language has been embedded into her thinking.