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Overreaching Ambition In The Handmaid's Tale

531 Words3 Pages
The question provided in the prompt asks how the tale explores the wives “overreaching ambition”- if you could even call it ambition! The Oxford dictionary defines ambition as a strong desire to achieve something, typically requiring lots of determination and hard work. In the tale, the wife becomes the Pope by doing no more than telling her husband to go make her wishes happen. Rather than discussing her overreaching ambition, I will interpret her unquenchable, terrible, greed. Right off the bat, the tale is very dreary and melancholic: “Once upon a time there were a fisherman and his wife who lived together in a filthy shack near the sea”. The world is a colorless and unpleasant void, and so it’s no surprise when the fisherman’s wife asks
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