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Polygamy In The Handmaid's Tale

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“The places in my novel are often real. The people and experiences are imaginary,” but, are all of the experiences purely imaginary? (Potts) One may know about a time in history when gender and race inequalities were often a norm. The influential author Margaret Atwood was inspired to write the social satire The Handmaid’s Tale, by various social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As she saw and experienced many different aspects of these social movements, one may question if this book is completely imaginary, or if it had some truth behind it. America could have truly become something that resembles the Republic of Gilead, the new society established after the fall of America. Examining the influence that the feminist movement had on The …show more content…

Firstly, polygamy was known before the 1950s and 1960s, but it only really started to gain people’s attention when various social movements started to appear (“Atwood’s Use of Actual Historical Events”). The influence of polygamy in the book started early on. “This is supposed to signify that we are on flesh, one being,” was a point in the book were Atwood shows that polygamy is not a normally situation (Atwood 94). Offred also realized this because she came from a background of being in a relationship with one other person. But now that she has to reproduce with the commander, with his wife having to be there to hold her hand, literally, she knows that this was and is not the meaning of true relationships. Atwood was once engaged to be married to a man, but then instead of starting a polygamist relationship, she decided to break it off with said man and marry a man named Jim Polk (Potts). Which leads me to the influence the about the minimum number of children a woman must produce, that number being five. Atwood saw that having so many children could greatly impact society, therefore when Offred said, “There is no such thing as sterile anymore, not officially,” we can infer that a mass number of babies being born to woman, that may not be able to take care of them is a bad situation (Atwood 61). A situation that was going on in The Handmaid’s Tale that needed to be resolved. Consequently, the Republic of Gilead and Romania were in similar situations, where they needed a population increase but were going about it all wrong. Making women produce multiple children could cause detrimental effects, like starvation. Having so many mouths to feed cannot be an easy task. Atwood herself had one daughter named Eleanor Atwood Gibson, that she cherished (Potts).

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There are two ways people will react to when their freedom is taken away. They will either accept it or rebel against it, which is what a lot of the female characters in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale accomplished. Shown through Offred’s repetition of certain events, Moira’s tone of being a fighter, and Serena Joy’s desperation, the reader can see that lack of freedom leads to rebellion. Offred, the novel’s narrator, now lives in a world where women are powerless. She has had her freedom taken away, and at times follows the rules, but ends up rebelling in many powerful ways.

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Also, a made is thing is replaceable. Offred attempts to hide her actual self that has feelings, preferences and an individual identity. She wants to represent the single story of a Handmaid, and appear as an inanimate object that has one purpose in life, which is to bear the child of a Commander. Similar to Offred’s need to present a made made thing. In “The Ideal Women” the author described how women “felt it necessary to adhere to the domestic ideal as much as possible in order to maintain their identity as a ‘good woman, mother, and wife’”

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