Atwood challenges preconceived beliefs about the role of women in society and
The princess directed her lover to the lady because of the sincere love that she had toward him. “....and she loved him with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to make it exceedingly warm and strong.” Due to the intense emotion that she had for him, the princess would not wanted to see her lover suffered. “From the moment that the decree had gone forth that her lover should decide his fate in the king's arena, she had thought of nothing, night or day, but this great event and the various subjects connected with it.” We see in this quote that when the lover had been put to jail she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Both texts ‘The Handmaids Tale’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’ were written during the second wave of feminism which centralised the issue of ownership over women’s sexuality and reproductive rights and as a result, the oral contraceptive was created. As powerfully stated by Ariel Levy, ‘If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire.’ Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter both celebrate female sexuality as empowering to challenge the constraints of social pressure on attitudes of women. Both writers aim to expose the impact of patriarchy as it represses female sexual desire and aim to control it thus challenge contemporary perspectives of women by revealing the oppression
This reductive literary tradition of portraying women as inherently crazy by authors is well explored in the book The Madwomen in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their tome of literary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar delve deeply through a feminist rereading of many celebrated 19th century literary works by female (and male) authors and quickly came to see the challenges these female writers encountered and the mechanisms they used as to navigate the confines of such tropes out of the scholarly and literary tools left from their male writer
Oppression in The Handmaid’s Tale Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale there are many ways in which the people of Gilead are oppressed. The government of Gilead uses fear and threats of death or violence to control its citizens. The eyes organization play a large role in the oppression of the people of Gilead. The characters do not know who they can trust and are scared to speak their own opinions.
Margaret Atwood (1939-) is a poet and novelist who, still to this day, has a passionate belief in equality and a love of nature. Margaret was a trailblazer for women fighting for equal rights. She grew up as a young woman in the 1950s with a mother who constantly taught her that she could be anything she wanted to be; not just the typical roles that were seen as ‘acceptable’ for women of Margaret’s generation. She channeled her anger towards the status quo in her many poems and books such as “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that appealed to feminists like herself in the 20th century. Atwood’s father was a zoologist at the University of Toronto where Margaret would coincidentally later go on to study and receive her bachelor’s degree.
Conflict can be described as the struggle between two opposing forces, whether the forces being person vs person, person vs self or person vs society. Good examples of conflict can be found in almost any book. Margaret Atwood’s novel, the Handmaid’s Tale is a source of all three types of conflicts. The Handmaid’s Tale is about a society where females are given specific duties and are restricted from reading, writing, talking to others and looking at themselves in mirrors. The protagonist, Offred whom is also the narrator in the novel faces conflicts with herself, with other people, and the society that she lives in.
A patriarchal horror where women are forced into certain roles, Offred tells her story of how her life became a nightmare. Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, is a science fiction novel . The novel is based on Offred, a handmaid, who tells her life in the new society, Gilead. The novel reveals that a patriarchal society leads to oppression of women as shown through the characterization of Moira, plot elements, and the formation of Gilead.
Perrault, a 17th century French author, wrote about women as damsels in distress in his fairy tales, while Atwood, a 20th and 21st century Canadian author, offers a more realistic and modern approach in her writing. Sharon Wilson, author of the essay “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning In Recent Texts”, calls Atwood’s use of fairy tales to talk about current issues in society as “meta-fairy tales”. Atwood’s “meta-fairy tales” offer insight on gender politics in a current patriarchal society. Instead of using generic conventions to tell her story, like Perrault does, Atwood uses them and then dismantles them in order to show the reader the problems within the genre like she does in her poem.
Margaret Atwood, born 1939, poet, novelist, literary critic and story writer, is a prominent figure in the contemporary Canadian Literature. She was born in Ottawa in Canada in 1939 and raised in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 1961 and did her Masters from Redcliff College, Harvard University, in 1962. She came into limelight with the Governor General’s Award for her anthology of poems entitled The Circle Game (1966). This was followed by the publication of Survival (1972) which brought her further acclaim.
Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, argues that women are instruments of the patriarchy, that women know this, and that women allow the system of oppression to live on. Her fictions ask, “What stories do women tell about themselves? What happens when their stories run counter to literary conventions or society’s expectations?” (Lecker 1). The Handmaid’s Tale is told through the protagonist, Offred, and allows readers to follow through her life as a handmaid while looking back on how life used to be prior to the societal changes.
Furthermore, the author displays a dystopian society completely dominated by a totalitarian and theocratic state. The main subject of this novel is the role assigned to women, mainly represented by the handmaids. In Gilead, the made-up country where the novel takes place, women are completely subjected by the government, and especially by men, who clearly have a higher status than women. Moreover, women’s freedom is entirely restricted, as they cannot leave their house at their will, they are forbidden to hold properties or jobs, they cannot read or write, and they are treated as sexual slaves whose only purpose in life is to bear children for elite spouses. The other option is a miserable, short life at the Colonies (a type of concentration camp), and death.
From many centuries men are always given immense power over women and are treated especially they always make the important decisions. In This Novel, a society named Gilead is a strictly hierarchical society, were men are treated the same way as they get to make the decision and have all the freedom but there’s a twist men think that they control everything, and they have all the right but in reality, the government controls them smartly. The whole country is run by the government in the novel government plays a big role. The government has categories for men like solider, angel, guardian, eye and commander (the highest class). In these novel men are depicted as the pillars of Gilead, yet their power such as freedom of expression, choice and
In the 1980s, United States was experiencing the rise of conservatism. Under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, conservative religious groups were gaining popularity. In response to the social and political landscape, Canadian author Margaret Atwood published a fictional novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986; a genre of dystopian novels. The storyline projects an imaginary futuristic world where society lives under oppression and illusion of a utopian society maintained through totalitarian control. Dystopian novels often focus on current social government trends and show an exaggeration of what happens if the trends are taken too far.
Margaret Atwood is a creative and revered Canadian writer who is know to be a social activist and an advocate of feminism. She is very broad in her work and has written poetry, novels, short stories, and books for children. Her poem “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" portrays how women are treated as things and not human beings in the eyes of men. Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “To Helen” however is a complete opposite to Atwood’s poem and shows the love and respect that a man can have for a woman.
