The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood creates a dystopian world in which the object of the government’s control and management are the women. The new Republic of Gilead uses the bible as their means for control, justifying their actions through a version of Christianity perverted so heavily it is hardly recognizable to the reader. Women walk around heavily shrouded, any hint of their sexuality is strictly forbidden, they cannot work or engage in any activity that goes against their gender role, and they are not even allowed to read anymore. Narrated from the point of view of the handmaid Offred, she tells her story as a way of making sense of how the world around her came to be and how to maintain a sense of herself while living in it. Her

However, Gilead rehashed all of those old tropes, and classified in a never before seen way. Women are now Wives, Marthas, Handmaids, or Ecnowives. Each classification has different responsibilities, dress colors, and status, but what binds them all together is the anonymity it shoves on to each woman. A woman is no longer a person, she is the role defined by her dress color, easily replaced by another one of the same dress color. They stick to their own kind, segregated from each other by the different status associated with each role. The loss of identity is apparent not only in how they are viewed only by their titles, but also when they act as a group. When Ofwarren is giving birth, for instance, the handmaid’s chant and act almost as one, they become one entity, “Nevertheless we are jubilant, it’s a victory, for all of us. We’ve done it” (Atwood 127). Feurer comments that “Offred at times becomes subsumed by her category and thinks of herself as "we" (203), and Atwood uses the motif of the double throughout the novel to represent this threat” (Feuer). Offred herself gets caught up in identifying as a handmaid and referring to herself as part of the group as a whole, indicating how hard it can be to maintain individuality when faced with a society when all handmaid’s are all considered to be the

The Handmaid’s are no longer permitted names, erasing any ties to the independent women they once were and any past relationships they may have had. Each woman now has her own specific role, but even those with “status” cannot escape the fact that since their only job is to fulfill these highly specific roles, they are all replaceable. Forbidding any sense of sexuality further erases the identity of women, as their bodies use is now are completely defined by government. By controlling their reproduction and how others (namely men) view their body, the government has forced the women into an identity, rather than each woman having her own. Finally, by using a hierarchy among the women themselves, the government does not have to worry about the women rising up against the system as they keep each other in their place in order for the ‘higher’ women to feel not as powerless as they really are. Atwood’s world of religious bigotry being used as a flimsy excuse to utterly control women and by extension their reproductive capabilities both serves as a compelling novel and a warning against unbridled