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The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

1333 Words6 Pages

How do men in power impact the lives of women and why is it such a negative impact? Well, in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the readers are introduced to a totalitarian society, Gilead, where the men in power have stated that a woman’s purpose is only to reproduce. Offred, the narrator, describes her life as a handmaid and how she’s treated more as a tool than a human being. She also highlights her want to rebel against Gilead’s rule. Offred illustrates how this treatment of women in her society is just one of the many examples how Gilead subjugates women. The dystopian establishment deliberately dehumanizes their female civilians as a method of oppression because it leads to them internalizing that oppression, believing that there …show more content…

Gilead’s ability to fool women into thinking that their current predicament is superior to their lives before Gilead results with women unconsciously oppressing themselves. With this in mind, women’s lives were less publicized. They were the ones who would not be in the papers and could only be found in the blank spaces of print, which just gave them more independence (Atwood 57). Women now had more privacy than before and to them, that meant they also had a great increase of freedom. However, they cannot realize that Gilead is just trying to silence their voice to the rest of the world. We can see this misconception of a better life the Handmaids have again through the Ceremony, which is when the man of the household has sex with their Handmaid. The Handmaids “furthers Gilead’s power by naming the coerced sex ceremony, not rape, but a scared opportunity”(Raschke 54). The Handmaids are manipulated into concluding that the Ceremonies are helping their communities as well as themselves. They do not realize the immoral action that is being taken on against their bodies or against their minds. The Handmaids are so brainwashed that they deem they are protected by the “war[that] cannot intrude except on television”(Atwood 23). The Handmaids’ ability not to recognize the deception behind Gilead’s methods, …show more content…

Removing their past causes the women to forget their need to fight Gilead, taking away their hope and rebellious spirit. Offred is portrayed throughout the book as one who has realized Gilead’s brainwashing methods. She notices how Gilead is trying to erase her past. Literary critic, Coral Ann Howells, explains that Offred “refuses to forget her past, she refuses to believe the in absolute authority of Gilead, just as she refuses to give up”(Howells 61). Though Offred finds a way to resist Gilead, there are many Handmaids that are not able to. They are trapped and Gilead taking their past forces many of them to give up and lose hope of freedom. Gilead tries so hard in order to make the Handmaids forget their past that it evens tries to make them forget how they dress. Before the times of Gilead, women were able to wear blouses that suggested they were able to choose then but now, they must be covered from head to toe with an unrevaling uniform (Atwood 25). Women being forced to wear a certain attire will soon become a norm and they will forget the freedom they had when they had the ability to chose. When women begin to get comfortable with a negative situation, there is a little to no way of them trying to attain hope of getting out of that situation. The Handmaids are pushed constantly to accept their lives in the present they forget what their lives were like in the past. Gilead tells them their new

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Some of these methods include destroying identity through classification, objectification, and indoctrination. Most women of Gilead are sufficiently repressed that they seem to accept their assigned roles, at least outwardly resigned to their fate. Atwood uses gender roles in The Handmaid’s Tale to show the lengths to which misogynistic totalitarian governments will go, to protect their dictatorships. The Republic of Gilead is a hierarchical society which requires complete submission of women to men. By taking away women’s paid jobs, confiscating their property, draining their bank accounts, and giving them no recourse, the male leadership leaves women in a fully dependent and subservient position.

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