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The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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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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The Handmaid’s Tale is based in a futuristic world and it contains a strictly enforced control on all the people. This system is called The Republic of Gilead. All must follow the rules set in Gilead and not dare to overstep them. The laws are due to the decreasing number of fertile women and based on biblical teachings. The Handmaid’s roles in this novel are significant; however, their freedom and rights are viewed inferior towards men.

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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ shows patriarchy and how it is used against the female voice through how the Gileadean society has placed women in roles of labourers and handmaids. For example, “He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world. He’s breaking the rules, under

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In the book The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Gilead was a totalitarian government. In the story, politics was dirty, sexual feelings were not allowed, and women’s bodies were treated as objects that only exists to bear babies, so population would not go down. All these mostly applies to handmaids as they are assigned to bear babies for elite couples who have hard time making babies. They are not supposed to have sexual relations to somebody else. All of the women in Gilead are “deprived of their individual freedom and ordered to serve the state in different ways and functions” (Zarrinjooee & Kalantarian 67).

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Like the setting, a dystopian republic similar to that of Puritan New England, the storytelling is a mix between past and future. Rather than having the events occur in chronological order, Atwood’s treatment of time in The Handmaid’s Tale adds to the storytelling by providing Offred a means of escape from reality. Atwood uses flashback, historical notes, and imagining others’ present as narrative techniques. Offred attempts to go through present events from others’ points of views.

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In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood wishes to modify the traditional attitudes and beliefs surrounding gender roles, reproductive rights, and power dynamics within relationships and society. Through the use of various literary techniques: imagery, irony, characterization, and more, Atwood seeks to influence the reader's or audience's views and encourage them to question and challenge these societal norms. One traditional attitude that Atwood wishes to modify is the rigid gender roles and expectations placed upon men and women. In the dystopian society of Gilead, men are expected to be the dominant, powerful figures, and women are relegated to subservient roles, with their values and worth based solely on their ability to bear children.

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In the beginning of the novel The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, Atwood immediately captures our attention by focusing on women’s freedom and humanity being taken away, especially that of the protagonist Offred. In the novel, Offred narrates the story of her life in part of the country that used to be the United States, but now it is called Gilead, a country that denies the freedom of individuals, especially women. The regime is a nightmarish reality where the women are forced into specific roles: The Handmaids, who have to conceive and carry the commanders’ children and wear a uniform that consists a red dress with white bonnet; the Wives, married to the commanders, are infertile and wear blue dresses to show their status; the Marthas, older women who serve as domestic servants in green attire; the aunts train the Handmaids for their role; and the Econowives who have a lower status, and do everything for themselves, but still have Offred’s (Of Fred) name signifies her role as a Handmaid, showing she belongs to a commander named Fred.

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The title of Handmaids also reveals the social status of women in Gilead. The women are divided into several categories based on their social status, with the Handmaids serving as the most oppressed class of women. Women who are infertile or too old to bear children are cast aside, while women who are able to procreate are elevated to the status of handmaids. However, even within this class, handmaids are still considered to be inferior to men and are subject to intense scrutiny and control. They are assigned to high-ranking men as reproductive vessels and are forced to undergo a monthly dehumanizing ritual called 'the ceremony', where they are forced to have sex by their assigned male partner in hopes of procreation.

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Through the prevalence of Puritan beliefs in The Republic of Gilead, readers can observe how different characters accept, feel oppressed and threatened by Gilead’s beliefs. These behaviours prove that Gilead is a product of Puritanism, a fundamental concept of New Historicism. In The Handmaid’s Tale, there are various strategies that authoritative figures use to install these Puritan ideologies to the citizens of Gilead. A lot of these strategies work quite effectively as some characters simply accept these ideas. However, these ideologies that largely deal with inequality of the sexes cause some characters to feel oppressed and as a result, some characters rebel while some characters feel threatened to rebel within

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Margret Atwood’s, The Handmaids Tale is a dystopian novel set in a totalitarian theocracy. Many unpleasant circumstances lead towards making this regime extremely controlling and manipulative. The government uses its power to take away every citizen’s freedom and force them to conform to the dystopian political ideology. In an oppressive society like Gilead, there are people who rebel and fight against the government to attain their rights and freedoms back. The main goal for dystopian societies like Gilead is to maintain power over its citizens through different means of control and suppress anyone who speaks against the government.

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Often, we see a society’s cultural values reflected in its citizens. For example, the United States values equality, a standard that is shared in all facets including gender. The opposite is true of Gilead, a fictional society in Emily Bronte’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel’s main character, Offred, is subjected to degrading treatment simply because she is a woman. It becomes apparent that this repeated degradation has affected the protagonist’s mind.

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For a society that was built on a goal of controlling reproduction after pollution and chemical spills led to radiation sickness which caused a decline in fertility rates, fertility was one of biggest influencers of Gilead’s caste system. For sterile women living in the Republic of Gilead, perhaps the most fortunate they could get was to be married to an man of power and status. Otherwise, the next best alternative for a sterile woman was to serve as a servant. In Gilead, two servant positions are granted to infertile women. Servants known as “Aunts,” worked to educate and train the fertile women in their road to becoming a handmaid, and “Marthas,” worked at an elite family’s home, serving as either housekeepers or cooks.

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The Handmaid’s Tale, a science fiction and dystopian novel, is set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian Christian theocracy within the present borders of the United States of America. The Republic of Gilead consolidates power by creating a hierarchical Christian regime which follows social and religious conservatism inspired by the Old Testament. The novel is narrated by a woman named Offred, who describes her life as a handmaid. Due to extremely low reproduction rates and high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, Handmaids serve as a vital function in Gilead. Handmaids are assigned to elite couples to conceive children.

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Handmaid’s whom are the fertile women in the Gilead society, are stripped from all freedom and rights, banned from knowing any form of literature and have to be submissive to men, allowing their bodies to be sexually used to produce children. In contrast, women who are not fertile such as Wives have their freedom taken away too as they are confined to doing assigned jobs around the house. In contrast, the Aunts and the Commanders are shown to have the highest rankings in the Gileadean society. They are powerful figures, with privileges such as the Aunts being allowed to read and write and the Commanders being permitted to get married and have a handmaid's assigned to

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1375 Words | 6 Pages

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood portrays a dystopian society which forces women into reproductive slavery to warn of the dangers of a Christian fundamentalist patriarchal government. These women, handmaids, have no rights and are raped by their owners, otherwise known as Commanders, every month in hopes of elevating the depleting birth rates. Offred, the main character and handmaid, only wants two things: her freedom and her daughter, but both were stolen from her. Women in Gilead, like Offred, are not seen as individuals, but resources with their most valuable asset lying between their legs. This demeaning viewpoint of women is horrifying in that it shares perspective with current misogynists and politicians.

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Offred’s thoughts relieves a glimmer of anguish by drawing connections of her liberal past to remember humanity and remain sane. Indeed, Atwood exemplifies humans taking for granted basic rights as latently important. Although conscious of the implications Offred passively accepts her new name. The naivety of the Handmaids makes Gilead dangerous, as their tyranny has no bounds. Furthermore, the patronymic composition, “Of” and the Commander’s name expresses the objectification of Handmaids as property of the Commander thus dehumanizes the Handmaid and accentuate their absence of personhood.

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