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The Handmaid's Tale By Margret Atwood

609 Words3 Pages

The novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margret Atwood, tells a fictional story of the future of the United States called Gilead. Gilead is a new era for all humans where only rich men have power. The women during this new era are taken by the rich men and are called Handmaids. The Handmaids do all the work in the house including having children with their Commander. Offred who became a Handmaid has been through some hard times since she was taken from her family and moved to a big mansion where she is being used. The heartbreaking situations that Offred and the other Handmaids make it difficult for all of them to live. The other Handmaids that are associated with the house all help each other to try to have faith in what will come. The agency between …show more content…

Offred who is a Handmaid works within the mansion and does all kinds of work for the Commander. While she and the other Handmaids get pushed around to do everything, Offred still has a sense of her own things while living in a new house. When Offred moves to her new home during the tough times, she still has “my room, then. There has to be some space, finally that I claim as mine, even in this time” (50). Offred has agency and no agency over what's hers, but she still appreciates anything and will have her own room even if it's not her choice. Serena Joy who is the Commander’s wife is strict with all of the Handmaids living in the mansion. For Serena Joy, life is not the best for her, but she gets her own choice and her own things. “The garden is the domain of the Commander’s Wife. Looking out through my shatterproof window I’ve often seen her in it, her knees on a cushion, a light blue veil thrown over her wide gardening hat, a basket at her side with shears in it and pieces of string for tying the flowers into place” (12). Serena Joy has a lot of agency and many things to call her own, but the garden is very sentimental to her and is the one thing that will always be her

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Providing for your husband and always being hospitable is trademark for housewives of the time period. However, she is not passive or submissive and is not afraid to stand up for herself, even to her husband. In this way she breaks the stereotypical mold of her time period and begins taking the role of an independent woman. When she’s leaving the house to go to a bake sale, Troy asks her when she’ll be back and she responds, “Ain’t no use studying me. It don’t matter what time I come back” (82).

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She would take them from the master’s homes or their plantation

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She is not allowed to leave the house unless she is alongside another handmaid which meets her outside the Commander’s house. When she walks through the market she is required to buy different items that Rita, a cook for the house placed there by the government, needs to cook. When

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Firstly, Offred's inner reflections on her past life from the disparity between her former freedoms and her current restrictive reality, attest to her resilience in handling the oppressive regime. Alone in her room, Offred’s mind starts to reminisce about her old life, stating “I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable” It is evident that Offred misses her past life, situations and relationships, particularly her moments with Luke. These thoughts further encapsulate the emotional toll of Offred living under Gilead's regime, as she is aware she is not seen with value.

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The Handmaid’s Tale: How Realistic it is There is a feeling of relief after watching a horror movie because the viewer understands that what they just watched was not real. It could not occur in the real world. While reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the reader is not left with that relief. Atwood has a way of writing which makes the reader believe in everything that is happening during the novel and its ability to happen in real life.

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In the novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood, the idea that women are to be submissive in a male-dominated society is expressed. While this may seem like an anti-feminist ideology, it is the opposite. Instead of shedding light on the uplifting of women, Atwood explores the idea of what would happen to women in a male-dominated world, and how we would be negatively affected. The first way women are made to be submissive to men in their society is through their clothing. Women wear extremely modest clothing, not even showing their faces to the men.

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In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred goes through many changes within her experience in Gilead. These changes include losing her job, being unable to read and being unable to have anything of value. Offred, alongside with many other women has been deemed as a handmaid. As a handmaid, the fertile women of Gilead are used to produced children for the infertile women and families. A handmaid 's life within this society contained of things such as the Ceremony where Offred would lie on her back, “fully clothed except for the healthy white cotton underdrawers.”

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Throughout the show, handmaids are killed or sent away if they break the rules provided by higher

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Offred initially feels a sense of loss due to her position as a fertile woman since the independence and individuality she once enjoyed has since been stripped from her by the Republic of Gilead. It is only through rebellion that Offred is able to slowly regain her sense of self and reject the role that Gilead forces her into. By rebellion, however, it is often more dangerous for the perpetrators than to the government’s grip on the people. Offred’s societal role as a handmaid in Gilead forces her to first obey, then causes her to question, which finally allows her to realize her

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In Margaret Atwood’s novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Moira is depicted as the symbol for resistance to authority and represents hope to the Handmaids. Atwood presents her as a polar opposite to Offred. She is independent, strong-willed, and outspoken. Conversely, the pair can be argued to be doubles in the fact that they both ‘resist’ to the oppressive Republic in Gilead.

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“What it really means is that she is in control of the process and thus the product. If any.” (109). The society of Gilead wants to make sure that the child is the Commander’s wife’s child as much as possible, and they believe that by having Serena Joy hold the hands of Offred, then that is possible. In this way, Offred, and all of the other Handmaid’s are sexually dehumanized.

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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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More recently, the awarded Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has also focused mainly on women’s issues and has been regarded as a feminist writer. In “The Handmaid’s Tale”, published in 1986 Margaret Atwood portrays a strongly feminist view of a dystopian society, in which women have been deprived of all their rights. Both of these writers are representatives of the female feminist writers who have let their footprint in our literary history, and each of them expressed her concerns on women’s rights according to the time they were living in. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) emphasizes the inequity of treatment for women throughout times that still persists in her society, and promotes her thesis that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (p. 6).

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Imagine a nation in which its government commands by a religion where women are separated into different titles and must conceive children for their commander. Their rights from before this regime, and anything deemed unholy by the government, are a thing of the past. This situation is the one represent in the Republic of Gilead, where the rules of society and its traditions are not taken lightly if broken. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood shows that an oppressive government leads to the inevitable neglect and remiss of the rules through Offred’s characterization, irony, and flashbacks. Offred 's character development can show that her actions change .

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