In the second half of the book, it talks about Offred starts having contact with the Commander since she goes to his office often, and feels uncomfortable about what they do after the ceremony. Un day where the Commander’s wife wasn’t at home, the Commander takes Offred out to a club. In the club, she sees her best friend, Moira. Two different feelings come up to Offred’s mind, happiness and also pity. Since Offred has been to the Commander’s house for some time, the commander’s wife suspects that maybe the commander is unfertilized, but this is forbidden to speak up the word and she wants a baby, at the same time, she probably wants to help Offred, so she plans Offred go with Nick in order to have a baby.
Once found, Jurgis is shocked to find the conditions of the family. Weak as she is, Ona has gone into premature labor and is dying. After enlisting the help of a midwife, Jurgis spends his night drinking, trying to forget his struggles and the pain he is experiencing. Returning home early in the morning, Jurgis finds that the baby had died, and Ona was not far behind. Racing into the bedroom, Jurgis speaks to Ona one last time before she dies, leaving him no one left to care about in the world except his son.
Ding Dong, Christopher heard the doorbell ring, pulling him away from his thoughts. Then he realized that that might be the next victim and they would see that the coat rack, next to the door, had no coats on it, as he did. He wondered if it would strike them as peculiar, as it did him. If they were the next victim, Ivanna then would already have a room ready as if she were expecting another guest. Christopher knew that the guest had to have certain traits, otherwise they wouldn’t be a good addition to her collection.
As the story progresses, the reader sees that Offred is sent to a home with a Commander and his wife, of course to bear their children. She must stay there for at most 2 years or until a child is born for the Commander. The Commander
Once the commander starts to speak with offred they start to have sex. Serena joy has to lay below offred while she has sex with the commander and offred is not allowed to speak. They have sex multiple times every month when offred is at a certain point in her menstrual cycle. Ofred does not get pregnant so they send her to the doctor to check if she's infertile. The doctor says that it's mostly the commander is infertile then offers to have sex with
It’s all [she’s] left with” (Atwood 294). She is so desperate by this point because failing to stand up to her beliefs has left with no other option. She depended on her friend Moira to fix everything, but since Moira has stopped fighting, they are now both in less than ideal situations. By making her internal beliefs clear and then depicting her conforming to and participating in the society that she so strongly opposed, Atwood demonstrates Offred taking actions that contradict her beliefs because she is afraid to directly defy the society.
With the bible locked up and only readable by the Commander, the government is able to make up whatever they want the words to be. They can twist the meanings of the bible verses to their well-being, and they won’t be questioned because they are the only ones who have it in their possession. Gilead uses the bible for fear. To the handmaids and the other servants it’s a sacred book they’ve been told stories from of which they live by, but no one has ever read what it truly says. Also, the threat of a revolution is another reason the bible is kept away.
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.
Offred trades sex in return for knowledge of her daughter's whereabouts.
Serena Joy barely even leaves her house as a wife’s duty consists of staying home. She is a very unhappy character. Her life before this new government was a celebrity in television singing gospels and making speeches fighting for the life she has now which she hates. The only attention she receives is from when she fakes ill and all the other wives come visit and nurture her. However, if she were to get “pregnant” it will bless her ,the household,and wives will envy her.
The Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, is shown to be living a horrible life, and we can see she despises Offred. In fact, through an act of desperation, Serena tells Offred, “ I was thinking of Nick” (Atwood 205). Serena previously had said that maybe the Commander couldn’t have kids. She then does something risky by suggesting Offred sleep with Nick, to see if she then gets pregnant. By Serena’s actions, we can tell she desperately wants a baby, so that way Offred can leave as soon as possible.
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.
Margaret Atwood has seamlessly woven a tapestry of feminist elements - mainly regarding gender oppression - within her works. With that, using two of Atwood’s texts, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Year of The Flood, as the foundation for our literary research, we will be focusing on the commodification of the female flesh in both similar dystopian contexts. Commodification refers to the action or process of treating an object, or a person, as a raw material or product that can be bought and sold, or even treated as an object of which sovereignty can be held over by one. In both works, women are victimized and treated as sexual beings whose bodies and physical expressions can be freely used by the men who have power over them against their will. The two texts illustrate how society brings about the oppression of women and this exacerbates the commodification of women.
Through breaking small rules, Offred is connecting to her past identity. At dinner, Offred steals butter, “As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will someday get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones,” (Atwood 96). This simple action represents the hope of a future that is like their past. Rebelling by stealing butter, playing Scrabble, reading magazines, and having love interests allows her to come back to part of her identity.
The novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a story about a society set in a future world where women’s rights have been revoked. Many values change with this new regime of controlled women and strict laws. Despite the changes in the world it maintains many conservative, religious beliefs while also containing liberal, feminist beliefs simultaneously. Society in the futuristic world of Gilead is structured heavily off of readings from the Bible and traditional views of gender that have been in place for a long time. An example of the Bible being an important part of society is the idea of the Handmaids came from a passage in the Bible about two women, Rachel and Leah.
