The Handmaid's Tale Power

Margaret Atwood's didactic novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) serves as a cautionary "tale" to warn readers about the destructive nature of power and oppression. Atwood portrays a dystopian totalitarian regime, Gilead, with a firm hierarchy motif where gender separation is established to reveal how an abuse of political power results in the oppression of individuals. Atwood uses her novel as an artistic tool to encourage the need for heightened political and social awareness by examining the way individuals are controlled through oppressive means, giving rise to a frightening loss of individualism and freedom. Hence, Atwood's novel communicates the dangers of a passive acceptance of power and oppression within societal and political movements

Atwood establishes militaristic and rigid settings in Gilead to emphasise the totalitarian regulation and lack of freedom within such a society, "Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods," using evocative animalistic imagery and prison-like descriptions, "Army cots that had been set up in rows, without spaces between so we could not talk," to show the dehumanising effects of such oppressive societies in order to consolidate supreme control. The Handmaids, as such, become dehumanised to the collective identity of mass-bred "cattle", representing their value to society merely being attributed to their sexual function. In order to consolidate the oppressive regimes, Atwood comments on the way those in power use fear as a method of silencing, marginalising and manipulating individuals from transgressing their socially prescribed roles. Atwood presents Gilead as a totalitarian regime that regulates its citizens through surveillance. This is portrayed through the symbol of the 'eyes'. Perhaps it was a test to see what I would do. Perhaps he

Atwood's novel challenges readers not to be complacent about the gains made in the feminist movement for fear of losing all that has been fought for. By setting the narrative in a speculative future, Atwood represents people in Gilead society as a rigid hierarchy where conformity is enforced through fear and people are valued according to their function and contribution to the state. Contextually, the rigorous tyrannies and lost freedoms to extreme conservatism as a corrective response to an age of extreme liberalism characterised by deterioration of morality and rampant sexuality is censored within the Gilleard regime. Thus, individual privileges such as abortion, "old sex", "mini-skirts", and agency become a distant memory, by which the regime reduces the self as a figure of the collective, mimetic in the loss of self with 'few mirrors'. Atwood compares the clothing worn by the Handmaids, "Everything except the wings around my face is red," with "the colour of blood", symbolising childbirth and fertility, to present the way clothing is used to "define us" as merely what people can offer. Atwood uses uniform clothing as a visual depiction of the notion of social stratification and subsequent power imbalance in Gilead, while trying to climb the hierarchy. In justifying institutionalised rape through the