The Handmaid's Tale: Women In Parallel Societies

The Handmaid’s Tale: Women in Parallel Societies Margaret Atwood’s highly insightful and complex novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, takes place in a futuristic society called the Republic of Gilead, established after a revolution has overthrown the U.S government. Because birth rates have become extremely low due to chemical poisoning, pollution and low fertility rates, childbirth has become extremely important and a necessity for all women. They are split into categories based on their fertility status - Wives, Aunts, Econowives, Marthas, Unwomen, and Handmaids. The fertile women are treated as objects whose only purpose in life is giving birth: these are the Handmaids. The Handmaids are assigned to a high status male, usually a Commander, to conceive

In the Bible, Gilead is seen as a city with “beautiful buildings,” and “fat pastures” (Jeremiah 22: 9), a city that is seemingly pleasant on the outside. However, referring to the Old Testament according to Hosea 6:1, it is a “city of wicked men, stained with footprints of blood.” The people in the novel choose the name Gilead to resemble the biblical paradise in order to illude the citizens into thinking that it is a desirable, pleasant place to live - if you only follow their rules - when in fact, “‘the Republic of Gilead...knows no bounds’” (Atwood 23). Instead of having the Republic turn out how the founders had hoped, it turned into a place of despair and loss of hope and morality. It is now a cruel and sexist place where women are taught that “it [is] best not to speak unless they ask you a direct question” (Atwood 14), and had little educational rights, where even “writing in any case is forbidden” (Atwood 39). As philosopher and scientist, Francis Bacon once said, Knowledge is power; thus the people of the Republic of the Gilead purposefully took away education from women to prevent any possible power they could acquire. By taking away their education, and therefore their power, women are left with “no chance for upward mobility, only down,” says an analysis expert on The Handmaid’s Tale (Garbato). This

It appears in the Old Testament, but rarely in the New Testament, the ‘Handmaids’ being used for the same purpose in the Bible as in Atwood's novel as shown through the story of Sarai Abram's wife; “Now Sarai Abram's wife bare him no children: and she had a handmaid…” (Genesis 16:1). Women and men would rather die than not have children in the Old Testament; in the story of Rachel and Jacob, Rachel was unable to conceive for her husband Jacob, “so she said to Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I’ll die!’” (Genesis 30). The people of Atwood’s Gilead seek to brainwash the women into believing this same ideal - that they will die if they do not have children. The Republic makes similar rules to the Old Testament to attempt to imitate a civilized society, but shows how harsh it has become in the way they treat women as well as what they coerce them into believing. This severe view on childbirth is exemplified when the narrator, Offred, goes to the doctor for a monthly check-up. The doctor asks her if she wants a child, and she replies “yes,” then repeats in her head the phrase from the Bible, “give me children, or else I die” knowing “there’s more than one meaning to it” (Atwood 61). For a Handmaid, they have it embedded into their minds that “There are only women who are fruitful and