The Mysterious Character Ofglen In The Handmaid's Tale
Barak Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was aimed to unite all Americans, and to soothe white voters of any worries and or fears from the communicant of a black Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Obama opens up his speech by reminding his targeted audience of what America was founded upon and how the perfect union has yet to be accomplished due to the previous sin of slavery. The President goes on to address how the comments of his pastor created a bigger discourse between whites and blacks, which deters their attention from bigger issues and widens the gap between races. Lastly, Obama ends his speech by informing his audience of how they can achieve a more perfect union. President Obama effectively appealed to ethos in his speech by displaying experience, good sense, and good character.
Gilead values obedience to their core beliefs and use many tactics to maintain it. The citizens often spy on one another and Eyes are spread throughout the society. Offred’s depression and fear is what controls the way she behaves even around Ofglen, who later on became one of her closest companions. “She may be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name. I can’t take the risk.
Offred struggles between her attraction to Nick and remaining faithful to Luke. In the end of the novel, Offred ends up giving in to her attraction to Nick, however she does not feel that she has betrayed Luke in any way. Both gentlemen fulfill needs of Offed at different times of her life. Luke only exists in her past life, and most of Offred’s memories with him are fading away as she struggles to remember certain details of her past. Offred thinks, “The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom.
The American science fiction and fantasy author Richard Grant once said that “the value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.” In both The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the main protagonists search for their identities through the context of their daily lives. In correlation with the preceding quotation, in The Awakening, after a vacation opens her eyes to all that she has been missing in her life, she becomes desperate to find herself outside of the mother-woman while in The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator must decide which parts of her identity she wants to hold on to and who she is in the trying times of the Gileadean society. The two novels demonstrate the journey of these women
The book The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood is a literary masterpiece containing many symbols hidden in everything from the flowers to the clothes worn by the characters. These symbols are used to represent the purpose of the characters in Gilead, the setting of the book. The flower is a symbol for the sole reproductive role of the handmaids and the colors are used to symbolize how the characters are meant to behave, red meaning fertile, white for purity, green for service, and blue for sadness.
Unlike most of the main characters in other novels, Offred is weak, she is passive, she does not do anything and goes with the current. Her main contribution to the world is her record of what happened in the Gilead society. Her world is limited within the walls and she does nothing to resist it. She misses Luke (her husband) and her daughter, she fears that if she does anything wrong the Gilead would punish them. Although there is almost no chance for her to ever see either of them again, she still tries to preseve the relationship.
(Atwood 93) this led to the Commander, his wife, and Offred getting the deed done to try for a baby. These very experiences molded Offred into the person she’d become at the end of the novel emphasizing the effect they had on her. Offred’s life before Gilead was similar to the typical women of 1980s. She had a husband, a child and more importantly a life.
It is narrated by the protagonist, Offred who is a handmaid forced into sexual servitude. Facing a plunging birth rate, the fundamentalist regime treats women as property of the state. Handmaids are the few of the remaining fertile women and their sole purpose is to help the government into re-populating their society, where a lot of people are left sterile. The Handmaid’s Tale deals with the theme of women in subjugation to misogyny in a patriarchal society, primarily. It shows the struggle that women have to go through in that society, as a Handmaid or as not being able to be one.
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.
There are two ways people will react to when their freedom is taken away. They will either accept it or rebel against it, which is what a lot of the female characters in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale accomplished. Shown through Offred’s repetition of certain events, Moira’s tone of being a fighter, and Serena Joy’s desperation, the reader can see that lack of freedom leads to rebellion. Offred, the novel’s narrator, now lives in a world where women are powerless. She has had her freedom taken away, and at times follows the rules, but ends up rebelling in many powerful ways.
Imagine that you’re walking through the aisles of a grocery store, trying to buy groceries. All you want to do is buy healthy, wholesome food for your family, but you're bombarded by companies spewing slogans at you, like “lightly sweetened”, “natural”, “local”, “free-range”, but what do they all really mean? Are the foods behind these labels regulated and monitored, or is a label just slapped onto a package to make the consumer spend a little more money and maybe feel a bit better about the food they they're putting into their bodies? In today’s world, when consumers are surrounded by numerous labels, it is important that they understand what food they are purchasing and feeding to their families. To begin with, bBefore we can explain exactly why these labels can be deceiving, we need to dig deeper and explain what each label really means.
“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.
The majority of people ask the same question at some point in their life; who am I? The concept of identity is something many wrestle with their whole lives. Other individuals are confident of who they are. The Handmaid’s Tale follows a society that is stripped of individuality and identity. This question can no longer be asked because it cannot be answered.
In the 1980s, United States was experiencing the rise of conservatism. Under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, conservative religious groups were gaining popularity. In response to the social and political landscape, Canadian author Margaret Atwood published a fictional novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986; a genre of dystopian novels. The storyline projects an imaginary futuristic world where society lives under oppression and illusion of a utopian society maintained through totalitarian control. Dystopian novels often focus on current social government trends and show an exaggeration of what happens if the trends are taken too far.
This piece is called Loss of Identity, created with watercolor and colored pencil. Complementing the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood, Loss of Identity focuses on one of the major themes of the dystopian world that Atwood displays through the Republic of Gilead: a loss of one’s self-image and past life. When the government in the United States is overthrown by the future founders of Gilead, they have in mind a new order in which traditional gender roles triumph in society once again. However, such a societal change quickly begins to reveal a loss of civil liberties and rights that women had fought so hard to receive.
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