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The Role Of Religion In The Handmaid's Tale

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In The Rapture of Canaan, a religion that tells her what she can and can’t do causes Ninah to battle with who she is apart from the girl her culture tells her she should be. Ninah finds herself “saying [her] “ABC’s” during prayer, thinking that periodic trips to the altar makes a good impression” (Reynolds 237). Ninah is unable to make religion something personal because the religion she’s been taught, she believes to be insane. She has trouble knowing right from wrong because from a young age, she’s been told everything is a sin, which she now knows isn’t exactly true. This leads to her becoming pregnant because she is unable to interpret what the Bible is really saying, apart from the lies her Grandfather has spun. Watching the other kids …show more content…

She wishes that “sooner or later [she] will get out, find her [daughter], she will remember her, and [they] will be together” (Atwood 120). Every night, Offred finds herself falling asleep thinking of the times she’s spent with her daughter, wishing she could still be holding her little girl. On top of missing her daughter, she struggles with the idea that she could be having another child for the Commander and his wife to raise. Offred begins to hate the commander's wife because she is jealous that this other woman gets to be the one to raise her child. However, after seeing the commander’s wife’s longing stare, Offred begins to wonder “which of them has it worse” (Atwood 109). While she has to give up her body and her baby to a family that hates her, the commander's wife has to watch as her husband sleeps with another woman because her body is unable to have a child, the thing she most desires. The commander's wife willingly puts herself through constant turmoil because she desperately wants a child. These women, who in reality have common desires, hate each other. These women are willing to go to no extent to be the loving mothers that they always wanted to

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