Throughout the novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, the protagonist Offred expresses how exposed beliefs and practices by the Gilead government affect the lives of Handmaids, relaying
In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the protagonist, Offred, expresses her wish that her “story [is] different,” that it is “happier,” or at least “more active, less hesitant, less distracted” than it is ultimately portrayed (267). However, as her story is told, these characteristics are evident in the way she talks and acts, especially around those with authority. Hesitant to express her true thoughts and feelings, and distracted by memories from her previous life, Offred attempts to piece together her role in the society that has taken her freedom. The result is a compilation of moments, of memories, both from her present, her past, and even speculation about her future.
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, written by Margaret Atwood, was written over thirty years ago in 1985. Despite this, her novel about a woman living in a totalitarian world is still widely read and relevant to today’s society. The lingering question is why? Why is it still relevant in our society despite its vast contrast to our world now? Why is it still so popular?
Offred, being a Handmaid herself, is desperate to have a child because of the fear instilled of not surviving without this act of service. During her monthly check-up with her doctor, Offred states her troubling options when she expresses in her mind, “Give me children, or else I die.” (Atwood 68). Infusing the horror of ceasing to exist ensures that Offred and the other Handmaids will understand that they can not go against the regime and must have a child with their Commander if it is possible with their fertility. Relatively, the doctors of Gilead are suffering with torment because of a life-changing choice they could make for the wellness of their patients.
In totalitarian governments such as Gilead, the citizens are controlled through fear, abasement and ignorance, this allows the government to become powerful while leaving its citizens ineffectual. Fear is used as an effective method to limit freedom and force people to live within limits. This is proven to be a valid method of societal control throughout The Handmaid’s Tale because of the way that the leaders of the Gileadean regime controlled the handmaid’s by imbuing them with the immense fear of not fitting in with the society and what would happen to them if they were unable to become pregnant. In the society of Gilead, the government made it so that the handmaid’s ‘jobs’ were seen as normal and not getting pregnant was seen as a violation of the societal norms. In the novel, the reader is able to see Offred’s struggle with the need to become pregnant and how the handmaids will go to all ends in order to become pregnant, “’You want a baby, don’t you?’
In face of severe situation, people often feel relief when they think of happier, simpler times in order to alleviate the severity. In the fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, a theocracy government controls every aspect of life in order to produce the best result of its plans. At the beginning of chapter 12, Offred takes a required, but luxurious bath because she can take off the burdensome wings and veils. While she bathes, Offred remembers her daughter from the past and a time with her family. Atwood compares Offred’s past and present through imagery, tone, similes, and symbolism combined with parallel structure to highlight the vulnerability of women to their surroundings.
In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred goes through many changes within her experience in Gilead. These changes include losing her job, being unable to read and being unable to have anything of value. Offred, alongside with many other women has been deemed as a handmaid. As a handmaid, the fertile women of Gilead are used to produced children for the infertile women and families. A handmaid 's life within this society contained of things such as the Ceremony where Offred would lie on her back, “fully clothed except for the healthy white cotton underdrawers.”
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.
“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body”. When Margaret Sanger spoke these words, she was expressing her belief on a woman’s right to have an abortion. This quote, however, speaks to the fact that women are oppressed on more than just abortions. In the novel, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Atwood portrays the dehumanization of sexuality through both the characters and events within the novel, therefore proving that women will always be considered less than men will. Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1939.
It offers an insight into a not-too-distant future of the United States, now the Republic of Gilead, wherein the society is based on Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practices. Its citizens are controlled through a group of classes known as the caste system. It is created as a superficially designed way to simplify the lives of citizens by dividing them into classes with clearly delineated standards. Fertile women are chosen to become Handmaids, walking incubators, whose role in life is to reproduce for barren wives of commanders. Older women, gay men, and barren Handmaids are sent to the colonies to clean toxic
Throughout history, women have often been subjected to prejudice and an inferior status to men. Due to sexist ideologies of men believing that women are not capable of controlling their own lives, women have often been reduced to the status of property. This concept is prominent in many pieces of literature to demonstrate the struggles women have to go through in a predominantly, male structured world. In the novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, the author illustrates a woman’s battle in an extreme society ruled by men to express the misogyny occurring in the time period when it was written, 1894. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia summarizes Atwood’s story as one that “depicts one woman’s chilling struggle to survive in a society ruled by misogynistic fascism, by which women are reduced to the condition of property.”
Refugees are people suffering from conflict and war and seeking to escape from their misery. They are innocent and don’t want the war to continue. The only way they can escape is through immigration. Furthermore, refugees lose their valuable home, their origin and decide to flee for safety. Every country can pass through such crisis even the U.S.; consequently, foreign countries should act as a unified world since it is an international affair.
Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, argues that women are instruments of the patriarchy, that women know this, and that women allow the system of oppression to live on. Her fictions ask, “What stories do women tell about themselves? What happens when their stories run counter to literary conventions or society’s expectations?” (Lecker 1). The Handmaid’s Tale is told through the protagonist, Offred, and allows readers to follow through her life as a handmaid while looking back on how life used to be prior to the societal changes.
More recently, the awarded Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has also focused mainly on women’s issues and has been regarded as a feminist writer. In “The Handmaid’s Tale”, published in 1986 Margaret Atwood portrays a strongly feminist view of a dystopian society, in which women have been deprived of all their rights. Both of these writers are representatives of the female feminist writers who have let their footprint in our literary history, and each of them expressed her concerns on women’s rights according to the time they were living in. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) emphasizes the inequity of treatment for women throughout times that still persists in her society, and promotes her thesis that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (p. 6).
Margaret Atwood wrote about a fear that lives with many, not having any freedom. Offred is one of the thousands of people who have had their freedom taken from them. Her life revolves around keeping others content and doing what she is told, but she begins to get bored and curious. When this occurs, Offred begins to break the rules due to temptation which helps her realize everyone is doing so. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, demonstrates that a lack of freedom leads to a breaking of rules.
