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Summary Of The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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Thesis- Margaret Atwood criticizes what we all know and have, Women's Rights, but Atwood takes them away even the most important parts of all women, being able to own a house, or having a bank account, even being able to speak your mind. In The Handmaid's Tale everything was normal equal rights between women and men, and than all of a sudden women can’t own any property, bank accounts get shut down, you can't leave without permission, as well as getting cut from jobs. In the new government commanders wives have to wear blue, and the handmaids wear red, it keeps them apart from each other and as well as people knowing who's who. You could only say certain words, and some words are forbidden, “he’s said a forbidden word sterile” (p61). The wifes cant have babies so they bring in Handmaids to help. The handmaid's get trained at the Red Center to know what to do and how to do the things around the house, go …show more content…

That is there life now, they can’t speak out, cant have their own opinion, with no way out of this, your thoughts are your only safe place. Without equal rights or ownership of anything all of a sudden, ever women can think, they aren't good enough or what did i do wrong. Even the wife’s, who can say anything, may feel threatened and feel not good enough for the husband because they have to bring another woman into their home so the husbands can have intercourse with them, so they can have a child that she can’t provide for him. Offred ends up getting caught as unwoman because she married a caregiver. You are not aloud to be unwoman, they hang her wife and make surgical adjustments to Offred, she can still have kids tho. If someone is to reach out for help, read a book or even fight back they will be hanged, cut a finger off or a hand if its the second offence. No one is

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Research Paper on The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, creates a dystopia of the near future in which a conventional fundamentalist group rules what is left of the United States, which has now become “Gilead.” The Republic of Gilead has subdued women and reduced Handmaids like Offred, the main character, to sexual slavery. Offred yearns for happiness and freedom, and discovers herself struggling against the totalitarian boundaries of her civilization. The Republic of Gilead is a totalitarian state formed by a religious cult centered on ideas of bigotry and inequality, especially in relation to gender.

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Rebellion In The Handmaid's Tale

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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.

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In Margaret Atwood’s novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Moira is depicted as the symbol for resistance to authority and represents hope to the Handmaids. Atwood presents her as a polar opposite to Offred. She is independent, strong-willed, and outspoken. Conversely, the pair can be argued to be doubles in the fact that they both ‘resist’ to the oppressive Republic in Gilead.

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In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the Republic of Gilead actively represses women by forcing them into very narrowly defined, ultra-conservative gender roles. This totalitarian government strips women of all rights and protections, and imposes severe punishments for defiance. Pollution and disease had caused severe infertility in this society, drastically reducing birth rates. In an effort to reverse a drastic population decline, this thoroughly misogynistic and power-hungry regime, takes full control over the human reproductive process. Furthermore, the leadership uses various dehumanizing methods to achieve complete subservience of women to men.

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Dehumanization In The Handmaid's Tale

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“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.

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Freedom In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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(Atwood, 194). In the end all the methods used to protect women only reinforced the discrimination, and Handmaids are depicted as baby machines. All this class struggle leads to one answer, in this society freedom is all about what you are forced to achieve to serve the nation. Individuals do not settle their objectives, but the government that force them to accomplish them because they are morally correct. Women are expected to do their job, their “uses”, since it is for the wealth of the

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In this written text, the emphasis will be on Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale and as well as the way Atwood portrays women and how it can be argued to show the oppression of women. The main purpose is to analyze the way women are treated throughout this book and depict why they are represented this way in the society in Gilead. Then, comparatively, observe the men’s domination over women and how they govern this society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are stripped of their rights, suffer many inequalities and are objectified, controlled by men and only valued for their reproductive qualities. The Gilead society is divided in multiple social group.

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Power And Power In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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