The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

Throughout the course of world history on Earth, humans have always worked harder and harder in order to improve society and make it more perfect, although it still hasn’t been done quite yet, because it is merely impossible to achieve perfection in a world with close to seven billion people. There is a very distinct difference between a utopia, which can also be known as perfection, and a dystopia, which can also be known as a tragedy; and the outcomes normally generate from the people in charge or the authority that sets up the foundation, the rules, and the regulations for a society. In the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Republic of Gilead is created by a powerful authority group called the Eyes after a huge government take over and the assassination of the US president. It’s very strict rules and goals are set up to protect women, to increase childbirth, and to keep all violence, men, and powerful social media under control. The novel is set in a first person point of view and the narrator, Offred, tells her story to us readers about her experiences as a handmaid and how her life was completely turned upside down. Throughout the course of the novel Offred reveals many sides of herself; although her thoughts do not remain consistent, her personality and opinion tends to change revealing, that she is hesitant and strong because she learns to make the best of what she has and silently overcome the system of the Republic of Gilead.

Written by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in the near future where the United States is overthrown and a military dictatorship forms called the Republic of Gilead. Gilead is a society that reconsolidates power and creates a new hierarchical regime that limits women entirely of their rights. The rulers of this dystopia are centrally concerned with dominating their subjects through the control of their experiences, time, memory, and history. A woman called Offred narrates the story and works as a Handmaid for reproductive purposes only. In her storytelling, Offred describes flashbacks consisting of portions of her life before the revolution. These flashbacks are the only thing that keeps her going in this

The literary masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, is a story not unlike a cold fire; hope peeking through the miserable and meaningless world in which the protagonist gets trapped. The society depicts the discrimination towards femininity, blaming women for their low birth rate and taking away the right from the females to be educated ,forbidding them from reading or writing. These appear in Ethan Alter’s observations that:

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, one discovers the dystopian society of the Republic of Gilead. This society was created in order to keep the birth rates from the continuous decline and deals with the problem by requiring women to have government-sanctioned sex. Women are only treated as if they are a pair of ovaries and the only purpose that they have is to keep the country populated . If a Handmaid is unable to reproduce, they are punished for their failures. “Having given birth successfully, the Handmaid can rest assured that she will not be sent the Colonies, where ‘unwomen’ clean up toxic dumps and radiation spills. ” (Miner 149). If a Handmaid is unable to do their duties, they are sent away, and there is a great chance they will not return. The sex they are giving to their Commander is in no way romantic, nor is there any real love involved. Offred, a Handmaid, remembers the life she once lived before becoming a Handmaid. The women who become Handmaid’s are given names that are not really their own. “My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses anymore because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter” (Atwood 84). The government has brainwashed these women into believing that they do not really matter and they have no real purpose. The government has taken away their names and given them the names of their Commander. In

In the novel The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood the themes of Religion and inter-human relationships are the themes that are most evident in the text. This novel shows the possibility of the existence of an all-powerful governing system. This is portrayed through the lack of freedom for women in society, from being revoked of their right to own any money or property, to being stripped of their given names and acquiring names such as Offred and Ofglen, symbolizing women’s dependant existence, only being defined by the men which they belong to. This portrayal of women demonstrates the idea that individuals are unimportant, that the goals of the society as a whole are more pertinent. “For our purposes, your feet and your hands are not

Throughout the novel, Offred switched between her life in Gilead and her life in California. Offred also talks about her mother who was a feminist and recount of the times that she would go to the rallies with her. Remembering these facts allows the reader to realize that Offred cannot forget her life before Gilead, even if she tried to. Finally, one day when Offred was

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood that contains many controversial ideas and themes relating to society. The novel takes place in the near future of a new society called the Republic of Gilead, not very long after the United States government was overthrown. Gilead follows the rules and policies made by the new religiously extremist rulers. The readers learn about Gilead through the narrator named Offred, who is a handmaid. The Handmaids in Gilead are women who had the job of reproducing with the Commanders of the different households they were assigned to.

Visualize a society controlled by a group of people, who lust having control of every aspect in a society. Making a place where only them has power and can decide of what they want. Creating rules to take over every habitant’s rights and destroying their identity, making them perfect slaves for their idealistic society. Think about a society where the most important individuals are the one who gets nothing but disrespect and neglect from the other citizens. Generally, these subjects are distained by the society, but this changes as soon as some very important and high-ranking personality needs them.

Throughout history, women have always struggled with maintaining a status equal to that of men in both the workforce as well as home life. Traditionally, women have been forced to be shut into the house performing grotesquely dull action such as constantly cooking, cleaning and caretaking while the man is out bringing home the money due to the female’s ability to reproduce readily. This outdated status of women, however, is taken to an extreme in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood where the women are demoted as practically slaves to the system. While numerous pieces of literature have addressed slavery across the world in different lights, very few have explored the enslavement felt by women to men in the ages prior to present day. By

In the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, written by Margaret Atwood, the author details a futuristic dystopia where women have been subjugated and dehumanized to serving the purpose of bearing children in order to equalize the disproportion in declining births due to the effects of the nuclear pollution. The authors in depth analysis conveys the notion of the atrocities women throughout history consistently find themselves enduring through with a male-dominated patriarchal system. Within the Republic of Gilead, women have been denounced as being seen as pure objects of reproduction not as actual beings. The agenda of Gilead has completely disrupted the order of society and refers back to a biblical order of existence. The creators of Gilead aspired to create a regime where women would no longer be

The novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood, explores the role of women in a fictional patriarchal society. Women in the novel are seen as property of a man and they live under a strict set of enforced rules and guidelines that male society has deemed appropriate. These patriarchal beliefs are so entrenched in the society that many women either believe the ideals or have been subconsciously influenced by society. Most of the women in the novel were “products of society” with their personalities being heavily attributed into the culture that they were now immersed in. A major theme of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood, is the skewed sense of freedom and power that the women have developed; seen in the value placed on children, the women’s interactions with one another, and the clear presence of suicide.

Meanwhile, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes about the underlying social dynamics present within the dystopic Republic of Gilead, a procreation-based society that ultimately defines the worth of a woman by her sex and biological role in reproduction. In this way, women in the novel are dehumanized and objectified because it is evident that they are seen by society as more of “baby-making” machines than actual human beings. Thus, one can argue that identity becomes problematic in this sense because the worth of a woman in Gilead is solely determined by her biological identity and reproductive function. In general, all women in Gilead are deemed inferior to men due to their sex and the socially constructed belief that males are

The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of a young woman living in a futuristic society in which women have no rights. Her only purpose on earth is to reproduce. Women are forbidden from having jobs, wearing provocative clothing, voting, or even reading. This insightful novel by Margaret Atwood supports feminism by giving a clear and terrifying example of what life has been, and could be like without the rights that we've become accustomed to. At first this novel seems nothing more then a fantasy, just a bad dream.

The Handmaid’s Tale explores gender and identity as well as domestic politics, which, in turn, ties into social protest. Atwood uses the example of a ‘Unwomen’, who were past protestors demonstrating against violent sexual attacks on women and calling for greater safety on the streets. This relays the knowledge that rebellions and protests have happened in the past and makes readers aware of the dilemma that moral freedom comes at a price. The real threat in The Handmaid’s Tale comes not from males but from the females. In other words, the male-dominated power structure that exists relies on females to regulate one another and enforce social standards within their society.

The conceptual understanding of a good text revolves not only around its content, but also its language and construction. This notion articulates profoundly within Margaret Atwood’s novel A Handmaid’s Tale as it is, after all, the author’s manipulation of the language and construction which enacts as vehicles towards the reader’s understanding of the content.