The Handmaid's Tale Quotes And Analysis Essay

Serena Joy is the most powerful female presence in the hierarchy of Gileadean women; she is the central character in the dystopian novel, signifying the foundation for the Gileadean regime. Atwood uses Serena Joy as a symbol for the present dystopian society, justifying why the society of Gilead arose and how its oppression had infiltrated the lives of unsuspecting people.

The young waiter has a harsh view of him as well because on occasion the old man has been so drunk he walks out on his bill. The younger waiter has a different respect for time, it’s precious to him and he values it. “I wish he would go home. I never get to bed before three o’clock. What kind of hour is that to go to bed?” “He stays up because he likes it.” “He’s lonely, I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.” “He had a wife once too” (153). The older you get, the more time wears down on you, and you begin to now, greater than ever, feel your mortality. This theme is used to help the reader understand the older mans pain and that no matter how young and confident someone is, they will eventually grow old and die.

In “The Pardoner’s Tale” a group of revelrous men seek revenge after Death kills their friend. While on the hunt for Death, the men find an old man, who has found Death, but Death has not taken the man yet. The three brutes ask the man where to find Death, and he

As the story progresses he deals with the eight nights. The first seven of them are leading up to the night when the old man opens his "vulture" eye. As the first seven nights occur, they were the same by the narrator looking into the room of the old man and hoping he 'd open the eye. During the second act, we see the narrator jump into the room and murder the old man with his own bed before cutting his body up. After murdering and dismembering him, he then hides his body under the floor of the man 's room. During the third act, we realize that the

Paula Hawkins, a well-known British author, once said, “I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.” In Margaret Atwood’s futuristic dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman named Offred feels she is losing control over everything in her life. Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead. A group of fundamentalists create the Republic of Gilead after they murder the President of the United States and members of Congress. The fundamentalists use the power to their advantage and restrict women’s freedom. As a result, each woman is assigned a specific duty to perform in society. Offred’s husband and child are taken away from her and she is now forced to live her life as a Handmaid. Offred’s role in society is to produce a child

In this short tale the Old Man knows things that the rioters do not. The Old Man writes, “I have walked to India searching round village and city on my pilgrimage, One who would change his youth to have my age” (Chaucer lines 119-121). This knowledge shows he was trying to give people his old age to have youth again. This knowledge foreshadows that the Old Man is creating death for those who ask for it. Overall, the Old Man's knowledge represents death due to providing information that creates a sense of betrayal and the taking of one's life.

Can human live without love? The answer is evidently no. Love can be defined as: the most spectacular, indescribable, deep euphoric feeling for someone. Margaret Atwood, the author of the outstanding dystopian fiction the handmaid 's tale (1985) had once in her book said: " nobody dies from lack of sex. It 's lack of love we die from.” In this novel, Atwood specifically depicts a society where relationships have been altered, undermined and in many ways forbidden. The key word in the issue of relationships is love. In the Republic of Gilead, a form of theocratic government, women had lost their ability to love. The protagonist Offred is a handmaid whose sole purpose in life is to reproduce a child. Gilead expects its handmaids to have faith in its commandments, but has removed love and hope from them. Women became objects and sex slaves to men. Therefore, the relationships of the protagonist Offred are unhealthy as well as abnormal, yet they are source of hope for Offred to survive from this theocratic form of government. Her relationship with the commander is strained but profitable, her relationship with Serena Joy has lots of tensions and conflicts; and her relationship with Nick is subtle as well as controversial.

Psychological criticism has roots as far back as the fourth century BC, when Aristotle “commented on the effects of tragedy on an audience, saying hat by evoking pity and fear, tragedy creates a cathartic of those emotions” (Dobie 54). More recently, however, psychological criticism has been shaped and influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. He developed theories concerning “the workings of the human psyche, its formations, its organization, and its maladies” that, while further refined by other theorists, are still the basis of the modern approach to literary criticism (Dobie 54). Freud’s theory of the tripartite psyche is used to classify and define the conscious and unconscious mind into the id, ego, and superego. When examined using this theory, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a patriarchal totalitarian government that has replaced the United States of America, is particularly interesting.

Could the old man have been death from the beginning leading the men to their death and knowing it, or was he just their to help with the directions? Some say he is death, but I say that the men personified death from the beginning when they went searching for death. Death is shown to the human eye as treasure to lure the men in thinking that they had stumbled upon good luck and even though death did not look obvious it was personified through the pot of gold. Once the pot of gold had been found, death had then been switched into the men once they started plotting against each other. Greed came into place and the men did not think about the consequences that could have came while looking for death and when everyone decided to turn on each other the only thing left was

Character Analysis of The Handmaid's Tale Moira = == = = We first meet Moira "breezing into" (P65) Offred's room at college.

In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaids Tale’, we hear a transcribed account of one womans posting ‘Offred’ in the Republic of Gilead. A society based around Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practises. In a society of declining birth rates, 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 waste.

2. What does death symbolize to these characters? The unknown where they do not have the power.

THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN IN ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE AND THEIR WAYS OF RESISTING THE REGIME

    Feminism as we know it began in the mid 1960's as the Women's Liberation Movement. Among its chief tenants is the idea of women's empowerment, the idea that women are capable of doing and should be allowed to do anything men can do. Feminists believe that neither sex is naturally superior. They stand behind the idea that women are inherently just as strong and intelligent as the so-called stronger sex. Many writers have taken up the cause of feminism in their work. One of the most well known writers to deal with feminist themes is Margaret Atwood. Her work is clearly influenced by the movement and many literary critics, as well as Atwood herself, have identified her as a feminist writer.

A genuine identity and individuality is not possible in an oppressive environment especially when one’s daily life, actions, and thoughts are dictated by domineering societal expectations. Oppressive environments such as regimes controlled by a dictatorship and that run off a totalitarian government system strip an individual of their civil rights as a human being in order to gain ultimate control over its citizens. A government such as the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s work, The Handmaid’s Tale, controls their citizen’s lives to the extent to where they must learn to suppress their emotions and feelings. In the Republic of