The Novel ' The Handmaid Tale '

Over the past 200 years sexual liberation and freedom have become topics of discussions prevalent within western culture and society. With the recent exploration of sexuality a new concept of sexual and gender identity has emerged and is being analyzed in various fields of study. The ideology behind what defines gender and how society explains sex beyond biology has changed at a rapid pace. In response various attempts to create specific and catch all definitions of growing gender and sexual minorities has been on going. This has resulted in the concept of gender becoming a multi- layered shifting hypothesis to which society is adapting. Since the 19th-century, philosophers and theorists have continued to scrutinize gender beyond biological and social interpretation. Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid 's Tale captures the limitations and social implications forced upon a set gender based on societal expectations. Gender is a social construct that limits the individual to the restrictions and traditions of a society, or if it’s an individually formed self-identification of sex and sexuality that is formed autonomously. Evidence of gender establishment can be seen within literary works and supported by various schools of gender and sexuality theory.

"Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing, ' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order." -Joyce Johnson-

Margaret Atwood's, The Handmaid's Tale, constructs a near-future dystopia where human values do not progress and evolve, but instead become completely diminished and dominated under the Republic of Gilead. This powerful and secure new government gains complete political control and begins to abuse their power by forcing fertile women to reproduce. The Gileadean society is enforced by many Biblical laws, morals, and themes, yet the Gileadian religious ideologies are based on only a few specifically selected Biblical passages that are taken literally. The selection of certain passages in the Bible helps control and manipulate the women that are being enslaved by giving them a false sense of justification and security for the treatment they

Parents typically don’t want their children reading in depth books about sex; however, The Handmaid’s Tale offers great fictional examples that teach sexism and the mistreatment of women, yet these examples can lead some in the wrong way. Therefore depending on the view in society, The Handmaid’s tale should be banned or kept to certain areas of the world because of the unfair treatment of women.

The chosen leaders in The Handmaid’s Tale use rhetoric to proselytize religion and Gileadean ideals. In Gilead, women do not have the choice to leave, even the Marthas—who are ranked just above the Handmaids—discuss the possibility of leaving the house in private. However, because the Colonies are where the “Unwomen… starve to death” (Atwood 10), Cora uses rhetoric to persuade Rita not to consider the Colonies. The negative connotation and denotation of “Unwomen” in The Handmaid’s Tale conveys a religious value in Gilead because it is someone who cannot bear children. It should not come as a surprise that the Handmaids’ lives are not always lillies—just like the ones on the FAITH-printed cushion. Though these words are not spoken, it is clear that Handmaids are marginalized, even if they are “spoiled” (Atwood 89).

In The Handmaid's Tale by Margret Atwood, the Republic of Gilead was formed on extreme religious views. In Gilead, the laws and regulations set in place, are pulled and manipulated from the Bible. The authority the Bible already had before the reign of Gilead, had become even more powerful. Small, fragmented pieces of Biblical text appear often throughout the novel to help enforce this strict new rule of Gilead.

As a wide-celebrated book, the handmaid’s Tale described world as female dystopia. What role does women have in such a scrutinized social environment? In the story The Handmaid’s Tale, the advocacy and commences of feminism is the theme throughout the whole book. The author Margaret Atwood appealed to feminism by mainly three storylines: Moria’s attitude toward life, the depiction of Offred’s mother, and the organization of Mayday. To begin with, the author Margret Atwood stressed the idea of feminism sharply and insightfully from Moria.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the author, Margaret Atwood, creates a dystopian society that is under theocratic rule. From this theocracy, each individual’s freedom is, for the most part, taken away. The Handmaid’s Tale creates a dystopia by placing restrictions on the individual’s freedom, using propaganda to control its citizens, and by having citizens of Gilead live in dehumanized ways. Furthermore, the creation of a hierarchal system in Gilead caused its citizens to lose the ability to feel empathy towards one another. In the search to create a perfect society, Gilead caused more harm and problems than expected which created a dystopia rather than a utopia.

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.

Imagine growing up in a society where all women are useful is to reproduce. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an excellent novel of what could potentially be the fate of the future one day. The main character, Offred, moves into a new home where she is there to perform “rituals” with the Commander, head of the house, so she can hopefully reproduce herself. The Commander is a key character for he can get rid of Offred if he does not like her and he has all the power. The two end up having a secret relationship where Offred begins to trust him. In the book the Commander is portrayed as a pretty trustworthy character to Offred, however the movie adaptation was the complete opposite. There are three important scenes that portray the Commander differently from the movie in comparison to the book serving to create a different mood.

In the period following the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s characterized by a religious conservative revival, Margaret Atwood wrote the novel The Handmaid’s Tale. With the elections of Ronald Reagan as president of the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain, both religious conservatives, many feminists feared that all the progress towards equality they had made during the ‘60s and ‘70s would be reversed. Atwood, thinking no differently than them, decided to create a novel that explored the implications and effects of a nation, Gilead, that has completely obliterated feminist progress. In Gilead, women have no decision-making power; they are merely objects. Even though the disparity between the sexes was not so wide in Atwood’s time, Gilead is still representative of a possible future for society. Atwood uses the motifs of color and nomenclature found in the fictitious nation of Gilead to make a connection to society, and prove that society forces both women and men to have feminine and masculine power respectively and pits those two types of power against one another.

Throughout Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded state is created through the use of multiple themes and narrative techniques. In a dystopia, we can usually find a society that has become all kinds of wrong, in direct contrast to a utopia, or a perfect society. Like many totalitarian states, the Republic of Gilead starts out as an envisioned utopia by a select few: a remade world where lower-class women are given the opportunity interact with upper-class couples in order to provide them with children, and the human race can feel confident about producing future generations with the potential to see past divisions of

In which ways and with what results do the ideologies of the dystopian society, Gilead, create an atmosphere that encourages the need for feminism? A dystopian society is a society where humans are dehumanized. A utopia, on the other hand, deals with everything perfect and good. In order for a society to turn into a dystopia, there needs to be a motive, for the said society, to make drastic changes to try and capture the idealistic utopic society. The substantial measures that Gilead takes to achieve perfection results in a dystopian society instead of a utopian one. The dystopian society has detrimental effects on the women of Gilead, both emotionally and physically. In the novel, The handmaids tale, by Margaret Atwood, the author utilizes the setting of the novel and its characters to communicate the themes of oppression and control over the female population of Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale is about a young girl whose name is Offred. Living in the political dystopia known as Gilead, men force Offred and the other women to become exactly like one another and only focus on becoming pregnant. Scared and alone, Offred struggles to survive in the political dystopia being enforced by Commanders and secret police forces which control a society basing itself on false principle, subjugating the people by color, represses a woman’s individuality, and treats women like objects instead of people. Women are assigned to live with a Commander in which take part in monthly “Ceremonies” in an attempt to impregnate the Handmaid of the house. Women are forced

A totalitarian regime is a very large piece of what is typically required for a dystopia, and it is certainly present in The Handmaid’s Tale. A totalitarian regime is a political system where the state has complete control and authority over the society. One way that the Republic of Gilead controls its citizens is through surveillance. However, the surveillance is not equal in who is monitored. In the critical essay “Sexual Surveillance And Medical Authority in Two Versions Of The Handmaid’s Tale”, Pamela Cooper states that “The Handmaid’s Tale thus brings together pre-Christian notions of absolute patriarchal authority—the omniscient, avenging God—with postmodernist theories of the objectifying and possessive male