A Critical Analysis Of The Handmaid's Tale

In today’s news we see many disruptions and inconsistencies in society, and, according to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, humankind might be headed in that direction. The deterioration of society is a concept often explored biologically in novels, but less common, is the effect on everyday social constructs such as the position of women as a item that can be distributed and traded-in for a ‘better’ product. The Handmaid’s Tale elaborates the concept that, as societal discrimination towards women intensifies, gender equality deteriorates and certain aspects of societal freedoms are lost. Offred’s experience with serving Gilead demonstrates a victim’s perspective and shows how the occurring changes develope the Republic.

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

In Gilead the social relationship that once existed between men and women is a thing of the past. In the former society women had value and felt good about themselves and how they looked. However, in the new society the men have stripped the women of their freedom and equality and lowered them to varying degrees of status. The young healthy women are labeled handmaids and are "issued" (24) by the government to various high-ranking officials in order to offer them the opportunity to create offspring. Getting pregnant is their only hope of survival. Females who are not of childbearing age are called Marthas because their purpose is to work and serve the men. A third category of women is labeled Unwomen because of their worthlessness in this male dominated society. All three categories are divided into colonies to prevent their rebelling against the system. Also, within each colony communication is limited and higher education is denied. In order to enforce this kind of oppressive social structure, the government uses various forms of intimidation.

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 her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has created the fictional Republic of Gilead, in which women are heavily oppressed by the newly installed regime. The new regime values women solely on their fertility, thus objectifying them to no more than a means of reproduction. By confiscating control over the process of and the rights to reproduction, the Gilead regime denies women ‘’any sense of control or independence’’ (Byrne). In this essay, I will argue that, although the female body is the main subject of oppression in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it is also the key to resistance for women in the so-called nation of Gilead, and that women hold the ultimate bargaining power, as they have the ‘’final say’’ on what happens to their bodies.

The Handmaid's Tale, a film based on Margaret Atwood’s book depicts a dystopia, where pollution and radiation have rendered innumerable women sterile, and the birthrates of North America have plummeted to dangerously low levels. To make matters worse, the nation’s plummeting birth rates are blamed on its women. The United States, now renamed the Republic of Gilead, retains power the use of piousness, purges, and violence. A Puritan theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, with its religious trappings and rigid class, gender, and racial castes is built around the singular desire to control reproduction. Despite this, the republic is inhabited by characters who would not seem out of place in today's society. They plant flowers in the yard, live in suburban houses, drink whiskey in the den and follow a far off a war on the television. The film leaves the conditions of the war and the society vague, but this is not a political tale, like Fahrenheit 451, but rather a feminist one. As such, the film, isolates, exaggerates and dramatizes the systems in which women are the 'handmaidens' of today's society in general and men in particular.

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.

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 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 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.

The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood illustrates is what she self professes as a piece of ‘speculative fiction’, a dystopian society set in the future, in which the government has been replaced by a totalitarian leadership, ruling America through a biblical patriarchy based on fundamentalism. This theocratic structure causes the women in society to face severe oppression, forced to conform to the rules and obligations appointed to the roles of Wives, Daughters, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts and Econowives. The role Atwood gives the reader a detailed insight into being the Handmaidens, whom are essentially concubines used for their fertility to carry the children of the commanders.

​Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the unspecified future in the Republic of Gilead, which is ruled by a totalitarian theocracy. In Gilead, individuals are segregated and separated into categories that can be identified from one another by something as simple as their dress uniform/code. The narrator of this story, Offred (or June), belongs to the category of a Handmaid, which exists under the umbrella category of “legitimate women” along with Wives, Daughters, Aunts, Marthas and Econowives. Despite the already subordinate ranking of women in this society—just before the Republic was established, all women’s rights were taken from them— there is further separation and, thus, tension within the different groups of women

One day, a carriage pulls up at the plantation, and a local sheriff calls out for Platt (Northup). The sheriff asks him multiple questions to confirm that Northup’s answers match up with the facts of his past life in New York. Northup recognizes the man with the sheriff as Mr. Parker, a shop owner he knew in Saratoga. Mr. Parker has come to free him, Epps is furious about this and he threatens them. The sheriff dismisses the threats and Northup gets into the carriage that will take him home safely.

Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ takes place in a fictional distopian society named ‘Gilead’ which was errected after the president of the United States of America was assassinated and the army therefore declared a state of emergency (Atwood 177). The society changed subtly but devastatingly. The Constitution was suspended and many rights, particularly women’s, were reduced or taken away. In the newly found patriarchal state Gilead the severely reorganized society was strictly partitioned into males and females. Focussing on the females, they were subdivided into Wives, Daughters, Econowives, Marthas, Handmaids, Aunts, Jezebels and the Unwomen. Persons who refused to accept these new circumstances were sent to the colonies, radioactive

The book begins with no explanation of what time period it is, who is narrating, and what has happened to alter “normal” society. Instead, it is up to the reader to figure out and interpret as much as possible. Offred, a handmaid and the narrator of the story, never shares her real name and very little is known about her. The reader must gain insight into her life through the memories she describes from the time before Gilead, the dystopian society she now lives in. She had a husband, a daughter, a job, and free will, however now, women are forbidden from reading, writing, using money, or working. They are limited to the duties of their specific roles and must behave in a particular manner. Although there is a very obvious hierarchy of women,