The Handmaid 's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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.

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.

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 the book The Handmaid 's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the foremost theme is identity, due to the fact that the city where the entire novel takes place in, the city known as the Republic of Gilead, often shortened to Gilead, strips fertile women of their identities. Gilead is a society that demands the women who are able to have offspring be stripped of all the identity and rights. By demeaning these women, they no longer view themselves as an individual, but rather as a group- the group of Handmaids. It is because of the laws that have been established that individuality has been demolished. From these points that will be raised, it can be concluded that a handmaid’s role in Gilead is more important than their happiness, and mental wellbeing.

In her book, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood describes a dystopian society in which all of the progress in the feminist movement that was made during the twentieth century is reversed and the nation is reverted back to its traditional patriarchal ways. The story is told from the point of view of Offred, a woman who was separated from her husband and child and forced into the life of a handmaid. In this book, Atwood explores the oppression of women through her use of literary tools such as figurative language, symbols, and literary allusions.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation” by Eudora Welty. In the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, the series of past and present events are not in chronological order like most books. The book is constructed like the mind, it is in no particular order. However, the passage at chapter 41, page 307-308 if read thoroughly with the use of texture can bring out new interesting findings. When studied with the use of literal content, plots and characters connect the passage. Analysing this passage critically, gives out insights into characters and the narrator’s life. Through an exhaustive deconstruction of textures, literal

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, power is emphasized multiple times throughout the text. The plot of the story consists of wealthy men being the overseers of the economy. Since the birth rate of healthy children has drastically decreased due to environmental problems, women are only wanted for their ability to reproduce offspring and replenish the world. Therefore, the poorer women are taken away from their homes and placed with wealthy couples to bear offspring for them. The main character, Offred, is one of the many women who was taken from her family and placed in the home of a Commander and his wife. Since the role of each societal class’ power has changed, different characters in the text have subtle ways of displaying power.

Atwood takes doesn’t take the feminist side in “The Handmaid’s Tale”, but does examine the possibilities of what could happen if the feminine was removed from the norms and reverted back to pre-1970s gender roles as being a ‘slave’ (Irigary 795). The dystopian government or the Republic of Gilead is the epitome of false Christian values that have been altered to achieve a person goal of obtaining knowledge at the risk of destroying something that already existed. The goal to achieve such knowledge ends up being flaw by the creators, The Commanders of the Faith, Offred’s commander actually breaking the rules for caring and allowing knowledge that she already had being given. She is allowed other freedom that were supposed to be forbidden and even begins breaking into her sexuality to be with Nick. In a way, Offred captures the ideals of Nietzsche to have the will to keep going and find the flaws in the Republic of Gilead.

This dystopian novel is written by Margaret Atwood. The title is The Handmaid’s Tale. What was once known as the United States to most people is now known as Gilead. Gilead came about by people who were trying to fix the world so they took power into their own hands to try and stop a declining birthrate and fertility. Handmaids are given to people of high status whose wives can’t have children, so their job is to give the family a child. The government thinks that these handmaids are the perfect people for this because they have viable eggs. Even though they live in such a place where you have no power over yourself any more, and are being watched where you go, Offred, main character survives day to day in the hopes that she will one day see

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.

I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here’s what happened. – p. 301

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 under discussion here is “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. It is a fictional story about a state of Gilead which formulated after the crises of birthrates decreasing dramatically. The United States of America has been replaced by Gilead. The state is governed by theocratic and totalitarian groups, which claim to take things under control. They use religion as a tool to imply what they wish.

Lisbet Ward wakes up with no recollection of her past identity;what she does know is that she is now the cyborg clone of the most cunning gladiator inside the walls of Artemisia. Lisbet's mission is simple. One, take the gladiator's place once she wins the Trial held annually for the ones seeking a chance at royalty or freedom. Two, only instead of choosing the obvious option of freedom like any level-headed gladiator would, she chooses royalty. Three, she is wedded to the bastard king and kills him in his sleep. Four, start a

Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood is a well-known poet and novelist, but also renowned for other positions such as literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher and environmental activist. She was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, Toronto, Canada. Until now, she published more than 40 literary works, which of those are 16 novels, 8 short fictions, 17 poems among many more. Atwood graduated in English with minors in Philosophy and French at the University of Toronto and soon established a reputation with powerful novels and poems. During a period, she also lectured at the University of Alabama, at New York University, at Macquarie University and at Trinity University.