The Handmaid 's Tale By Margaret Atwood

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood exaggerates the situations that people are facing in present time. In this novel, Margaret created a world named Gilead that seems to have rules and regulations for everybody; but in reality, they are not applied equally. Narrator of this story is a handmaid. Her name is Offred. She shares her experience, that she was brought into a house as a handmaid by the commander to give birth to his child. This novel explores many themes, and one of them is that the world is ruled by people with money and power.

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:

“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

Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, satirizes the movement of religious conservatives that was occurring during its time of publication in the 1980’s. The beliefs expressed by these conservatives are taken to the extreme in the book when a totalitarian government creates a new society that reverses all advancements of women. Through these reversals and formed hierarchies, Atwood creatively makes a statement about the unfair molds in real life that both genders try to break free from. In other words, the story inflates the roles of men and women through the creation of strict regulations in order to show the discriminatory stereotypes that are a reality today.

As a rare and coveted fertile woman, Offred is forced to become a Handmaid and be passed from Commander to Commander. Each handmaid is renamed “Of,” signifying ownership, followed by the name of her commander, rebranding her as property. Renaming handmaids takes away their individuality and erases their former life, reinventing them as new people with a refocused purpose. It likewise makes her dispensable because a new handmaid can easily replace her and adopt the name Offred. She is obligated to partake in the “Ceremony” each month during which the Commander reads a bible verse before having sex with her as his wife encircles them. Offred struggles to define the act. As she explains, “I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose” (94). She goes on to emphasize that no passion or love is involved for anyone, even the Commander: he is simply

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.

The significant elements that make a literature interesting and attractive are not only a plot, settings, and characters but also the style and tone of the story. They are the main keys that propel the purpose of the story and the attitude of the author by passing through the language methods, which include rhetorical devices and figurative language, that he or she is using. The Handmaid’s Tale, which is written by Margaret Atwood, is the novel that the author uses several different devices and techniques to convey her attitude and her points of view by running the story with a narrator Offred, whose social status in the Republic of Gilead is Handmaid and who is belongings of the Commander. Atwood creates her novel The Handmaid’s Tale to be more powerful tones by using imagery to make a visibleness, hyperbole to create more effective, simile for comparison, and allusion to make references.

Dystopian themes have been displayed throughout time dating back to ancient times, and literature has found its way to make its argument about dystopian society by sending a message to the near future as a warning to what may happen, through creative and exemplary writing the book 1984 gave a great example of what society might in the modern world. The book Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood displayed a dystopian society, focusing on women presenting problems of sexism towards women, fighting alongside feminism. turn into “language and power” occurs a lot in the book, and it is displayed through the government's control, Offred's thoughts. Three main examples are neologisms, biblical language, and language musings. Religious and biblical language

The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the most prestigious books of Margaret Atwood, and many readers believe that this is a feminist novel. Also, like the author, Margaret Atwood, indicated in the preamble of the book: “If you mean a novel in which women are human beings- with all the variety of character and behavior that implies- and are also interesting and important…then yes. In this case, many books are feminist.” Actually, her words were accepted by many people, the Handmaid tale is a feminist book because the book is described from the side of the women and shows the discrepancies of women, the book demonstrates how women suffer the cruel state actions of Gilead, and the book reveals a series of stereotypes on women as well.

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood is a story of fiction that takes place in a future where the ability to reproduce healthy babies is scarce. The novel focuses on a future where traditional values are strictly enforced by a totalitarian government leaving women powerless. This dystopia touches upon several aspects of life that shape society such as religion, government, gender roles, equality and more. Margaret elaborates on the outcome of a society that solely depends on traditional roles and its effect on women. The traditional values that govern this dystopia are similar to those seen in today’s society except they are taken to a further extent that prohibits any other way of living.

In the year 2008, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) conducted a survey on workplace sexual harassment. Out of 500 respondents from 92 companies, seventy-nine percent of sexual harassment victims were females. In the Republic of Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the protagonist and narrator, Offred is a handmaid with a ticking biological clock. A Handmaid’s purpose is to repopulate the world by having sex with their respective Commander’s but at the age of 33, Offred does not have that much time left. If she remains infertile then a cruel fate would be awaiting her, All the while during this crisis, Offred reminisces back to

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.

Margaret Atwood’s text, The Handmaid’s Tale, centers around the potential outcome of a world ruled under an austere theocratic government, whose power is sustained through harsh violence, incessant observation of the people, and the re-educating of the people being governed. With the creation of this fictional, dystopian society, Atwood addresses prospective issues that would be related to a society such as the Republic of Gilead. One of the more significant issues that arises early in the novel and continues for the duration is the concern of females and their roles in society, from a highly sexual standpoint. Atwood touches upon a plethora of issues throughout the novel, as told through the viewpoint of Offred. Using a feministic approach to analyze the text, combined with research in regards to the major feminist movements taking place between the 1960s and 1980s in America—the time at which this book was written and published—Atwood magnifies and popularizes feminist rights in politics.

“Women as a Metaphor in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” by Sonia Chadha compares the treatment of women in society to the treatment of women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Chadha’s essay leaves her readers in a state of bewilderment after only a few pages. Her disorganized structure and repetitive subjects are only a couple reasons of why this essay is an absolute mess. Chadha’s essay is all over the place and only shows one-side of the argument. Overall, this essay was poorly written and very repetitve.