Fear as a Powerful Motivator in The Handmaid's Tale
Fear is a powerful emotion that everyone experiences in life and can be used in ways that can help your situation but can also be abused. In The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, fear is shown as a powerful motivator for the handmaids. Fear is used as a means of control, as a incentive for conformity, and an motive for resistance.
Firstly, The Republic of Gilead uses fear as a means of controlling the handmaids and keeping order in society. “The three bodies hang there, even with the white sacks over their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the necks in a meatshop window; like birds with their wings clipped, like flightless birds, wrecked angels. It’s hard
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The fear of losing their freedom and individuality causes them to resist and hope for escape from Gilead. While Offerd is with the commander she asks what the writing from the previous handmaid says. The commander says, "Don't let the bastards grind you down." (Atwood 171). This shows that the handmaids are trying to resist from letting Gilead wear them down enough to give in. Offred says to herself, “My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day.” (Atwood 80) She talks about how her real name is something she should remember and keep until it can be used again. While Gilead is trying to dehumanize the handmaids they are trying to hold on to their individuality and freedom. The fear of losing what they have from a time when they were free causes them to hold onto them instead of conforming to the new society of
In the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, there is a wall that’s main purpose is to put fear in the people of Gilead. To illustrate, the gate has “sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top”(Atwood 31). As a result, the barbed wire fence is a way to show fear towards the people of Gilead and to express that they are not the ones in charge. Moreover, it states, “Beside the main gateway there are six bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders”(Atwood 32). The purpose of the people hanging is to show that it is impossible for anyone to escape and
Also the fact that the laborers had to work 12-14 hours non-stop know that they are not properly fed had a very negative impact on them because it led to a shorter life span and an unhealthy lifestyle. It goes on to describe the workers physical appearance, “...they are all wizened, sickly and emancipated, their bodies thin and frail, their limbs feeble, their complexions pale, their eyes dead.” This description of the workers can connect to slavery as they are basically tortured and unfed which made them physically incapable of laboring and gave them a low moral, yet were still forced to man the hard, tiring tasks in the factories. And in the last sentence she says, “O God! Can progress be bought only at the cost of men’s lives?”
This contemporary physical imprisonment of women represents the bondage that extends from the fresh and physical being to the spiritual aspect of the individual as well as the attempt to arise from the original sin. For example, in the captivity narrative of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, at some point she was given a Bible by the Indians and which she used in "finding great deal of hope". She proceeds to look at a portion of the different verses of the Bible to a few circumstances in her own particular life circumstances. At this point it becomes very clear the uniqueness of the entire perspective of the events as she emphatically feels that the virtue of being human, one stays with no decision but to take up and acknowledge the will of God upon their life and even attempt to understand it, even in troublesome
Comfort uses these examples as a way to explain that once these women enter the prison, they are under the control and order of the prison
Balram recalls, “They [the women] hid behind the door, and as soon as the men walked in, they pounced, like wildcats on a slab of flesh. There was fighting and wailing and shrieking … "I survived the city, but I couldn't survive the women in my home," he would say, sunk into a corner of the room. The women would feed him after they fed the buffalo.” (22) Here, Balram is recalling how the women in his family have so much power, and are therefore able to force the men to give up all of their wages to them. Even though it was the men who earned this money in the light, almost all of it was lost to their families in the darkness.
They force Handmaids to forget and to give up their names. The process consists of the preposition (of) and the first commander’s name that handmaids will move to
Gilead’s ruling class does this because even though the handmaids do not know exactly what the prisoners did, they know that they do not want to be the ones next in line for the gallows. This Scroggs 2 could keep the handmaid 's from acting out,
In both societies, the districts and categories have specific jobs and are identified by a color or style of clothing. There is a sense of being watched in both Panem and Gilead. In “The Handmaid’s Tale” this surveillance is called ‘The Eye’ but in “The
The Fear Itself "Fear is a powerful stimulant" (Atwood 268). The novel Handmaid 's Tale is a story that takes place in a dystopian society where in order to increase the fertility rate women who are able to have children are distributed across the country and are encouraged to have babies from the Commanders. Like most of the dystopian novels, the focus of the story is how people are oppressed in the name of fear. Fear is used as a controlling mechanism to keep people in check and stop them from rising up. In the book, fear is too strong of a feeling that it creates the base of most of the emotions and actions.
In the book A Handmaid’s Tale passivity is a common theme throughout Offred’s journey as a handmaid. In this context, passivity is allowing others to do things to you without complaining or pushing back to protect oneself and to keep oneself safe from harm or cruel treatment. There are several instances in which Offred is forced to be passive in order to please the people who have Offreds life in their hands. In the position that Offred is in as a handmaid, she is expected to do as her commander and the wife of her commander instructs her to do, and if she does not comply to these orders, no matter how unusual or unfair, she faces severe punishment or even death in the worst of cases. Just like Offred there are several other women who are forced to call Gilead home that must be passive in order to stay alive.
Handmaid’s whom are the fertile women in the Gilead society, are stripped from all freedom and rights, banned from knowing any form of literature and have to be submissive to men, allowing their bodies to be sexually used to produce children. In contrast, women who are not fertile such as Wives have their freedom taken away too as they are confined to doing assigned jobs around the house. In contrast, the Aunts and the Commanders are shown to have the highest rankings in the Gileadean society. They are powerful figures, with privileges such as the Aunts being allowed to read and write and the Commanders being permitted to get married and have a handmaid's assigned to
(Atwood 88) This verse was read to the Handmaid 's everyday at breakfast and before the ceremony just to drill it in their minds, even though most of them know those were not the right textual evidence from the Bible. The police are called “Guardians of the Faith” which suggest that they are guarding the beliefs of Gilead. Another biblical allusion depicted would be the Angels, so they are called. But they were simply Guards.
Atwood’s dystopian novel is a warning about the consequences of misogynistic, authoritarian governments. Her message seems to be universal since the subjugation of women by religious extremists, remains a concern in the present
In this frightening society, women are not allowed to speak freely, therefore, the handmaids learn how to lip-read, and to whisper at one another while they are at the Red Center (where handmaids are trained for their mission), as their only way to communicate with another person, and to maintain even a minimum of human contact in a society that has amputated their ability to feel as a normal human being. Even though this is pure fiction, sadly some common threads between Gilead and our society can be found. For instance, in some South Asian countries, women’s rights are non-existent, they are treated
Despite their endeavors to escape their bondage, the women behind the bars could not escape because the men found alternative tactics to keep them in confinement. The bars strangle and cut off the heads of the women that climb out of the pattern, “it turns them upside down and makes their eyes white!” resonating to an envision of a crazy woman. The narrator herself is a great example of how effective men were at establishing alternative tactics like this. The narrator was classified as having hysterical tendencies, like most women of the nineteenth century, were when they complained of pain, anxiety, fatigue, or depression, as a source of suppressing their agency through prescribed isolation and prohibited writing.