The Handmaid’s Tale was able to provide more clear, and specific description which help the reader visualize and allow the reader to show more interest. Camus was able to provide a description but not a description which went above and beyond what Atwood was able to provide. Camus had strong key points as
It’s all [she’s] left with” (Atwood 294). She is so desperate by this point because failing to stand up to her beliefs has left with no other option. She depended on her friend Moira to fix everything, but since Moira has stopped fighting, they are now both in less than ideal situations. By making her internal beliefs clear and then depicting her conforming to and participating in the society that she so strongly opposed, Atwood demonstrates Offred taking actions that contradict her beliefs because she is afraid to directly defy the society. Consequently, Atwood shows the negative impacts of not protesting when Offred is taken by the van.
Thus, there is no sisterhood and women will be forced to bond and accept their Commander. Therefore, they are not equal to the other groups such as the Commander’s Wives or the Marthas and the Econowives. Moreover, the protagonist of Atwood’s novel titled The Handmaid’s Tale is a member of the Handmaid group. The protagonist of Atwood’s novel is Offred. Her name means that she is under the property of a man named Fred.
cultural constructs of femininity, identity, and the extent of government control. The story explores the affects social and political trends have on society. The Handmaid’s Tale evaluates gender roles and the subjugation of women. Atwood’s use of aphorisms, symbolism, and allusions urges readers to examine the juxtaposition of cruelty and vulnerability in femininity. Throughout the novel, aphorisms play a large role in depicting the role of women as subservient to their male counterparts.
Foster suggests, “...sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works” (158). The Handmaids must submit to their Commanders as they hold the dominant role. The Handmaids are also sacrificing their bodies and fertility to their Commander and his wife in order to give them a child. They have all been renamed with names that signify the Commanders they serve: Offred, Ofglen, Ofcharles, Ofwarren, etc. These names show the Commanders’ possession of the Handmaids.
Imagine a nation, in which its government commands by a religion where women are separated into different titles and must conceive children for their commander. Their rights from before this regime, and anything deemed unholy by the government, are a thing of the past. This situation is the one depicted in the Republic of Gilead, where the rules of society and its traditions are not taken lightly if broken. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood shows that an oppressive government leads to the inevitable neglect and remiss of the law through Offred’s characterization, irony, and flashbacks. Offred's character development can show that her attitude towards the law changes over the course of her experience in the Republic of Gilead.
Just as the feminists played on the fear of not being able to control one’s own body, the fundamentalists play on the fear of an unknown religion, very much reflecting society today. The fact that Atwood described what was occurring at her time, before any of the major terrorist attacks of the 20th and 21st century occurred, supports the idea, not only that Atwood used The Handmaid’s Tale to discuss human cyclicality, but that this idea is a universal one not subject to specifically her writing. Continuing with the idea of cycling societies, the Republic of Gilead is no unique government, and Atwood knows this, and does this on purpose. She models the nation after the Puritanical societies that also dominated New England centuries earlier, using this as a comment on how everything eventually comes back around, and that humans hardly change as much as it seems. What’s more are the many parallels drawn between how women are treated in Gilead, and how slaves were treated.
The patriarchal society, most of the time, is one of the important reasons behind turning the women bodies into objects with having control over their bodies. However, the most arguable question is: is there a way out? Can women survive these oppressions that resulted from objectifying heir bodies? In The Handmaid’s Tale, Mayday came to Offred’s rescue, but as what she said it is an vague way out: “whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.”
The relationship between language and power within The Handmaids Tale will be used over the course of the novel to further convert and condition the society of Gilead to follow it’s theocratic ideologies through fear and intimidation. Furthermore, protagonist Offred will continue to reflect on and argue the beliefs of the new United States throughout the text in attempts to hold onto the world she knew before; not allowing the republic to take control of who she is now and erase who she was. This malicious regime, intimidates this former egalitarian society into following inhuman practices and regulations through the introduction of social institutions such as “The Eye” and “The Guardians” (Atwood, 17,20). The guardians, seen as the hands of God, are the
A major theme in The Handmaid 's Tale by Margaret Atwood is how restriction of women 's sexuality leads to loss of power and is inherently anti-feminist. This is shown primarily in two major topics- ban of abortion and censorship of pornography; both topics are depicted differently in the classic novel and modern televised adaptation. Atwood’s writing shows strong pro-choice themes by incorporation of historic events in the context of the novel. Her dystopian society, Gilead shows the life of June, a Handmaid surviving in an oppressive society where women have been stripped of all rights and are forced to continually try for conception. The treatment of women in Gilead reflects past and present views of women in reference to abortion and