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Outward Conformity In The Handmaid's Tale

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Outward conformity along with inward questioning, that is what the main character, presented in Margaret Artwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, has to undertake in order to survive in a theocratic society. Stepping out of line in any way risks your life, so in a place where freedom of speech and basic human right’s no longer apply, Offered must comply with whatever rules they have in place and pretend to agree with the system, but in the inside, she cannot help but think about her past life, her husband, her daughter, before everything began. Flashbacks are integrated in the novel to not only compare the old society with the new one, but to also demonstrate this fake conformity Offred has to display to others and her internal struggle with giving up on escaping the Republic or just accepting her fate and playing by …show more content…

Above, on the ceiling, a relief ornament shaped of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out.” gives the reader a first impression of dull, boring, broken spirited. The short sentences and the commas in them force the reader to pause or break in the flow of reading, so any chance of the moment intensifying never happens. The author does this on purpose to create that more dull, boring tone in the form of simple sentences. She does this because that is just what that moment is, boring, nothing interesting is happening and that is exactly what the character is experiencing at the moment. The structure also implies a robotic speaking tone, meaning the character has been forced to abandon some sense of emotion, and that is demonstrated in the way she is describing her surroundings. It supports the idea of how the new society is forcing human nature to change. “Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia.” because that is what is has become, a battle of the fittest, of who is fertile and who is

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