The book The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood is a literary masterpiece containing many symbols hidden in everything from the flowers to the clothes worn by the characters. These symbols are used to represent the purpose of the characters in Gilead, the setting of the book. The flower is a symbol for the sole reproductive role of the handmaids and the colors are used to symbolize how the characters are meant to behave, red meaning fertile, white for purity, green for service, and blue for sadness. Everything about the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale from their names to their clothes is used to symbolize their roles in the book and the handmaids aperal is no exception. The handmaids all wear the same clothes, a red, ankle length skirt, red gloves and a white bonnet.
Furthermore, they also wear red for the blood of parturition, from Mary Magdalene. In example, blue if for the Commander’s Wife. According to the introductory section in the book, the wives wear blue of purity, from the Virgin Mary. They compare these two to show that the wives are not allowed to bare children. The flower symbolizes fertility, as an object that can grow along women.
More significantly, it symbolizes their inner pain, suffering and loss.The statue of the black Madonna symbolizes the mother figure for the women maternal need. At the Boatwright sister’s house, the white girl, Lily, encounters the statue of the Black Mary. She senses her closeness to it: “She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one” (Kidd 87). It mirrors their lost and fragmented identities in seeking completeness and wholeness. In her book, Unveiling the Secret Life of Bees, Amy Lingnitz suggests that “Feminist theologians have embraced Mary as a way for women to recognize a feminine expression of the Divine” (8).
Imagery of fire and of destruction follow Hedda’s actions throughout the novel. Similarly, images of flowers continue to arise in The Handmaid’s Tale. The narrator describes the abundance of floral imagery in the Commander’s house, there 's a "watercolor picture of blue irises" , the bathroom is "papered in small blue flowers, forget-me-nots" and the bedroom is embellished d with "a starry canopy of silver flowers". Furthermore, in the novel the Wives compensate for their lack of fertility by decorating themselves with flowers and tending gardens: "Many of the Wives have such gardens, it 's something for them to order and maintain and care
Conflict can be described as the struggle between two opposing forces, whether the forces being person vs person, person vs self or person vs society. Good examples of conflict can be found in almost any book. Margaret Atwood’s novel, the Handmaid’s Tale is a source of all three types of conflicts. The Handmaid’s Tale is about a society where females are given specific duties and are restricted from reading, writing, talking to others and looking at themselves in mirrors. The protagonist, Offred whom is also the narrator in the novel faces conflicts with herself, with other people, and the society that she lives in.
How come it 's always the women who are fighting for a stable and painless life? Why is it always the women who have the choice to live by suppressed under the society’s expectations or face the consequences of going against it and gaining nothing? Women equality has been an issue for a long time and it is dragged even to the present time. Fitzgerald, in his novel “The Great Gatsby” portrays women in two manners which are submissive and assertive but also showing how they both have desires for a comfort and stable life. Gender roles in society mean how certain genders are expected to act, speak, dress, groom, and conduct themselves.
Childless and merciless, Madame Defarge is the antithesis of Lucie Manette. Both women possess the ability to inspire others, but while Lucie creates and nurtures life, Madame Defarge destroys it. Because her entire family perished when she was a young girl, Madame Defarge wants revenge, not merely on the family that caused the evil but on the entire class from which it came. Her knitting represents both her patience and her urge to retaliate, because she knits the names of her intended victims. She knits a register of all the oppressors belonging to the ancien régime, dooming them to destruction.
Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, argues that women are instruments of the patriarchy, that women know this, and that women allow the system of oppression to live on. Her fictions ask, “What stories do women tell about themselves? What happens when their stories run counter to literary conventions or society’s expectations?” (Lecker 1). The Handmaid’s Tale is told through the protagonist, Offred, and allows readers to follow through her life as a handmaid while looking back on how life used to be prior to the societal changes. The novel is set in a dystopian future that illustrates the collapse of the US government, a new theocracy taking over, and how the theocracy has supposedly solved the problem of fertility with the creation
Furthermore, the peony symbolizes female beauty and love, and the speaker personifies the peonies in such a way that the poem also shows the role of women in courtly society. When the peony dies, a woman’s beauty that once was compared to the Palace of Brilliant Light will die and fade only into a captured memory of what used to be a picture of elegance. It is inevitable that both peonies and women will bow down and conform to the laws of time, even if it means that they will have to relinquish what matters to them the most--their
Beauty is illustrated through the characters in both stories. In Rappaccini’s Daughter, Beatrice is “with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone” (Rappaccini’s Daughter). The garden’s beauty symbolizes the same of Beatrice’s. Beatrice has a connection to the flowers in garden; she is beautiful, transmits a lovely scent, and even dresses to be similar to one.