How Does Margaret Atwood Use Power In The Handmaids Tale

You’re granted power and want to change a situation in order to benefit yourself. How do you do it? In the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, people with power are found in situations which they feel a need to change. They seek this change by twisting moral views. Power leads to the corruption of values, as shown by the Gilead setting, the Aunts’ character, and the use of Offred’s first person narrative. In the Gilead setting, the powerful leaders of the society twist both Biblical and secular values to justify their rules and actions. The Handmaids often use the phrase which says “Give me children, or else I die” (Atwood 61). This is a phrase the Handmaids have learned from the Gilead society leaders. It has been cherry-picked from a Bible story in which a sterile woman named Rachel begs her husband for children, using that phrase to express her sorrow. The Gilead society has used its power and corrupted the original story by taking the phrase literally, sending the Handmaids to a certain death in the colonies if they cannot bear children after a specified time. During the Prayvaganza, the Commander in charge of the service claims that the young girls’ arranged marriages benefit women by saying, “We’ve given them more than we’ve taken away...think of the trouble they had before..some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery”(Atwood 219). By saying