No totalitarian regime can be successful without the help of the submissive part. According to “The Feminist History Reader”, one of the way that patriarchy is reinforced is by women’s colluding in the system “The oppression of women could not have endured so long and in so many places without their cooperation” (Morgan 67). Women’s complicity can be seen in Gilead as act of spying and supporting the system. For example, women spy on each other. Janine accept to spy on other handmaids to help Aunt Lydia to find Moira.
A Definition of Justice Equality is the well-known problem faced by women. It is the issue of how women have been treated differently from men who act as if they have a higher social position. Besides the equality issue, there is another problem faced by many women: mental abuse at home. The husbands are not literally abuse their wife, but how they act have made their wives live in agony. Subsequently, when the women as the oppressed party who have been treated unequally cannot demand such abuse to be punished since it is not written in man’s law, they will seek their own justice.
In this written text, the emphasis will be on Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale and as well as the way Atwood portrays women and how it can be argued to show the oppression of women. The main purpose is to analyze the way women are treated throughout this book and depict why they are represented this way in the society in Gilead. Then, comparatively, observe the men’s domination over women and how they govern this society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are stripped of their rights, suffer many inequalities and are objectified, controlled by men and only valued for their reproductive qualities. The Gilead society is divided in multiple social group.
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” a phrase in the novel meaning, “don’t let the bastards grind you down”. This phrase found in the closet pushes Offred to fight against the oppression within the society of Gilead. Margaret Atwood's, The Handmaid's Tale, narrated through the protagonist, Offred, a Handmaid who serves the purpose of reproducing, lets the reader know that handmaids are not allowed to have any verbal interaction with men or have the ability to read. The novel reveals how a patriarchal society leads to the oppression of women throughout the character of Offred, hierarchy, and symbolism. Atwood reveals oppression through the role that Offred portrays in the novel, which shows how a patriarchal society leads to oppression
Hedda is a victim of all the negative qualities that can be imagined. Ibsen has tried to move away from the stereotypical women by sketching feminist dramas but yet when he deprives the woman of her doll-like exquisiteness and angelic beauty, he still remains confined to the stereotypical women rather he makes them monstrous and treacherous. In my research, I will look out to these questions that How can a loving wife neglect and torture her husband? How can she insult her husband and his relatives? How a female can negate her child?
What would become of the world, if our current societal flaws, such as sexism, racism, and classism were ingrained and executed at a systematic level? This is exactly what The Handmaid’s Tale set out to explore. The novel, which claims to be speculative fiction, is set in the theocratic Republic of Gilead (formerly the USA), where birth rates are rapidly declining and women have been marginalized by the patriarchal regime, forbidden to read, write or love and valued only if they are able to procreate. They are separated into classes, including Wives, Marthas, Aunts, Unwomen, and Handmaids, distinguishable only by the color of their clothing. The Handmaids are renamed by combining ‘of’ and the name of the Commander that they have been assigned to, stripping them of any individuality.
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.
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 represent 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 rules through Offred’s characterization, irony, and flashbacks. Offred 's character development can show that her actions change .
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the effects of suspicion on a society, on handmaid’s, are clearly visible; it can also be seen that the government’s method of control leads to the creation of a dystopia. The Handmaid’s Tale proves that a society built on fear and shaped by suspicion achieves near total control of the population by the ruling class, the government of Gilead in this case. In chapter 42, Aunt Lydia describes how they will no longer announce the crimes that the prisoners have committed at the Salvagings. Once Offred learns this she states, “Now we are left to our own devices, speculation” (Atwood 275). Therefore, through Offered, the reader is able to see how the handmaid 's will now have suspicions of what the prisoners did to get hanged, since they are no longer being told.
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