If one were to scale in human nature, that determines the desired state of man and the role in which they play in society they could apply it to the lense of gender criticism. The left having the undesired state of man; a life full of sickness, poverty, dissatisfaction, disrespectfulness, and unhappiness. As for the right; a life containing health, wealth, satisfaction, respect, and happiness. Many different aspects go into such a scale like education, gender, and class. An author could use this scale in order to classify the roles of their characters in their novel. Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale through her use of characterization demonstrates the role of women is determined, but not subject to improvement, by expectation of society, class and education.
In the mid-1980s, in the town of Boston, Massachusetts, a group of fundamentalists decided that they were going to take over the nation. After killing the president of the United States and the members of Congress, they implemented a new form of government in which it stunted women’s growth in society by taking away their credit cards and denying them jobs and education. This new society was called Gilead, “...a repressively conservative state bent on annihilating homeosexuals, abortionists, and religious sects other thatn their own, and resetting Jews, old women, and nonwhite people in radioactive territory, known as the Colonies” (Snodgrass). In their utopian society, the government has the power to require any fertile female to submit their body into a government-supervised child producing program. The others were sent to the Colonies in order to become part of the clean-up crew (Novels for Students). Those who were fertile were taken away from their normal life and...
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Millman, China. Berkow, Jordan ed. "The Handmaid's Tale Glossary". GradeSaver, 22 August 2006 Web. 15 May 2014. http://www.gradesaver.com/the-handmaids-tale/study-guide/glossary-of-terms/ "The Handmaid's Tale." Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 114-136. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX2591700018&v=2.1&u=pl2901&it=r&p=GLS&sw=w&asid=3f5f7234f1a393c70955c579f202013a Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. CliffsNotes on The Handmaid's Tale. 15 May 2014
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SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Handmaid’s Tale.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2003. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/
The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood shows the way of life for women in the
The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood is a novel about a totalitarian state called Republic of Gilead that has replaced the United States in which the women of society have been taken away from their families and forced to be
Thesis: In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood characterizes Handmaids, as women with expectations to obey the society’s hierarchy, as reproducers, symbolizing how inferior the Handmaid class is to others within Gilead; the class marginalization of Handmaids reveals the use of hierarchical control exerted to eliminate societal flaws among citizens.
Wisker, Gina. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Reader's Guide. London; New York : Continuum, c2010. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
The setting of The Handmaid’s Tale – known as Gilead – is a totalitarian government, originally based on Old Testament patriarchy. This structure forbids rival loyalties or parties, so all loyalty must be for the group of men that govern the State. Such a structure means that women are assigned ‘roles’ according to their biological ‘usefulness’.
‘The Handmaids Tale’ is a blunt warning to modern society, Atwood underlines that all the points in her novel have occurred in the world previously, and if propaganda establishes itself it could take place again.
The Handmaid’s Tale (Contemporary Classics). Journals Bertens, H. (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics, The Politics of Class: Marxism. Abingdon, Routledge. Sourced in AQA Critical Anthology LITB4/PM Issued September 2008.
In Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates a society of oppression in which she redefines oppression in common culture. Gilead is a society characterized by highly regulated systems of social control and extreme regulation of the female body. The instinctive need to “protect and preserve” the female body is driven by the innate biological desires of the men. The manipulation of language, commodification, and attire, enhances the theme of oppression and highlights the imbalance of power in the Gilead society.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Cliff Notes on Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Lincoln: Cliff Notes, Inc., 1994.
In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaids Tale’, we hear a transcribed account of one womans posting ‘Offred’ in the Republic of Gilead. A society based around Biblical philosophies as a way to validate inhumane state practises. In a society of declining birth rates, fertile women are chosen to become Handmaids, walking incubators, whose role in life is to reproduce for barren wives of commanders. Older women, gay men, and barren Handmaids are sent to the colonies to clean toxic waste.
Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid's Tale, PETER G. STILLMAN and S. ANNE JOHNSON, Utopian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1994), pp. 70-86
The Handmaid's Tale presents an extreme example of sexism and misogyny by featuring the complete objectification of women in the society of Gilead. Yet by also highlighting the mistreatment of women in the cultures that precede and follow the Gileadean era, Margaret Atwood is suggesting that sexism and misogyny are deeply embedded in any society and that serious and deliberate attention must be given to these forms of discrimination in order to eliminate them.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood explores the role that women play in society and the consequences of a countryís value system. She reveals that values held in the United States are a threat to the livelihood and status of women. As one critic writes, “the author has concluded that present social trends are dangerous to individual welfare” (Prescott 151).
The Handmaid's Dystopia The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a dystopian tale about a world where unrealistic things take place. The events in the novel could never actually take place in our reality." This is what most people think and assume, but they"re wrong. Look at the world today and in the recent past, and there are not only many situations that have ALMOST become a Gilead, but places that have been and ARE Gileadean societies. We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy! Even today, there are places in the world where there is a startling similarity to this fictitious dystopia.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a compelling tale of a dystopian world where men are the superior sex and women are reduced to their ability to bear children, and when that is gone, they are useless. The story is a very critical analysis of patriarchy and how patriarchal values, when taken to the extreme, affect society as a whole. The result is a very detrimental world, where the expectation is that everyone will be happy and content but the reality is anything but. The world described in The Handmaid’s tale is one that is completely ruled by patriarchal values, which is not unlike our society today.