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In Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, the human spirit has evolved to such a point that it cannot be subdued by complacency. Atwood shows Gilead as an extremist state with strong religious connotations. We see the outcome of the reversal of women’s rights and a totalitarian government which is based on reproduction. Not only is the government oppressive, but we see the female roles support and enable the oppression of other female characters. “This is an open ended text,…conscious of the possibilities of deconstruction, reconstruction, and reinterpretation … Atwood engages in metafictional commentary …in her storytelling and by the time the reader arrives at the text, Atwood has already told and retold the story, questioned and hedged, changed the context, deconstructed and reconstructed the narrative.” (Univ of Toronto) “The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.” - Oscar Wilde The climate during the 1980’s was the suppression of women, The Handmaid’s Tale illustrated the political climate of the times. The book is based in part on the authors’ travels to socialist Soviet countries where people did not talk to anyone out of fear of retribution from the Soviet government. In 1980, the women’s movement was in its infancy and the Soviet Union was still deeply entrenched in the patriarchal tradition. Feminist Tatyana Mamonova, forced into exile by the Soviet government for her feminist activities, stated “communication among women is still very hard, very conspiratorial. We are taught in school that we are already emancipated, and so there isn’t really any sense of feminist consciousness…this ... ... middle of paper ... ...uarterly. Summer 2006. Vol. 75 Issue 3. p 857. Paul, Sarah. “Soviet Feminist Speaks on Rights Of Russian Women.” Cambridge: 1980. The Harvard Crimson. Web. www.thecrimson.com “Golden Glow of Reagan Legacy Lacks Luster for Feminists.” National Organization for Women. National NOW Times. Fall 2004. Web. www.now.org Pollock, Thomas. “The Feminist totalitarian State.” The Men’s Tribune. 1999. Web. www.menstribune.com Staels, Hilde. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating”. English Studies 76.5 (1995): 455. Academic Search Complete. Stein, Karen. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Scheherazade in Dystopia”. University of Toronto Quarterly 61.2 (1991): 269. Academic Search Complete Zuhlsdorf, Fr. John. “University of St. Thomas requires freshmen to read Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Minneapolis: 2007. Web. www.wdtprs.com
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a story heavily influenced by the Bible and has many biblical themes that are used to prove Atwood’s belief in balance. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead which was formerly the United States. The story is told through the perspective of a handmaid named Offred and begins when she is placed at her third assignment as a housemaid. Offred describes her society as a fundamentalist theocracy where the Christian God is seen as the divine Ruler over the Republic of Gilead. Atwood is often thought of as a feminist writer but through this novel her writing is not completely feminist nor patriarchal but something in the middle. Atwood is also someone who described herself as a “strict agnostic”
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.
...s still evidence of two social classes in today's society. While not as distinct as those described by Margaret Atwood, men are more often in positions of power, they are often paid more, and there is less pressure on males to have a specific body type. Women are still viewed as conquest and recent events such as the video and shootings by Elliot Rodger is enough proof that a large group of people still believe that women owe them sex. However, media coverage has not focused on the well documented misogynist opinions of the shooter, instead focusing on his suspected mental illness. The warnings from a book written 30 years ago still ring true in today's society. In The Handmaids Tale, Atwood portrays two distinct social classes through her choice of words and uses her novel as an warning against the treatment and perception of modern day women by conservative men.
As Margaret Atwood once said, "You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' is from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid..." Today I will explore the significance of the three epigraphs within the "Handmaid's Tale" prior to chapter 1. I will firstly describe the background of the epigraphs and their relationships to the themes of the story. Then I will discuss the implications of each epigraph on the reader and finally I will suggest that through the epigraphs and other techniques including foreshadowing and biblical allusions, Atwood aims to introduce the reader to the themes of the text that they are about to read.
Wisker, Gina. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Reader's Guide. London; New York : Continuum, c2010. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
.... Since Wives do not have the ability to have a baby, they ask Handmaids to sleep with their husbands once a month to bear a baby. Their husbands cannot see Handmaids except for every month’s Ceremony. Because the husband cannot kiss and touch Handmaids when they have sex, the husbands go to night clubs to dally with Jezebels. In this society, women each have a function and become the victims of patriarchal ruling. Once we lapse in dealing with the gender relationship, what will the situation be for the entire human society? In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood puts this worry into her feminist dystopia, a real nightmare. Although the sufferings everyone undertakes in the novel will not occur in the real world, the novel conceives a unique, horrible social panorama, exaggerating and magnifying the gender tension in the real world, containing the criticism of reality.
Margaret Atwood's renowned science fiction novel, The Handmaid's Tale, was written in 1986 during the rise of the opposition to the feminist movement. Atwood, a Native American, was a vigorous supporter of this movement. The battle that existed between both sides of the women's rights issue inspired her to write this work. Because it was not clear just what the end result of the feminist movement would be, the author begins at the outset to prod her reader to consider where the story will end. Her purpose in writing this serious satire is to warn women of what the female gender stands to lose if the feminist movement were to fail. Atwood envisions a society of extreme changes in governmental, social, and mental oppression to make her point.
In the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood describes a totalitarian and oppressive society that seeks to place every person into an orderly box. But, people being individuals, conflict arises. Atwood uses this heightened setting in order to explore the larger role of individuals. The Handmaid’s Tale poses the dilemma of being uncertain of one’s place in society and of how power affects one’s place in society.
In Margaret Atwood's novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Atwood deploys a multitude of motifs and other literary devices in order to substantiate the realism of a dystopian society based on the downward course of our own. Author Margaret Atwood directs the reader toward a dark and foreboding situation that foreshadows themes such as, quelled masculine authority; by showing male doctors a previously hierarchal career being undermined by the portrayal of them as lifeless dolls with blank faces, Atwood also develops historical context for the semi-futuristic setting of Gilead and it’s quick descent into dystopia from a modern society. In this one passage several notable themes are present, those of flowers, red, and emptiness.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Cliff Notes on Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Lincoln: Cliff Notes, Inc., 1994.
The Handmaid's Tale has been described as a scathing satire and a dire warning! Which elements of our own society is Margaret atwood satirising and how does her satire work ?
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.
Wilson, Sharon R., Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen, ed. Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1996
There are two kinds of freedom, “freedom from and freedom to” (31) throughout Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Freedom from is a negative liberty that involves external restriction to a person’s actions. On the other hand there is freedom to, a positive liberty the one can act upon their own free will. The two different categories of freedom are discussed and debated through a feminist view point. We explore and try to understand the way in which the difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to” is applied to females in society. This novel gives us two contrasting ways of liberal thinking. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to. The story appears, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel written by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. In this book, Atwood shows that no one is a beneficiary in a totalitarian, patriarchal society like Gilead Republic by revealing the oppression facing by different characters in the story. Even though this book does not have a sophisticated setup for background, Atwood still successfully ties the story to the real world that we live in and leads us to think about the question she asks in the book. Since this book causes people’s profound rethinking of the problems that we are facing now (e.g., infertility, low birth rate, public good vs. personal rights) and the writing is fantastic, it is definitely a worth reading book.