The Handmaid's Tale Analysis Essay

Margaret Atwood takes readers through a dark, dystopian experience in her work “The Handmaid’s Tale”, where woman no longer have any use beyond childbearing. This work was completely based on a dystopian society, under complete government control. In order for Atwood to take her readers on this journey she incorporated key literary devices.
When it comes to characterization Atwood main tactic is to separate woman in seven different categories; Handmaids, Wives, Daughters, Martha’s, Aunts, and Econowives or Unwoman. This separation shows how woman are forced to live base on their ability to have children. Handmaids are the child bearers, wives are the woman who stay married to the elite but aren’t able to have children, Daughters are woman who

The first major theme becomes apparent as soon as the first chapter. As the first characters make their appearances, it becomes highlighted that the only forms of communication they are able to have is through their ability to “lip-read, our [their] heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, and watching each other’s mouths” (Atwood, 4); meaning they are stripped from something as basic as communicating with each other. We later find out that one of the woman from the first chapter is forced to go by the name Offred. She had another name at one point, but nobody was permitted to use it because all real names become forbidden, you were ‘of’ someone; meaning they held an ownership over you. No handmaid is even able to read basic signs, they get to read one word and that is faith. They [the government] had decided that even “the names of shops were too much temptation” (Atwood, 27) for handmaids. To be a handmaid, means to become nothing more than a child bearer. They had even broken down Offred to the point of being completely devastated when her time of month came because with each period meant another month she had failed, failed “once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my [her] own” (Atwood