The discussions of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in 'The Second Sex' (1949) laid the foundations that precipitated the Second-wave feminism movement, defining late-twentieth-century feminist thinking. 'The Second Sex' chronicles the patriarchal system as a social construct that subordinates women based on their biological differences from men. Though Beauvoir acknowledges the true biological differences separating the sexes, she argues that utilizing it as a means to determine the cultural, political, social and ideological aspects of society gave men the authority to assume control over women for past generations. Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' suggests that different, and often contradictory, conceptions on the role of …show more content…
Concerning the above ‘Table 1: The Hierarchy of Women in Gilead’, each role sanctioned by the Republic (1 through 5) in 'The Handmaid's Tale' correlates with Beauvoir’s stance on the patriarchal agenda to dominate through social constructs that impose stereotypes on women. The Econowives and the Wives of the Commanders are relative to the dominant male. Marthas and Handmaids exist to fulfill the Republic of Gilead’s need for the ‘natural’ role of women, while the Aunts serve to educate the Handmaids and to naturalize their servile purpose in society as ‘two-legged wombs’ (Atwood, 2010, p.146). All the women abide by a strict dress code, wearing color-coded uniforms that correspond to their roles, aggregated into groups defined by their social and reproductive functions, and stripped of their …show more content…
In this case, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ illustrates men’s dissatisfaction with the legal roles of women, and how men abuse their status to create and modify more roles of women. For example, the protagonist Offred, a Handmaid, engages in sexual intercourse with the Commander of her current household in hopes of becoming pregnant (Atwood, p.104). Society permits the Commander the power to dehumanize Offred into a vessel to breed his offspring. He continues to abuse this power by imposing an arrangement on Offred to meet with him privately in his study to play Scrabble. Torn between her role as a Handmaid and heeding the direct request of the Commander, she ultimately decides to follow through with the latter (Atwood, ch. 23). While she assumes the role of a Handmaid in public, she takes on the role as the Commander’s ‘mistress’ in the privacy of his study and later at Jezebel’s (Atwood, ch.37). The text claims that: “It means you can’t cheat Nature,” he says. “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan.” (249) This encapsulates the existence of different, at times conflicting, conceptions men have on the role of women (Cain & et al., 2001, p.1408). And while the hierarchal system of the Gilead Republic’s
The women are divided into functions and are identified by the colour of their dress. In chapter 5, Offred is walking down the streets of Gilead, reminiscing about the days she used to walk down the street wearing what she wanted to wear before she got taken away, and also thought about simple things such as how she was able to freely walk to the laundromat to wash her own clothes with her own soap. She informs the reader of her analysis of the different types of women in the Republic of Gilead: “There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Martha's, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimp, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, they're called. These women are not divided into functions. They have to do everything; if they can.” (Atwood, 5.5) The Handmaid’s— the bearer of children— wear red, the Martha’s, who are the housekeepers wear green, and the wives wear blue. Econ Wives are the only women who aren’t defined by the colour of their dress because they must do every function. Atwood is showing that the individuality and identities of these women have been completely taken away and are labelled by the clothing they are forced to
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.
This is exposed in numerous occasions in the novel i.e. when offred portrays herself as a “cloud congealed around a central object”. Offred say here that apart form her womb, which is a women’s “central object”, women in Gilead are a “cloud” which symbolises that they are nothing apart from a grey mist and are something indistinct, unclear and of no use. If the women do not conceive, they are labelled as “barrens” and so hence are sent to the colonies from where they would eventually die. Some women in the novel (the sterile handmaids) are often classified as “unwomen” and so therefore are in Gilead’s view “inhuman”. Women in terms of Gilead are possessions of men and have no liberty of choice.
Due to the fact that the Wives are not allowed to sleep with their husbands, the Wives are all extremely envious of the Handmaids. In Gilead, Serena is deprived of a life of genuine freedom and is forced to watch her husband sleep with his Handmaid. This makes her extremely bitter and jealous and so she takes this out on the Handmaids–including the main character–although it is not exactly their fault. Although the reader is sympathetic to her emotions, they are still completely unfair. The fact that Serena feels hostility towards the Handmaids is ignorant because she knows that they have not chosen their position in society, but rather they were forced into it. At the end of the novel, Serena finds out about Offred’s secret visit to Jezebel’s. She is mostly upset with Offred, which is completely unreasonable because the Commander had forced her to accompany him to Jezebel’s. This is a direct example of the feminist way of thinking: it’s always the fault of a women’s promiscuity, not a man’s. Serena’s attitude supports the order of Gilead, because she tortures the Handmaids, who cannot help themselves. She knows that these women are forced to become Handmaids, yet she still continues to envy them and punish them. Although she should, she has no sympathy for other women and plays the exact role that society requires her to. Women like her allow Gilead to function because they enforce the
The Gilead Society has segregated women into different caste systems. There are six main categories in the caste system. The first are the Wives, who wear blue dresses and are at the top of the female hierarchy. Their main purpose is reproduce with their husbands, if they are unable then Handmaids are used. Then there are Daughters, either the natural or adopted children of the ruling class. They tend to wear white until marriage. The next are the Handmaids, fertile women whose sole purpose is to reproduce children for the wives. Handmaids wear a full red dress outfit with red gloves, red shoes, and...
The Handmaids Tale is a poetic tale of a woman's survival as a Handmaid in the male dominated Republic of Gilead. Offred portrayed the struggle living as a Handmaid, essentially becoming a walking womb and a slave to mankind. Women throughout Gilead are oppressed because they are seen as "potentially threatening and subversive and therefore require strict control" (Callaway 48). The fear of women rebelling and taking control of society is stopped through acts such as the caste system, the ceremony and the creation of the Handmaids. The Republic of Gilead is surrounded with people being oppressed. In order for the Republic to continue running the way it is, a sense of control needs to be felt by the government. Without control Gilead will collapse.
n Handmaid’s tale novel we can discuss about women’s role. The key to the whole program is using other women to train and control them. It is hard to go against your own kind, when Son’s of Jacob took over, they knew that if they use male, it would not be workable because women could easily seduce the males to get their own way. "Something could be exchanged... We still had our bodies."(p. 4). By using other women as known as the Aunts, they could tell the women that they understood and knew what it was like, and that all this was for their own good, to keep them safe and make their world a better place. Aunts usually were very strict; they could use force to Handmaids. According to Offred “they had eclectic cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts”. (p.4). In addition, there are many of these training facilities such as Red centers, where the women trains by Aunts to be handmaidens. In other words, to be thought to bear children for wives who were no longer capable of childbirth. Older
In the novel The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood the themes of Religion and inter-human relationships are the themes that are most evident in the text. This novel shows the possibility of the existence of an all-powerful governing system. This is portrayed through the lack of freedom for women in society, from being revoked of their right to own any money or property, to being stripped of their given names and acquiring names such as Offred and Ofglen, symbolizing women’s dependant existence, only being defined by the men which they belong to. This portrayal of women demonstrates the idea that individuals are unimportant, that the goals of the society as a whole are more pertinent. “For our purposes, your feet and your hands are not essential” (chapter 15) is a quote revealing that Gilead denies rights to individuals and to humankind. In The Handmaids Tale, handmaids are only considered of value for their ability to reproduce, otherwise they are disposable. Religion is an aspect very prominent in the society of Gilead. We see this in chapter 4, where Ofglen and Offred meet and th...
In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, there is an apparent power struggle between Offred and the Commander. The Gilead Society’s structure is based off of order and command. This is what creates a divide between genders and specifies gender roles in this novel. Without this categorization of the roles and expectations of women, the society would fall apart at the base. Thus, the Commander, being the dominant gender set forth by the society, has control over Offred.
In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, social turmoil after a staged terrorist attack has led to a totalitarian Christian regime. In this dystopian future, the roles of men and women are much different than in today’s society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are unequal because they have no choice about their bodies, their dress, or their relationships.
Monique Wittig, a radical feminist, illuminates, “For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we call servitude”. The concept of justifying the female inferior image based on biology and the ‘w...
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.
Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, the author Margaret Atwood gives the reader an understanding of what life would be like in a theocratic society that controls women’s lives. The narrator, Offred gives the reader her perspective on the many injustices she faces as a handmaid. Offred is a woman who lived before this society was established and when she undergoes the transition to her new status she has a hard time coping with the new laws she must follow. There are many laws in this government that degrade women and give men the authority of each household. All women are placed in each household for a reason and if they do not follow their duties they are sent away or killed. Atwood bases the irrational laws in the Gilead republic on the many
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
As The Handmaid’s Tale is considered an allegory of the social injustice women face against traditional expectations of their role in society, the symbolism of the Handmaids and other women as a whole for repressed feminine liberty and sexuality allows Atwood to connect her work to the theme between gender and expectations in her society. As Handmaids in the Republic of Gilead, females are stripped of their previous identity and are defined as a tool of reproduction for the men who is assigned them. At its core, these females are forced against their will to be mere tools, experiencing unwanted sex at least once a month, which Gilead names “The Ceremony”, hiding its true nature as a form of rape. Offred