The Handmaid's Tale is set in the early twentieth century in the futuristic Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States of America. The Republic has been founded by a Christian response to declining birthrates. The government rules using biblical teachings that have been distorted to justify the inhumane practices. In Gilead, women are categorized by their age, marital status and fertility. Men are categorised by their age. Women all have separate roles in society, and although these roles are different, they all share the same theme: Every woman is confined to the home and has a domestic duty. Marthas are cooks and housekeepers, and handmaids have one duty, which is to reproduce, growing and giving birth to babies to the childless wives of the higher class. The Aunts train and brainwash the handmaids to fulfill their duties. Atwood uses the Aunts to show that in Gilead women are not just oppressed by men, but also by women. Older single women, gay men, and barren handmaids are sent to the colonies to clean up after war and toxic spills, and will probably die due to exposure to radiation. This is because they have no reproductive powers and so are seen as useless in the Republic. People's use and status is totally dependant on their ability to reproduce.
Women's roles are visually defined in the clothes that they wear. Every woman must dress in the appropriate attire in accordance with her role. The Marthas wear green dresses, the Wives blue dresses and the handmaids wear red. The handmaids' red, nun-like uniform symbolizes their imprisonment in that role.
`Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.'
The red colour of the handmaids' dresses symbolizes fertility, which ...
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...vel Margaret Atwood gives a bleak message about women. At the same time that she condemns Offred, Serena Joy, the Aunts and even Moira for their complacency, she suggests that even if the women gathered strength and stopped complying, they would be likely to fail to make a difference. This is because no matter what a woman does, she can never change her biology, which is the thing that puts her in this position. No matter what opinions women have,
even if they are brave enough to also express them, they will never be able to change the fact that they are the ones with the womb and ovaries; they are the only ones who can bear children.
Bibliography
Letts Explore Literature guide - The Handmaid's Tale : Sandra Langdon
www.google.com : November 2003
www.novelguide.com : November 2003
www.sparknotes.com : October 2003
www.bookwolf.com : October 2003
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.
As a female, I’m particularly concerned about Gilead’s treatment of women. As you all know, the Republic of Gilead built itself on the foundations of male dominance. But as you all know, these days you can’t even coax women into cooking breakfast (Laughter). That’s where the ingeniousness of Gilead’s governing system comes in. The Handmaid’s Tale, this series of tape recording from the early Gileadean period, reveals a lot about the tools
The assigned gender roles in The Handmaid’s Tale are hyperboles of traditional roles that the genders play. In Gilead, the women stay home and men run important things like the government, which includes business and military. The assignment of the roles and the strictness of them seems legitimate to the majority of Gilead’s population, and they come as an accepted result of physical differences between men and women to them. Almost all of the women in the population and many of the men have been sterilized due to...
The society of Gilead strips every basic human right and power from women until they are nothing; because of this, all women will be impacted tremendously and incapable of returning to a normal life after the laws have been lifted. “In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explicitly questions why people so often cooperate with totalitarian regimes and how they come to accept life under their dominion,” (Laflen). The Handmaid’s have grown accustomed to doing whatever it takes to survive; the society they live in forces them to think of themselves as the Commander's puppet. As a Handmaid, Offred must conceive a child with the Commander. During these sex ceremonies the Handmaid must play it absolutely safe because everyone is watching, “One false move and I’m dead,” (Atwood 88) Offred says. Handmaids have the most responsibility, but at the same time they do not have any responsibility at all. During the ceremony, Offred must make sure not to move a muscle or make any suspicious movements that would raise an eye. “It is true that the colonization of Offred's body can be linked with
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 by people being oppressed.
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 Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale there is a threat of physical, emotional, and mental abuse if you disagree with the established group or party. The Handmaid’s Tale is a book about a “woman victimized by a totalitarian system that attempts to control her thoughts and deny her humanity” (Thomas 90). In The Handmaid’s Tale there are differences between all the women. There are the wives, who are married to the commanders. The commanders are in charge of all the other women. There are the econowives, which are the wives of the low-ranking officials. The Martha’s are in charge of the upkeep of the commander’s house. The Handmaid’s are in charge of having the commander’s baby. Each woman has to listen to their husband or commander. No woman can think for herself. The men are in charge of everything. (Atwood, Thomas)
.... 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.
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 the gilead society, women are placed in a social hierarchy in which they are defined by their role. The wives are the elite members. The handmaids are the people who produced babies. Marthas are the house servants. Aunts are a prestigious group of people who trained handmaids. Econowives are low class women. However, none of the women are defined as people with their own personalities and interests. Instead, Women are seen as objects that belong to men. Econowives belong to the Guardians. The wives, marthas,
In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, women are subjected to unthinkable oppression. Practically every aspect of their life is controlled, and they are taught to believe that their only purpose is to bear children for their commander. These “handmaids” are not allowed to read, write or speak freely. Any type of expression would be dangerous to the order of the Gilead’s strict society. They are conditioned to believe that they are safer in this new society. Women are supposedly no longer exploited or disrespected (pornography, rape, etc.) as they once were. Romantic relationships are strongly prohibited because involving emotion would defeat the handmaid’s sole purpose of reproducing. Of course not all women who were taken into Gilead believed right what was happening to their way of life. Through the process of storytelling, remembering, and rebellion, Offred and other handmaids cease to completely submit to Gilead’s repressive culture.
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.
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.
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.