Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale - 1305 Words

In the period following the â€Å"sexual revolution† of the 1960s and 1970s characterized by a religious conservative revival, Margaret Atwood wrote the novel The Handmaid’s Tale. With the elections of Ronald Reagan as president of the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain, both religious conservatives, many feminists feared that all the progress towards equality they had made during the ‘60s and ‘70s would be reversed. Atwood, thinking no differently than them, decided to create a novel that explored the implications and effects of a nation, Gilead, that has completely obliterated feminist progress. In Gilead, women have no decision-making power; they are merely objects. Even though the disparity between the sexes was not so wide in Atwood’s time, Gilead is still representative of a possible future for society. Atwood uses the motifs of color and nomenclature found in the fictitious nation of Gilead to make a connection to soc iety, and prove that society forces both women and men to have feminine and masculine power respectively and pits those two types of power against one another. Colors and coloration greatly represent the two types of power and their struggle against one another. The two most prevalent colors are red and black, the colors for the game of checkers. Checkers is a strategic game of power and promoting pieces in order to win. The pieces in this game are representations of the people found in Gilead and society. There is also a strategicShow MoreRelatedThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1357 Words   |  6 PagesOxford definition: â€Å"the advocacy of women s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes† (Oxford dictionary). In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood explores feminism through the themes of women’s bodies as political tools, the dynamics of rape culture and the society of complacency. Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, at the beginning of WWII, growing up in a time of fear. In the autumn of 1984, when she began writing The Handmaid’s Tale, she was living in West Berlin. The BerlinRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1249 Words   |  5 PagesDystopian Research Essay: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood In the words of Erika Gottlieb With control of the past comes domination of the future. A dystopia reflects and discusses major tendencies in contemporary society. The Handmaid s Tale is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. The novel follows its protagonist Offred as she lives in a society focused on physical and spiritual oppression of the female identity. Within The Handmaid s Tale it is evident that through the explorationRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1060 Words   |  5 Pagesideologies that select groups of people are to be subjugated. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood plays on this idea dramatically: the novel describes the oppression of women in a totalitarian theocracy. Stripped of rights, fertile women become sex objects for the politically elite. These women, called the Handmaids, are forced to cover themselves and exist for the sole purpose of providing children. The Handmaid’s Tale highlights the issue of sexism while also providing a cruel insight into theRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1659 Words   |  7 Pagesbook The Handmaid s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the foremost theme is identity, due to the fact that the city where the entire novel takes place in, the city known as the Republic of Gilead, often shortened to Gilead, strips fertile women of their identities. Gilead is a society that demands the women who are able to have offspring be stripped of all the identity and rights. By demeaning these women, they no longer view themselves as an individual, but rather as a group- the group of Handmaids. It isRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1237 Words   |  5 Pages The display of a dystopian society is distinctively shown in The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Featuring the Republic of Gilead, women are categorized by their differing statuses and readers get an insight into this twisted society through the lenses of the narrator; Offred. Categorized as a handmaid, Offred’s sole purpose in living is to simply and continuously play the role of a child-bearing vessel. That being the case, there is a persistent notion that is relatively brought up by thoseRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1548 Words   |  7 PagesIn Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, The theme of gender, sexuality, and desire reigns throughout the novel as it follows the life of Offred and other characters. Attwood begins the novel with Offred, a first person narrator who feels as if she is misplaced when she is describing her sleeping scenery at the decaying school gymnasium. The narrator, Offred, explains how for her job she is assigned to a married Commander’s house where she is obligated to have sex with him on a daily basis, so thatRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale, By Margaret Atwood1629 Words   |  7 Pages Atwood s novel, The Handmaid s Tale depicts a not too futuristic society of Gilead, a society that overthrows the U.S. Government and institutes a totalitarian regime that seems to persecute women specifically. Told from the main character s point of view, Offred, explains the Gilead regime and its patriarchal views on some women, known as the handmaids, to a purely procreational function. The story is set the present tense in Gilead but frequently shifts to flashbacks in her time at the RedRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1540 Words   |  7 Pages Name: Nicole. Zeng Assignment: Summative written essay Date:11 May, 2015. Teacher: Dr. Strong. Handmaid’s Tale The literary masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, is a story not unlike a cold fire; hope peeking through the miserable and meaningless world in which the protagonist gets trapped. The society depicts the discrimination towards femininity, blaming women for their low birth rate and taking away the right from the females to be educated ,forbidding them from readingRead MoreThe Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1256 Words   |  6 Pageshappened to Jews in Germany, slaves during Christopher Columbus’s days, slaves in the early 1900s in America, etc. When people systematically oppress one another, it leads to internal oppression of the oppressed. This is evident in Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale. This dystopian fiction book is about a young girl, Offred, who lives in Gilead, a dystopian society. Radical feminists complained about their old lifestyles, so in Gilead laws and rules are much different. For example, men cannotRead More The Handmaid s Tale By Margaret Atwood1667 Words   |  7 Pagesrhetorical devices and figurative language, that he or she is using. The Handmaid’s Tale, which is written by Margaret Atwood, is the novel that the author uses several different devices and techniques to convey her attitude and her points of view by running the story with a narrator Offred, whose social status in the Republic of Gilead is Handmaid and who is belongings of the Commander. Atwood creates her novel The Handmaid’s Tale to be more powerful tones by using imagery to make a visibleness, hyperbole