Margaret Atwood Create A Dystopia In The Handmaid's Tale

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Margaret Atwood's thought-provoking novel, The Handmaid's Tale, displays a dystopian society in which men dominate women. This governing body, the Republic of Gilead, presents a dystopia where the freedom of women is completely cut-off due this new governing body's radical policies. This society, is narrated by a women named Offred. Offred, a Handmaid in the story offers the society a means of reproduction. Offred presents us with the ideas and ideology of this society through a first-person narrative. The story also offers flashbacks, and allow the reader to envision the society before the Republic of Gillead took over. One emotional aspect of the novel is the fact that women are subject to mistreatment and subjugation, are soon thought to be the ones who provoked the abuse in the first place. This only permits and…show more content…
In the novel, Atwood displays the Handmaids as just a “uterus” used for solely reproduction. They are chosen, and uses for the sole reason to produce babies. Hannah Heinzekehr of The Femonite says, “But perhaps what is most disturbing about this unfortunate society is that, although Atwood imagined this society and penned this book in 1986, the societal influences that made this book hit home are still present with us today. Over the course of the past year, debates raged about contraception, Planned Parenthood and all sorts of other reproductive topics. In short, women’s wombs were front and center as conversation pieces nationwide” (Heinzekehr). Clearly, it can be seen that Atwood was attempting to display the feminist agenda of when she was a young woman. The echoes of the feminist agenda in The Handmaid's Tale can be related to today, and shows that society has made hardly any progress. In current society, it has been noted that people see women only as sex objects, made for their own pleasure. It is extremely sad to think that that is how some of society portrays
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