The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a recount of Offred’s service as a national resource within the dystopian theocracy of Gilead; a fundamentalist Christian society where every intricate social structure is a counter-revolution to the now-defunct United States. Offred is a handmaid at the disposal of her assigned Commander and must spend hours waiting in isolation, considering the past, present and future. From Atwood’s developing descriptions of life before the coup, the reader begins to fully understand the flaws which plagued this pre-Gileadean world, including over-sexualisation, violent crime and declining birth rate. Upon considering Offred’s descriptions regarding the United States, it becomes clear that this pre-Gileadean civilisation…show more content…
Atwood uses a metaphor to demonstrate this shift in crime, explaining that “nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” Offred remembers that “women were not protected then”, considering the unspoken rules: “don’t open your door to a stranger… don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble… if anyone whistles, don’t turn and look.” By comparison Gilead is a society supposedly founded on the ideology that women should be protected, as illustrated by Aunt Lydia who inculcates that “in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.” In reality, however, women deemed ineffectual within Gilead face penalties including extradition to the colonies or custody under the Eyes, facing deaths which are equally violent and horrific in nature. Even fertile handmaids of high status are subject to corporal punishment at the hands of the Wives and must bear children to avoid life in the…show more content…
While attending the birth of Janine’s state-sanctioned child, Offred recalls that “air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic chemicals” and reveals that the probability of giving birth to an Unbaby are now “one in four, we learned that at the Centre.” The resulting decline in child population which afflicted the United States is highlighted by the attempted kidnapping of Offred’s daughter and descriptions of the desks at the RED Centre, which had “no dates after the mid-eighties. This must have been one of the schools which closed down then, for lack of children.” Once again this issue of the past is directly addressed by the regressive social structure of Gilead, wherein females are now publicly viewed as a national resource, whose only purpose is that of a ‘two-legged womb’; an ‘ambulatory chalice’ for healthy children. Furthermore, the Republic’s distain for deformed children is exemplified by the guttural term “shredder”, used even by Offred who is typically critical of Gilead’s social
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