Margaret Atwood

Offred’s struggles throughout Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates the effects that relationships and experiences have on an individual’s sense of self and hunger for freedom. The Republic of Gilead is a warped modern-day rendition of Puritan life, a “fertility cult” (Nakamura 3) under the guise of a religious society. Like the Puritans and many other historical cultures, the women of Gilead are treated like objects to be issued, thus robbed of their voice and their…

The Handmaid’s Tale confronts Margaret Atwood’s vision of men and women in a controlling light that may infer the way our society would translate in a dystopia. I focus primarily on how the The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a male’s ownership over a female, a male’s undisputed power over women in this particular dystopia, and how that translates to our society today. I will be presenting this depiction in two specific scenes in which the power distribution is obviously in favor of the male figure…

The Character Analysis of Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale” The main character of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood is a handmaid named Offred. Offred is not a real name but just a nickname given to handmaids who belong to a certain commander (man only), in her case Fred. She wears a uniform of a handmaid, a red clock covering ankles, gloves, and a white veil covering almost half of the face, which covers the whole body. The place of the story is somewhere inside of the USA that the…

Milestone Two: Rough Draft Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel takes place in Gilead, located in New England in the United States, where the republic’s democracy has been overthrown and replaced by a totalitarian theocracy. In order to procreate, the plummet of live births in Gilead leads to the implementation of divorced and fertile women serving as surrogates for childless couples. The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred’s life prior to the change in government and follows her as she…

Literary Analysis Essay The Handmaid’s Tale It is scary to think of a government that exists only to serve a specific group of citizens. However, this story contains such a government. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood, she demonstrates that some ideologies lead to the suffering and oppression of others as shown by the beliefs and practices of the Republic of Gilead. The main protagonist, Offred is forced into procreating due to falling birth rates in the…

In her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood explores the poor ideals and horrors of a futuristic patriarchal society. The story is set in Massachusetts at an unspecified time in the future and tells the story of a young lady’s struggles through a change in the way of life after America was taken over by another governing body, Gilead. By Gilead’s traditional rules, women were not allowed to work and own property, and men were far superior to the women. In the story, procreation was…

visits Hailsham and shows little interest in the students, this conveys that the world outside of Hailsham condemns Kathy’s kind and that she will constantly be fighting a predetermined identity that civilisation has formed for her. In contrast, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, portrays the progression of finding identity in extreme circumstances. The name of the characters reveals early on in the novel that people within Gilead society don’t have a sense of individualism, for example…

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Commanders run a society lacking authentic emotions and relationships. They use threats of removal to the colonies and death to fulfill their desire for order. A Handmaid’s only purpose in life is to produce offspring for their Commander, and they have no connections or feelings for each other. Offred says that Handmaids like her are for “breeding purposes” and are merely “two-legged wombs…sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” for their Commander’s…

different from our own society, but also include elements that we are familiar with. These dystopian societies will not be far from our own future if we abuse the powers that we posses. Margaret Atwood claims that she is not a science fiction writer. Science fiction suggests things that humans are not able to do. (Atwood) Both books have things that we are capable of doing through our technology and government. In Oryx and Crake, the technology they have is not far from what we have now. In The…

psychologists and identified in literary works. The Handmaid’s Tale is a shockingly realistic representation of the extent of oppression of women and how it can alter their psyche. By using strict religious ideals and a totalitarian government, Margaret Atwood is able to portray a society in which women are forced to not only abide to certain rules, but to perform acts against their will. Women are stripped from their families and forced to conceive children for wealthy couples. Atwood’s…