The Handmaids Tale
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood speaks of the roles that women and men play in a dystopia. The place of her setting is the city of Gilead and there are a number of Biblical references in her novel. The name of the city is itself important, because this was where the pilgrims found the balm after hardship- there is no balm for the protagonist Offred.Patriarchal norms and values are exemplified in this totalitarian novel. They are considered of maximum importance and it is the men who lay down the norms and standards for the way women dress, work, act and perform daily duties. The women are divided into classes based on the position they hold in life- the position of the wife being the most upheld, but even there, there is segregation- for example, the econowives. The classes are stressed by the way that the women dress, the wives in blue, econowives in striped outfits and the handmaids in red. This colour coded material helps to identify the women at a glance. The didactic element of clothing comes out here- Offred has to dress like a wife to get to the hotel, only to then dress in the clothing of a whore. The entire body must be covered, the human body degenerates to nothing but a sexual object if female. Even sandals a
She is a lesbian, which means that she rejects male-female sexual interactions, the only kind that Gilead values. 308) This distancing of the person can be noted in the works of Helene Cixous as well when she speaks of woman or women as literally- the physical beings with vaginas and breasts. The clothing leads to more stereotyped ideas of women, especially since there is almost no verbal contact between people of the opposite sex, and such contact is frowned upon. There is almost no form of entertainment shown in the book, except for the hanging of a man who raped a handmaid. She can see the difficulty of her own life, but not that of another woman. At this point, a catharsis reaction takes place as all the handmaids get together to beat the man into a bloody pulp. Men seem to want variety, stated from the lines "so now that we don't have different clothes, you merely have different women. Aunt Lydia describes the pre-Revolutionary United States as a society dying of too much choice, offering security and stability in place of that too-demanding freedom The doctors who try to help the handmaid perform their one duty- i. The colour of the handmaids' clothes- the colour of their menses and shame for not being able to produce a child is also the colour of passion and the sexual desire that they produce in men. More than that, she is the only character who stands up to authority directly by making two escape attempts. 203), and Atwood uses the motif of the double throughout the novel to represent this threat. She wants to look at the forgotten person's perspective of what is happening to her and see things from a new point of view, rather than a solely patriarchal point of view. Speech is curtailed as well; all that they can talk about is the weather and God when they go shopping together. With all this sexual repression, one feels that something is about to explode in a society that has such strict values and norms.
Common topics in this essay:
Offred Patriarchal,
Biblical Rebecca,
Helene Cixous,
Aunt Lydia,
Beauvior Sex,
Serena Joy,
Offred Offred,
Ultimately Offred,
Gayle Greene,
Quince Zygote,
act sex,
handmaid's tale,
forced labour camp,
sex offred's,
labour camp,
husband child,
sexual desire,
identity personality,
aunt lydia,
offred feeling,
forced labour,
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