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 are not permitted in the heat. With all this sexual repression, one feels that something is about to explode in a society that has such strict values and norms. There is almost no form of entertainment shown in the book, except for the hanging of a man who raped a handmaid. At this point, a catharsis reaction takes place as all the handmaids get together to beat the man into a bloody pulp. 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.
             Another notion that is upheld is the fact that since women are for men's pleasure alone, they cannot have complete control over their bodies...