The Handmaids Tale in regards Essay Example

The Handmaids Tale in regards Essay Margaret Atwood having wrote ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, a novel about a society in which all women rights have been removed would have come across as extremely startling to a world where the women’s suffrage movement in America had started over 100 years earlier and women had finally been given the right to vote 25 years beforehand which had essentially been the point where the feminist movement had become widely acknowledged with the literacy studies on feminism such as that of Kate Millett’s. Margaret Atwood’s thoughts on her novel ‘a book about what happens when certain causally held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions’, explores the feminist theory by creating a society in the near future in which the rights of women, which women all over the world had worked hard for, for centuries are taken away giving women a new role in life. The protagonist Offred lives in a time where a revolution had happened years previously which put into authority authoritarian power. The new government see the Handmaid’s as an instrument of the government as they are the only women who can reproduce due to the dangerously low reproduction rates as a result of nuclear results which led 99% of women to be sterile. ‘Distribution of power over the male and female partners mirrors the distribution of power over males and females in society’. Women’s relationship with men especially those of the Handmaid women is that of servitude with women being seen as possession of men. 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The diminution of each social type of women from the Commander’s Wife to the Martha’s in each household mirrors the struggle for power of every woman in the Republic of Gilead. The idea that women are encouraged and socialised to hate other women rather than sympathise if a woman is in a similar or different situation stems from the feminist view that men have created stereotypes of women through literature and art which becomes widespread as other women start putting themselves and others into these stereotypes. ‘Once I’d merely hated her for her part in what was being done to me; and because she hated me too and resented my presence’, the women’s lack of unification is hinted as one of the reasons that the authoritarian regime still existed. Being unable to sympathise with the other types of women groups; with the Martha’s, The Commanders wives and the Econowives all thinking that the handmaidens are sluts for sleeping with the Commanders even though they know that the Handmaidens have no choice. This assists into creating a society where there are no female friendships and bonds, where the only relations females have with each other are built of fear and jealousy. The protagonist isn’t one typical of a feminist novel, as even though she longs for freedom and hasn’t completely converted by keeping her memories and occasionally breaking rules she is still a passive and essentially helpless character. Atwood deliberately uses a protagonist that the feminist theory criticises in literature; Offred is passive and only possibly escapes due to a man (Nick) possibly saving her, creating a damsel in distress character. However Atwood does this because Offred is a symbol of the majority of young women in the 1980’s, acceptant of her position as a woman, having some freedom but not as much as she should, this illustrated as she tells the readers of her life pre-revolution as she worked in a library with only females. Her affair with her later husband Luke while he was married also goes against the sisterhood that feminists encourage, however it makes for a more relatable and human character, someone the female readers that Atwood was addressing the novel to would sympathise with. Her memories of the past during the sexual revolution introduce to us characters such as Offred’s mother and her best friend Moira are the feminist literary constructs in the novel. Offred’s embarrassment of her mother’s actions, formerly desiring for a mother who women had been oppressed into being for centuries – a domestic mother. ‘You young people don’t appreciate things she’d say. You don’t know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are’, there is a sense of foreshadowing as Offred will later appreciate the life she once had, however she only does this once it is too late to change anything. The feminist and woman’s suffrage movement fought to be from oppression of the duty that they are told they are made to do. These rights have been revoked in The Handmaid’s Tale where the only purpose of the Handmaids is to reproduce. ‘We are for breeding purposes. There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us, no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts. We are two-legged wombs, thats all’. These views on women- that they are only useful to bare children dates back to centuries and is a view that feminists criticise due to the basic perception it puts on women. To be barren such as the Unwomen are in The Handmaiden’s Tale is to be seen as useless as they aren’t even able to do the only job that women are expected to. ‘It’s only women who can’t, who remain stubbornly closed, damaged, defective’. Handmaidens are put into households where the commander’s wife isn’t able to have children due to the nuclear weapons that made women infertile. It is suggested that it is actually The Commander who is infertile instead of his wife but in the Gilean society it isn’t possible for men to be infertile, the blame is rested solely on women if they are unable to conceive. This highlights the unfairness of society and what women had to face before all the women’s suffrage came into place emphasising the importance of feminism and its fight for equality. ‘The problem wasn’t only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men†¦You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage. Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do. ’ The explanation by the commander as to the reasons why women’s rights had been taken away back to the ‘natural’ order of things is due to the effects the liberation of women had on men. Men found things too easy to get as there wasn’t a challenge in getting women to sleep with them, also with women having new found freedoms such as being able to work and have money of their own left the men with no purpose, as they were no longer the heroes or the providers like they had been portrayed to be in literature as the women were no longer damsels in need of saving. ‘Most of the male characters that she examined were denigrating, exploitative, and repressive in their relations with women’. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ presents the true nature of men in the novel, hiding from any assumptions that they repressed women’s rights in order to protect women, but rather so that men could stay in the same position in life. The only way they could get their purpose in life back was to revoke women’s freedoms, at the cost of the happiness of most women. This supports the extremist feminist view that men purposely suppress women so they can have total control. Atwood’s novel can be regarded as a feminist piece due to the portrayal of a society where women’s rights are infringed even more than it had previously been in history. She encourages her female readers embrace the female history in order for history not to repeat itself which she feared when she wrote the novel, due to conservative people coming to power condemning the sexual revolution.