Comparing Power In The Handmaid's Tale And We

Though there are many blurred lines, people generally have a strong sense of what is wrong and right. If someone is faced with a situation that rubs them the wrong way and the niggling voice inside their head whispers that something is not right, their conscious responds accordingly and dictates their reactions. It is the accumulation of these moments when personal morals are formed. Atwood and Zamyatin both depict a world turned upside down in their dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale and We, respectively. They create an entire society and plot that shocks and causes readers to reexamine their personal morals. The micromanaged society, backward way of thinking and living, and horrific, oppressive realisticity of it all spark strong intellectual and emotional responses about morality throughout time. The use of …show more content…
In The Handmaid’s Tale, there is a strict social stratification with high ranking men at the top, such as the Commander, and women below them with their own power structure. Women are classified as Wives, Martha's, Handmaids, and Econowives, “there are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Martha's, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men” (Atwood 24). This places clear labels on individuals and segregates people into their assigned groups. Similarly, D-503’s society controls every aspect of their inhabitant's life. They employ and strictly follow the Table of Hours, “How could the olden day governmental power-primitive though it was- have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them?” (13 Zamyatin). These examples of such a negative utilization of power make it obvious how easily power can be taken away and how controlling it is on those subjugated under