Love And Loss In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

The main theme of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is about love and loss. In the novel, Offred, who is a narrator of the story, is one of Handmaids in the society of Gilead. Before she was a Handmaid, she had a little cute daughter with Luke, her husband. Offred had experienced some worst situations about losing her daughter in the past that became her nightmare forever. The first situation was when she and her husband were shopping at the supermarket, someone stoled her daughter. In the novel, “One day, when she was eleven months old, just before she began to walk, a woman stole her out of a supermarket cart. It was a Saturday, which was when Luke and I did the week’s shopping…” (Atwood 63). From this statement, while Offred …show more content…
The writer, Atwood, conveys the story of life and roles in the society of Gilead through the protagonist Offred and other Handmaids. Atwood writes that these Handmaids were control and convinced by Aunt Lydia’s speech. Aunt Lydia always spoke to those women and made them believed that their statuses were better than others. In the novel, “Some day, when times improve…no one will have to be an Econowife” (Atwood 44). Aunt Lydia tried to induce the Handmaids that the Econowife was a bad thing and was not good enough for them. Moreover, Aunt Lydia also used Doublespeak to control and persuade the Handmaids to believe that they could have the freedom. In the novel, “The future is in your hands” (Atwood 47). She used the beautiful words and “freedom” to seduce those women from the truth that there was no freedom for the Handmaids. And Aunt Lydia also said that: “I’m doing my best…I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have” (Atwood 55). This means she tried to emphasize that everything, which she did and told the Handmaids, were a goodwill. Even though Aunt Lydia spoke a lot of influential speeches, Offred still distrusted in all of her speeches. In the novel, “The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen” (Atwood 55). In this statement, Aunt Lydia used the word of “those things” that would make Offred suspected why those words had come out from Aunt Lydia’s mouth because she always spoke about a success. Offred also thought different and felt that she had no freedom. In the novel, “But there was nothing in [the hands]. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen” (Atwood 47). This statement shows she knew that freedom was just a forlorn hope, which never came true! Therefore, Atwood writes