The Handmaid's Tale As A Feminist Analysis

The South historically was an agitation cultural society ‘frozen in its virtues and vices’ and as a result was cut off from the rest of society seen as a backward looking, ahistorical and resistant to change. Faulkner interrogates and challenges the idea of femininity through Caddy who destabilises patriarchal order and culture in the Compson household, through her promiscuity thus, moving away from socially acceptable feminine expectations of the twentieth century. Such a disempowerment reflects notions of gender-stereotyping where woman were seen as objects and insignificant beings, ‘she is not even figured as human but instead as ‘an hind’, a female deer,’ here Bennet and Royle examine the social role that woman were expected to obtain in Western culture that they should be passive, hysterical, …show more content…
The first instance in which we encounter Caddy rebel against patriarchal norms is at the age of seven, when she is playing around in the branch with her brothers and the other children and decides to takes her dress off as it gets wet. ‘Caddy took her dress off and threw it on the bank. Then she didn’t have anything but her bodice and drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and feel in the water,’ this scene acts as an early kind of exposure to Caddy’s promiscuity, this unsettles Quentin that his sister is taking her clothes off not just in front of Benjy but, the Gibson children . Here Quentin is criticising Caddy for not conforming to the norms of decorum of the time and therefore feels he must punish her for the shame that she has brought upon herself, thus is why he slaps her which leads to her slipping, getting her drawers dirty and wet. This scene by critics has be interpreted and understood in two very contradictory ways, Caddy in many ways here is presented by Faulkner as wilful, a young girl enjoying her freedom and having