Women In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

“If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” Mary Astell This question is one that women and men have struggled to answer through history. Do males and society view women with equal rights? In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood creates a dystopia society, which demonstrates the injustice towards women’s rights. In this challenging novel, the narrator and protagonist, Offred is a Handmaid in the “Republic of Gilead.” Handmaids are female servants, who supposedly are fertile and forced to bear children for the elite infertile couples. While living in the “Republic of Gilead,” Offred undergoes various adversities to where she is left to feel inferior. Through Offred painful physical and psychological burdens of her daily life in the “Republic of Gilead,” Atwood effectively communicates her theme that inequality of the sexes still prevails in society and definitely in the male’s perception of a woman’s ascribed role. And, in the end, if such moral ambivalence continues to exist then humanity is just sowing seeds for future evils. …show more content…
Handmaids wear red, “Wives” wear blue, and household servants, called “Marthas,” wear green. However, the “Econowives,” the lower-class women, are somewhat a mixture of all these classifications, so they wear stripes. The main color, which subjugates women, is the color red. “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us” (8). In the “Republic of Gilead,” red symbolizes the blood of the menstrual cycle, but mainly fertility. Not only does each color helps decipher which commodity a specific woman facilitates, but is also illustrates sexual repression. Throughout the entire novel, the reader realizes the inequality, in which Offred’s sole purpose is dictated by her