Colleen Atwood

Oppressive circumstances can lead to a comforting form of ignorance. The once United States of America has now turned into a nation known as the Republic of Gilead. The falling reproductive birth rates and chaos of the previous nation has lead to an implication of certain restrictions placed on women. The few women that are able to reproduce, known as handmaids, are assigned to couples in order to bare them children. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Handmaid’s Tale, the main character Offred…

Women have been oppressed from their emotional and sexual freedom since the beginnings of time. Margaret Atwood was able to write a novel where she is showing to her audience the oppressive and rigid hierarchy of Gilead which is full of Orthodox traditions, making it a symbolism from the reality where we have been living forever. In Gilead there’s only one power, the power of repression and women have no hope that there is an opponent power that can save them from misery. Even though nowadays…

people, one way or another the government always tries to maintain power of its citizens to make sure nobody is doing anything that would harm the state. This idea of power of authority is shown in these three works, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Panopticism by Michel Foucault and “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. In The Handmaid’s Tale it was the constant fear of being watched by the Eye and the masters, being viewed by a person standing in a watchtower from Panopticism, or even…

Elizabeth Pham Professor Sara Moore English 200 4th February 2016 Dystopian Freedom The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood is a dystopian novel based in a totalitarian Christian theocracy that has forcibly removed the United States government from power and has become the Republic of Gilead. Due to the terrible decline in reproduction rates because of natural disasters, women become an essential part of ensuring that the population does not drop any further. In this republic, women are…

Fighting for Moral Sense: Analyzing the Effects on Mental Health in The Post-Apocalyptic World of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake To survive in a post-apocalyptic time requires sacrifice, one of the sacrifices being moral sense. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is set in a post-apocalyptic world, Jimmy or his post-apocalyptic name Snowman being the son of a scientist that was a contributing factor to the failure of humanity. The moral sense of Snowman has been dehumanized by society’s…

where Jimmy lives with his scientifically oriented parents in an isolated compound. The compound has no value for those who are not scientifically capable. However, Jimmy is more of a “word person” and his talent is mostly unappreciated in his world (Atwood 74). His parents are emotionally distant and concerned about Jimmy’s poor logical skills. As a result, Jimmy feels frustrated as he is unable to connect to his parents. So, due to Jimmy’s fascination with language and an emotionally distant…

she respects Madame even if she is not yet Diouana’s employer. In Madame’s eyes, this means that Diouana will be more obedient to her employers and will be less likely to speak her mind out of respect for her authority. By solely watching the movie, however, viewers do not immediately understand why Madame chooses Diouana over a more eager candidate on the street corner. “The Promised Land” gives a greater context to this issue that eventually leads to Diouana’s treatment that reduces her…

The Handmaid’s tale is a book written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. She believed that this country was heading in the wrong direction so she wrote a book to get people to understand her view; she said we are heading backwards not forwards in our progression. Margaret Atwood is a famous writer known for such books as The Handmaid’s tale, Cat’s eye, Alias grace, The blind assassin, Oryx and crake, and surfacing. One of Atwood’s famous quotes is War is what happens after language fails, when two or…

Analysis of Alias Grace and The Heart Goes Last by Margret Atwood : Rough Draft In the novels, Alias Grace and The Heart Goes Last by Margret Atwood, Atwood uses a specific style of writing to convey her themes of each novel. Atwood utilizes techniques such as symbolism, syntax, point of view and the use of setting to create the Theme of these two novels, In The Heart Goes last the theme is that even utopias are not all they seem to be and can often turn out to be dystopias, sort of like the…

The dystopian genre aims to challenge the utopian assumption of a rather faultless society with human perfection. It is rare to find hope in this genre, whether it be in regards to hierarchical society, identity—which has been a constant topic or struggle throughout all three works—, or social class systems, elements of dystopian concepts can be seen through Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as well as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The audience simply could not…