Colleen Atwood

In the world before Gilead, Offred felt uncomfortable with her mother’s feministic ways, and she had an affair with a married man named Luke. Luke then divorced his wife and married her, and they had a child together. When Gilead started they took their daughter as they tryed to escape across the border into Canada. Instead, they were caught and Offred hasn’t seen her husband or daughter since. After her capture, she continues to mentally resist Gilead, but she submits to Gilead. Afterwards,…

“They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick” (192). On a subconscious level, she has replaced Nick with Luke, and as the romance becomes more heated, Offred becomes more reckless. Here Atwood is commentating on the mechanism of romance as a tool of control. Society sees romance as the most desirable good for women, and that the ultimate end goal is the transfer of authority over the women from their fathers into their husbands. Once they…

offspring for their Commander, and they have no connections or feelings for each other. Offred says that Handmaids like her are for “breeding purposes” and are merely “two-legged wombs…sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” for their Commander’s child (Atwood 136). After a birth, the baby is immediately taken to the Wife, leaving their Handmaid in concealed despair and loneliness. After giving birth, women experience hormone changes that can lead to many emotions, such as sadness. The…

In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian world of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, we are introduced to a totalitarian world in which fertile women are captured and it is their duty to have children for elite couples. Throughout the novel, the primary handmaid and protagonist, Offred, reminiscences on her former life as she reveals the realities of her new life with a somber tone. I argue that Offred being stripped of her purpose and being suppressed into someone she is not intensifies her desire for…

Handmaid’s Tale, Margert Atwood satirizes the body of women in order to illustrate the notion that all they are, is an it. The Handmaid’s were once considered “an instrument,” in which they played a tune of good nature and choice (Atwood 73). They had everything of their own, they were no one’s property, no one’s birthing vessel. In the present, however, the women’s vaginas are the utmost importance of the Gilead society, as even the doctor “deals with a torso only” (Atwood 60). Offred,…

The narrator, Offred, describes how she and other handmaids slept inside a gymnasium in the new nation of Gilead. There are two Aunt, Sara and Elizabeth, who has cattle prods around their waist in order to put fear into the handmaids. The women are not allowed to speak with one another so they must resort to lip reading when the aunts are not looking. The handmaids were allowed two walks a day around the former football field. While the women are walking , the guards stand with their backs…

This forms a tighter bond between the two using language and using it in a forbidden manner. In other cases where Ofglen said “You can join us’ she says. Us? I say. There is an un then there’s a we. I knew it.” (Atwood 168-169) This sharing of knowledge is also a sharing of power that is forbidden because you become a threat to the totalitarian government which rules all of Gilead. Power comes from the language that is shared and passed between everyone but most…

and women were found jobless. After this, women find all liberties being stripped away from them. One of the most important factors in the book is the appearance of extremism and how women are expected to follow rules without rebelling against it. Atwood uses internal monologue to portray how extremist ideals in Gilead’s society are unjust by having inner thoughts whenever the main character couldn’t speak up about those matters. As a result, this shows that women such as every other citizen are…

In the novel, Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, a dystopian society is shown, with a background story explaining how this world came to be. In the novel Atwood shows that through human interference and corruption the world has taken a negative turn and do to the decisions the humans make nature is effected and cannot act the way as it originally has. While this novel is an exaggerated version of our world, it shows that if we keep making the decisions we are making, in areas such as…

Handmaid’s Tale is set in a theocratic nation known as The Republic of Gilead, defined by its significant social boundary between males and females. Influenced by the strict and traditional lifestyle of the seventeenth century American Puritans, Margaret Atwood based her narrative on the disparity between the role of the man and woman in their culture. Especially in the 1970s, America was swept by rising movements based upon the Republican party ideals which heavily supported the values of…