Margaret Edson

Abuse of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale and Night Humankind has an inner desire to achieve power and success. Whether that power is achieved through morally correct means is dependent solely on the individual themselves. If the achieved power is abused it directly correlates to a negative ripple effect on the lives of others. In the novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Night written by Elie Wiesel and Margret Atwood respectively, the same concept applies. The systems in both novels abuse their power,…

In the novel, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, Atwood introduces postmodernist motifs throughout the development of Crake as a character. Crake increasingly begins to feel a deep resentment for humanity due to economical, racial, religious, and social conflicts that humanity causes. As a result, Crake begins to develop a new species, called Crakers, that transcends the mental processes for these injustices to exist and believes in a Marxist interpretation of post-humanistic society. At the…

In “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood describes a new society, Gilead, formed from the ruins of the modern day the United States. Although theoretically this society is built to foster women and protect them from fear of sexual harassment and rape, Gilead takes feminism back hundreds of years. Women are either sexless wives and Marthas or childbearing Handmaids. With a distorted version of the Bible as a model, the Gilead leaders formed a republic founded on fear and oppression. Atwood…

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…

them the same things”(Plato). Not only is equality important but Plato ties in education as well. He believes that women should not be defined by their ability to bear children. The idea of gender is seen much differently in The Handmaids Tale. Margaret Atwood describes strict gender roles for the handmaids. Women aren’t even called by their own names, they all belong to a man and take on their mans first name which is still similarly seen in modern society where women take their husbands last…

The loss of identity is prevalent amongst the Handmaids when they have to endure the struggle of control with wearing the same red uniformed dress, not showing their faces. Once the women convert to the now freedom less and strict life of being a Handmaid, their name is changed to only one name beginning with “of” from their given birth name. Offred and Ofglen have these names which are used as slave name for their function. Offred’s name is means “of Fred” which meaning that she belongs to her…

The history of birth control goes back as far as 3000 B.C. when condoms were made out of fish bladder or animal intestines. In 1916 Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn with contraceptives that she smuggled from Europe. At this time “birth control was a radical idea that challenged conventional notions of women’s sexuality and reproduction” (483). Before 1916 both genders struggled to get birth control. In 1873 The Comstock Act allowed mail carriers to confiscate…

How effectively have the texts you have studied convey aspects of power? The composers Stephen Spender, Robert Browning and Margaret Atwood of the texts My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough, ¬¬¬My Last Duchess and The Handmaid’s Tale, all convey various aspects of power in their corresponding texts through the use of a variety of language techniques embedded in their writing. The poems My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough, and My Last Duchess both explore aspects of…

In sections I-V of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the reader gets a sense of the dystopian society that has been set up in which the narrator has been sent to live with what can be assumed as a wealthy family. The narrator makes it obvious that the head of household is the Commander through using a title for him and simply calling his wife “the Commander’s wife.” In fact, throughout the first five sections of the book, the implication is that married women are defined by the status of…

Essay question: The handmaid’s tale reveals that people are controlled by fear, abasement, and ignorance. Assess the validity of this statement. Arguments: 1. The regime is taking away any means of education other than the education they wish for the women to learn. Reading and writing are banned in order to maintain an ignorant population, Knowledge is power….critical thinking 2. By making the women ignorant, it shows how complacent the women have become. (which in a way reflects the success…