Margaret Atwood created The Republic of Gilead, which is a society that is based on fertility and being able to have children. Gilead is in the former United States. This area has become overpolluted which has caused the birth rates to rapidly decline. Gilead was established to help save the population. The men are made to either be part of the military or to be a Commander, who runs a household and is responsible to “make” the babies. The Commanders get a Handmaid who is to be the one who has their baby. The Handmaids are heavily protected because they are the only women that have viable ovaries. Fertility is illustrated throughout the society through flowers, the color red or hard boiled eggs. Flowers. Such a simple everyday object. One would have never thought that they hold such a significant value in a society whose population is declining. Flowers are often …show more content…
“The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon [...] I think that this is what God must look like: an egg” (Atwood 110). Offred knows how important eggs are, whether it is the eggs she eats or the eggs that she produces. “The handmaids have no choice about what they eat and are permitted to consume only that which the authorities consider will enhance their health and fertility. Caffeine, alcohol, and cigarettes are forbidden and sugar is rationed” (Parker). All of the Handmaids are required to eat eggs everyday for breakfast. They have to eat eggs to essentially help make their own healthy eggs. “Their meals are brought to them in their rooms and they eat alone. By controlling what they eat, the Gilead regime gains direct control over the handmaids' bodies” (Parker). Forcing Handmaid’s to eat eggs helps to have dominance over their body and make them only eat what the authorities think is healthy for them and good for
Women are expected to be quiet birthing machines and accept the role that society has given to them or be exiled forever to the colonies. The society of unwomen is brutal, cold, and a miserable place for people to live. So the women of Gilead have a choice to either follow society 's expectations and become a handmaiden or retreat to become an outcast in the society of unwomen. When Offered wants to escape the grueling life of a handmaiden she realizes she can’t be a part of society unless it’s as they wish her to be. Just like in Boy Erased Offered is not free to be her true self because she will be forced to become an outcast.
The Commander and the Aunts claim that women are better protected in Gilead, where they are treated with respect and kept safe from violence. However, while Gilead claims to suppress sexual violence, it actually institutionalizes it. An example is Jezebel’s, the club that provides the Commanders with prostitutes to service the male elite. Another example is the Ceremony that compels Handmaids to have sex with their Commanders. Foster suggests, “...sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works” (158).
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the main character, Offred, who is a handmaid meaning that her duty is to get pregnant having intimate relations with the Commander because the wives are unable to get pregnant. A group of women are categorized into a group where they have duties and are all held under the same group being monitored by Aunts, who train the girls in what their tasks are. One day Offred and her companion, Ofglen, leave to do grocery shopping in Gilead, the setting of the story, and as they arrive at the grocery store they encounter Ofwarren, also known as Janine who is pregnant. Many of the women envy Janine because she is pregnant and as pregnant women in Gilead, they do their best to keep pregnant women safe and from not doing
However, in Gilead the main idea was to make lives to keep your own. Also, in Gilead men and women had specific roles, responsibilities, and freedoms but in Panem there were no specifically clear roles separated for men and
What did they not want? Gluttony. And Aradia? She was the Sin of Gluttony. Being Gluttony, Aradia was a sin that people would unintentionally indulge in though never truly sought out.
Atwood connects the political events to show how Gilead gained control and keeps their control by establishing fear into the women. Gilead stays in control by limiting speech to religious references, keeping the women from talking about the oppression they are suffering. Additionally, women are blamed for the social issues that were present in a pre-Gilead society such as rape, abortion and adultery. Women get the blame for the issues and men do not suffer consequences since it is in their nature to cheat. Atwood uses allusions to the Old Testament and historical events to satirize the oppression of women in political, religious and social
“What it really means is that she is in control of the process and thus the product. If any.” (109). The society of Gilead wants to make sure that the child is the Commander’s wife’s child as much as possible, and they believe that by having Serena Joy hold the hands of Offred, then that is possible. In this way, Offred, and all of the other Handmaid’s are sexually dehumanized.
From my personal research, the events in the novel were influenced by negative situations that involved the American society prior to the 1980’s. These negative aspects of Gilead’s religious society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ were drawn from similar issues facing the American public prior to the 1980’ s. These issues were based on religious concepts that were thought to greatly improve the American population's standard of living. The main ideas that influenced the creation of certain events and
This is because many of them were starting to believe that being a handmaiden was the absolute best option for them. Despite all of this, says Offred Moira became a fantasy for many. She became a mythological figure, a beacon of hope. Many grasped onto her story and used it to get through everyday life. After she became a handmaiden she slowly assimilated into the lifestyle of a handmaiden and began to agree with Gilead's laws.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel critiques gender inequality and autocratic authority. The hierarchical class of men consists of Commanders, Angels, and Guardians. In particular, the Commanders are the highest-ranking social group in Gileadean society. The Commanders are represented as powerful men. They have leadership roles, autocratic governance, and are oppressors controlling the Gilead regime.
Women do not have a life time to have children like men do, and after the age of thirty the peak of fertility starts to dissolve. In the time pre-Gilead finding fertile women was not such a problem. Women were often times even scrutinized for the age of which the mother was when she had a child. Offred—the main character, makes a statement about this while reminiscing about a conversation she had with her mother about people and their opinions on being an older pregnant woman saying, “When I was six months pregnant, a lot of them (friends) started sending me these articles about how the birth-defect rate went zooming up after thirty-five.—At the hospital they (nurses) wrote “Aged Primipara” on the chart, I caught them in the act.
It seems the older Wives are seeking to hang onto their attractiveness and fertility by decorating themselves with flowers and tending gardens. Serena Joy seems to enjoy mutilating the flowers ; flowers being the symbol for the Handmaids. This shows her hatred for the Handmaids . What the Handmaid’s never get to experience is freedom as they are supposed to blindly follow the rules set for them. In the text, the Eyes of God are Gilead’s secret police.
This society is governed by men, the Commanders with the assistance of Aunts, then comes the Wives, Handmaid’s and Moira. Gilead was formed as a response to the dramatic decreasing birth rates, thus women called Handmaid’s are used to rejuvenate the population. How and why are different social groups represented in a particular way in The Handmaid’s Tale? In Handmaid’s Tale, women are objectified and used only for their reproductive attribute.
In this frightening society, women are not allowed to speak freely, therefore, the handmaids learn how to lip-read, and to whisper at one another while they are at the Red Center (where handmaids are trained for their mission), as their only way to communicate with another person, and to maintain even a minimum of human contact in a society that has amputated their ability to feel as a normal human being. Even though this is pure fiction, sadly some common threads between Gilead and our society can be found. For instance, in some South Asian countries, women’s rights are non-existent, they are treated
The novel is set in a dystopian future that illustrates the collapse of the US government, a new theocracy taking over, and how the theocracy has supposedly solved the problem of fertility with the creation