The Handmaid’s Tale free essay sample

Like many totalitarian states, the Republic of Gilead starts out as an envisioned utopia by a select few: a remade world where lower-class women are given the opportunity interact with upper-class couples in order to provide them with children, and the human race can feel confident about producing future generations with the potential to see past divisions of classes. Yet the vast majority of the characters we meet are oppressed by this world, and its strict attention to violence, death, and conformity highlight the ways in which it is a far from perfect place. Atwood is tapping into a national fear of the American psyche and playing with the idea of American culture being turned backwards and no longer standing as the dominant culture. Atwood engages the reader by recreating events that have previously happened making the ‘dystopian’ world more relatable and, therefore, more frightening. Two of the most important themes of The Handmaids Tale are the presence and manipulation of power and freedom. The ideas of power, freedom and confinement are closely entwined and constantly on Offred’s mind. It is often the case, however, that these can be muddled with what is free and what is bound. Auntie Lydia thinks ‘there is more than one kind of freedom†¦ Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it. ’ This suggests the belief that; despite all that the women have lost, Aunt Lydia and Gilead argue, they are free now. They have freedom from things like sexist catcalls and potential abuse from strangers. They would argue that the women of Gilead should be grateful for such freedom rather than mourning the other freedoms theyve lost. On the one hand, Gilead is a theocratic dictatorship, so power is imposed entirely from the top. There is no possibility of appeal, no method of legally protecting oneself from the government, and no hope that an outside power will intervene which suggests that the people of Gilead are not free at all and have no power to break away from the regime. The confusion between boundlessness and restraint continues as Offred reminisces of Moira – Offred’s symbol of freedom: ‘Moira had power now, shed been set loose, shed set herself loose. She was now a loose woman. I think we found this frightening. Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. ’ The repetitions of â€Å"loose† shows the prominent idea of freedom – what all people would surely desire but the regime has made them frightened of this. The pattern of three gives the impression that she is now so loose that there is nothing to hold her together and she will not survive in the world she has escaped to. This shows how successful the Center is at brainwashing women and teaching them to believe in this new regime. So while once Moira would have been seen as a motivating force – a fantasy of an escape made good – the women in the Center are already retreating from their old notions of freedom and rights. With no freedom to think, the manipulated women question whether they even need any power. It soon becomes clear, however, that Offred is frivolously trying to hold on to the few memories she has left – as she feels these giver her power. Offred tries to still recognize the fact that this regime is wrong and she desperately tries to hold onto the idea of wanting to escape. She constantly reminds herself that she ‘intend(s) to last’, but she is morally and literally becoming ‘undone’. In this society memory is resistance in a less active manner. Her memories are a place she can escape to so we question whether that is enough freedom or not. To the present day reader the idea of only being free in your memories is far too restricting – reinforcing the dystopian narrative. As Offred’s relationship with the commander develops we see and emergence of the idea that even in a powerless regime women can exploit their sexual power and we become familiar with the idea of ‘fallen women’. Offred is in her room and filled with nostalgia for the outmoded habit of falling in love; ‘Falling in love, I said. Falling into it’ which is then mirrored; ‘Falling in love, we said; I fell for him’. The underlying biblical reference to ‘The Fall’ when Adam ate the apple from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden is very prominent. We are forced to consider the idea of the fall from innocence, which is presented as a paradox in this dystopian world as the women are not, by the terms of the bible, innocent. However it is also a reflection of the Gilead society because biblically ‘The Fall’ was Eve’s betrayal of Adam and the women who have been deemed â€Å"fallen† were unable to become pregnant – the ultimate betrayal of this society. The whole idea of â€Å"falling† is hugely passive and gives the impression of a very powerless action. For women in present day society I believe it would be the ultimate torment to be catapulted back in societal thinking where woman were far less than equal as it has previously been. The repetition of biblical references strongly draws in the theme of religion. The Handmaids Tale is a warning about what might happen if extreme religious ideology is followed as a solution to societal problems. It suggests that allowing religious fundamentalists to run a government is a recipe for injustice, cruelty and oppression. By using the novel to specifically target fundamentalist Protestants in America, sometimes known as the Christian right because of their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, womens rights and gay rights, we know that religion is a pressing issue not only in the predicted future, but in today’s society religion is an element of life that many people hold close allowing Atwood to engage the reader in the idea that this nightmarish world could become a reality. The Handmaids Tale was written during the presidency of Ronald Regan, from 1981 to 1989 – during which political and religious conservatism was on the rise. The novel takes some of the positions advocated by religious conservative and exaggerates them. For example, it is no secret that many conservatives, both then and now, wish to re-criminalize abortion. This is mirrored in the novel as the doctors who performed abortions are hanged at the Wall. Conservatives also tend to oppose gay rights; in the novel gays are hanged for ‘gender treachery’. The novel is infused with frequent allusions to different parts of the Bible. The most obvious is the reference to Genesis 30:1-3, ‘Give me children or else I die. The Ceremony, the ritual in which a Handmaid must lie face-up on her Commanders wife and grasp the wifes hands while the Commander has sex with her, and the Birthing Ceremony, where the wife feigns labor while the Handmaid gives birth, are direct references to the Genesis story of Rachel and Jacob. Also, we learn through Offred that the actual name of the Red Center, where Handmaids are trained, is the Rachel and Leah Center. The direct quote from the bible is a method Atwood uses to unnerve the reader as it makes the Gilead dystopia more realistic. On the most obvious and superficial level, the Bible plays an important role in the naming of objects and people in the Republic of Gilead. The men, according to their role in society, are called ‘Commanders of the Faithful’ and ‘Guardians of the Faith’ are the members of the police force. ‘Angels’ or ‘Eyes of the Lord’ are the soldiers of the army, and they have names like ‘Angels of the Apocalypse’ or ‘Angels of Light’. Whereas the word â€Å"angel† suggests something innocent or holy, the â€Å"Angels† in Gilead fight in wars. The names seem to suggest that it is a religious war they fight. The ‘Eyes’ are the secret police that are supposed to spy on the people in Gilead. The most important name, namely that of the state itself, is an allusion to the Bible as well. In the Old Testament, Gilead is a very fertile and therefore very desirable region in ancient Palestine. Ironically, the Republic of Gilead in Atwoods novel is exactly the opposite of fertile and desirable, which shows how the state tries to appear clean and pure, although it is not. It is a wasteland that has been devastated by pollution and war and whose citizens are oppressed. Significantly enough, the regime only uses statements from the Bible that present the beauty and godliness of Gilead and leaves out passages that imply negative things about the biblical model. One example for the choosing of biblical passages for the purposes of the regime is a passage in Hosea that Gilead chose not to use: â€Å"Gilead is a city of wicked men, stained with footprints of blood† Throughout the novel, Atwood shows how Offred desperately desires the knowledge and language she is being denied by the Gilead regime. Right from the opening pages of the novel it is evident that Offred’s desire for language to help her communicate and keep her identity is strong. The dislocated opening emphasises the confusion and fear that characterize any totalitarian state. For instance, in the opening chapter of the novel, Offred and the other Handmaid’s learnt each other’s real names by passing messages from bed to bed when denied the opportunity to otherwise do so. Offred describes how â€Å"We learnt to lip read watching each others’ mouths†. This highlights just how important names are in constructing our identities. The women in the centre feel it important enough to know each others’ names to risk being disciplined to do so. This shows hints of the bible again, as innocence and knowledge are being challenged against each other. They can’t ‘unknow’ what they have learned. Offred frequently creates similar neologisms, for example: ‘Salvagings Prayvaganzas Birthmobile†¦ Unwomen†¦ Unbaby’ which suggest the exaggeration of the regime that in today’s society there aren’t even words to describe some events. In a society where literacy is forbidden her, Offred frequently contemplates words and their meanings. Instead of illicit sex, the commander engages her in illicit games of Scrabble. Scrabble doesn’t fully rule out the sexual tension between Offred and the Commander as the words she chooses to spell all have sexual connotations or make some kind of physical reference; ‘Larynx’; ‘Valance’; ‘Quince’; ‘Zygote’; ‘Limp’; and ‘Gorge’. These choices of words gives the impression that the whole regime is dominated by sex and reproduction – a fearful idea for the people of today’s society who have worked so hard to bring humanity to where it is today. Harriet F. Bergmann argues that the novel presents its reader with an exercise in learning how to read for survival as in order to stay alive, Offred learns to use the new language of her own time so as to seem part of the new order that the language reflects. Nighttime is where Offred feels at her safest. This irony is significant because human nature teaches us not to trust the night, as the moon is never constant. The continuous changing of the moon symbolizes Offred’s memories becoming more of a blur. Sleep; or no sleep’ the night offers freedom of a kind because Offred is more or less alone. Inside her head she can dream herself into better times: ‘the night is my time out. Where should I go? †¦ Somewhere good. ’ At other times, she lies awake grappling to make sense of the horrendous changes in her situation. Atwood repreats references to the night because Offred sees her dreams as an escape and is never once concerned about whether of not sheâ⠂¬â„¢ll have a bad dream – as she could not dream of anything worse than the situation she’s in. To conclude, in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaids Tale the nightmarish scenes are created with a striking reality and continuously mirrored with present day life to create a dystopian narrative. At first, the situation in which the people of Gilead live seems completely futuristic and improbable but Atwood’s endless parallelisms to events which have already occurred gives reason to believe that history could repeat itself, as it has relentlessly done so in the past.