Handmaid's Tale Themes

Handmaid's Tale Themes

The handmaids tale is arguably one of Margaret Atwood's finest literary works, it focuses on many themes in the setting of a dystopian future that can be quite easy to draw parallels to our own present day, in this essay I will be specifically concentration on the oppression of women in the book.
One of the most prominent themes in the handmaids tale is identity. In the novel, you see everyone's identity has been stripped away from them despite their social rank. Even the privileged and powerful people were repositioned and renamed. To push it further, they put women in classes. For example, the handmaids are purely created for the use of reproduction. There are also Martha's, Aunts, Econowife's and wife's, each serve their own purpose. The female body is seen only for their cooking, cleaning and childbearing abilities. The woman inside the body has no importance despite how much knowledge or personality they may have. They are only truly aloud to be blank slates. No character in the book is mentioned by their true name, they're only defined by their gender role.
Another theme would be obedience. Everyone is passive and silent to their oppression, The women are worse off in the book because they have no social, political or economical power anymore. They're no longer aloud to react to big events such as having their children taken away from them. Any sort of acting out, including something as tame as reading can result in brutal punishment or even a death sentence. You can see in Offred's situation how this restricts her horribily in comparasion to the freedom she had in her past life. The more powerful women of Gilead go as far as clinging onto any power they have no matter how small, and in this way they support the regime by willingly being a part of it. For example, while the wife Serena Joy has no power in comparison to men, she does what she can to rule the women beneath her like Offred. She convinces the other womens into the power and ruling...

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