The Handmaid’s Tale Essay Examples
“Something could be exchanged… we still had our bodies. ” (Chapter 1) How are the women in The Handmaid’s Tale both oppressed and the oppressors? Atwood’s novel portrays strong feminist ideas throughout the tale, suggesting how women could become oppressed in the future. The Giledean state runs its laws and regulations based on extreme biblical…
Figurative language was used by Margaret Atwood, through the persona of Offred, to illustrate The Handmaid’s Tale. Figurative Language consists of similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration, onomatopoeia, hyperbole and idioms. First, figurative language can be used to describe different settings. 1. Offred’s experience at night in her bedroom “The heat at night is worse than the…
Offred, in Margaret Atwood’s disturbing novel The Handmaid’s Tale says, “But who can remember pain once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” The society of Gilead causes the aforementioned…
Names are a very important thing that most people are given shortly after birth. A name is “the word or words that a person, thing or place is known by” (Cambridge Online Dictionary (2011), Retrieved November 6th 2012). Names are given to identify an individual in replace of calling someone “it”, a term used to…
Some would argue that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a book that pulls its ideas and beliefs about women and their place in society from the Bible. But based upon the novel, the Bible, and some writings by Christian writers, that is true, but highly skewed. Let’s begin by taking a look at how…
The main themes in both Top Girls and The Handmaid’s Tale are feminism, politics and women’s role in society. Top Girls is based on social realism and political drama. Churchill once said “Playwrights don’t give answers, they ask questions”. [1] It could be said that Churchill is asking the audience to acknowledge how much a…
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale delves well into the horrid nature of extreme control and immoral limitations in defining the corrupt theocratic government at large, and more specifically the effect this control has on the society’s women. In an age in which a newly emerged and merciless governmental system called the Republic of Gilead has…
In this essay I am going to look at how readers get a sense of Dystopia from the first opening chapters of the novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood. We are thrown right into it and we readers are forced to think what is happening. Right at the start of Chapter one Atwood starts…
Gilead’s totalitarianism regime uses religion to meet the ends of the regime, rather than the regime being a means to serve God. ‘Soul Scrolls’ is a place where Handmaid’s purchase one of five prayers to be read to them, before being recycled. Offred’s prayer is a distortion of the Lord’s Prayer which is ostensibly much…
Compare and contrast the ways Margaret Atwood and William Blake present the power of authority over the most vulnerable in society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ Both Margaret Atwood and William Blake explore the issue of authority and the power it has over the vulnerable in society in their texts….
She wonders if women everywhere get issued exactly the same sheets and curtains, which underlines the idea that the room is like a government ordered prison, ‘government issue? ‘ Furthermore the regime continues as we see the main character starting to rebel against this isolation and confinement in which they wish to get rid of….
The Historical Notes section is Atwood’s epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale. Although confusing at first, one quickly notices that this section illuminates many issues in the text. The reader is told that, for the purposes of Atwood’s novel, the era of Gilead, and therefore Offred’s story, is historical fact. This makes the protagonist’s story, in…
Moira is a strong and independent woman who is not like other handmaids and therefore has a vast array of roles through out the play. Moira is an autonomous woman who rejects the responsibility and job of the handmaid and as a result of this the narrator uses her proper name. Moira allows the narrator…
Many novels set in the future, in situations supposedly removed from the present, in fact offer critiques of today’s society. What specific aspects of society do you think Atwood comments on in The Handmaid’s Tale and how does she do this? “Atwood’s feminism is an integral part of her critical approach, just as her concept…
In Dracula, Jonathan and Mina are separated twice; him going to another continent, and her becoming a vampire. The Handmaid’s Tale is no different. Before the narrator – Offred- was launched into the new regime, she was a normal woman, with a child and a husband, Luke. They were a happy couple, even though now…
