Patriarchy and Forced Heterosexuality in The Handmaid's Tale (original) (raw)
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Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's most renowned dystopian novel, is one of those works whose memorandum appears to transcend period. It has been analyzed to demonstrate the presence of various layers of feministic and dystopian cultural concepts in the novel. A qualitative investigation of secondary resources reveals that the situation of women in the novel is portrayed as a reproach to the patriarchal construction of the contemporary world. The women characters in the novel position as testimonies of the subjugation that unescapably concentrates them, helpless against a societal and political organisation that interprets the position of women as a reproductive machine. According to Atwood’s novel, by representing the repercussions of the revolution in the United States through the fake theocracy and totalitarian law insists, women must serve the commanders of Gilead society for sexual and biological reasons. Infertile women and working slaves should both serve as serva...
IDEAS , Vol. 8, 2022
Margaret Atwood, the famous Canadian author describes the contemporary society of New England through her renowned novel The Handmaid's Tale. Here she explores the work and function of the handmaids through some female characters. The protagonist, named Offred is assigned to do her work for the high-class soldiers. Being a mother, as a handmaid she has to leave her child and husband and is forced to do the work for the Gilead society. Offred's character comes out through her work, dialogue, recalling of past life, and description of the present situation. While narrating her character, the writer describes both male and female characters who represent the society. At the same time, the characters of this novel reveal two dominant societies during that time: patriarchal society and matriarchal society. This paper brings out the strained discourses between these two societies of New England by analyzing the characters. At the same time, my purpose is to show that the females always struggle hard for living purpose in so many ways, but ultimately their condition never improves because of the dominating patriarchal society.
The Misogynist: Women's Position in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
The Misogynist, 2023
This research paper aims at exploring how Margaret Atwood's use of the dystopian technique in The Handmaid's Tale reflects woman discrimination in a totalitarian theocratic society. Hence, her technique serves as a feminist critique of the patriarchal image of women and their role in society. The research offers a comprehensive analysis of Atwood's
Female Identity in the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
2019
The Handmaid’s Tale is a story where women’s rights have been revoked, and thus women are back in gender roles taken to the extreme, with no rights, no opinions, and no cosmetics or beauty products of any kind. A once independent woman is turned into an object, a ‘vessel’ whose sole purpose is to bear children to save the population. It is a dystopian nightmare which subjugates and subdues women to the point of sexual slavery, language impacts and indoctrinates them in a psychologicallydamaging manner, and denies them the basic freedoms which most women in Western civilization take for granted (Porfert 1). The aim of this paper is to arguing the representation of feminist dystopia and the issues related to female predicament, their submissiveness to men in the novels. It will draw a final picture of women’s struggle for freedom. It has been asserted that woman's identity is pushed aside and even erased in the patriarchal social structure of theocratic states.
The novel, Handmaid's Tale (1985) is set in future at a place called Gilead which is a dictatorial phallocentric society. The novel has characterized a dystopia, a term given by Sir Thomas Moor in his famous work Utopia. Gilead is a world having the tradition of negative utopias like dehumanization, totalitarian, and environmental disaster but this dystopia of Atwood differs from other dystopias like Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. My research paper, describing the brief aspect of dystopian beliefs, will be focused upon the political dominance and broken identity of females in The Handmaid's Tale. Offred, the protagonist of the story is captured while crossing the border of the country and forced to work under totalitarianism of a commander. Her name is never mentioned as all captured fertile ladies are called with the same name Offred. The work of an Offred is to fulfill the breeding purpose of giving birth for the childless wives of commanders of Gilead. During a monthly ritual the Commander intercourses with Offred in the presence of his wife because pregnancy is the social goal of every handmaid and if not succeeded the women is considered as un-woman and expelled to the colonies to clean up nuclear waste.
Gender-Based Discrimination Experienced by the Main Character in Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
LINGUAMEDIA Journal
The Handmaid Tale is a literary work created by Margaret Atwood in 1985. This novel tells of a woman named Offred who lives in a dystopian country called the Republic of Gilead. She experienced various forms of gender discrimination. This novel reflects criticism of forms of gender discrimination where women are treated inhumanely and do not have freedom in their lives. Two research questions are addressed in this study. The first question aims to find out the forms of gender discrimination experienced by Offred. The second question aims to find out how the main character deals with the gender discrimination she experiences. The research method used in this research is qualitative. Sources of this research include novels, books, and journals. Three feminist theories are used in this study to analyze and answer research questions: Rivkin and Ryan, Simone de Beauvoir, and Laura Mulvey. This research's impact is encouraging women to engage in critical thinking and not make themselves objects to men. In conducting this study, the researcher identified various forms of gender discrimination that contribute to the development of the main character.
DEPICTION OF MOTHERHOOD IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE
KY Publications, 2022
Margaret Atwood is a broadly perceived scholarly figure, particularly known for her topics of women's liberation. Her books, including Alias Grace and The Handmaid's Tale are well known for their women's activist topic, and one tracks down similar strong subjects inside her verse. Judy Klemesrud, in her article for The New York Times, when made the astute affirmation that "Individuals follow her in the city and in stores, looking for signatures and needing to examine the characters in her books the greater part of whom are wise, narcissistic current ladies looking for personality. These ladies likewise endure significantly, and accordingly, a few Canadian pundits have named her 'the high priestess of angst'"(March 28, 1982). To be sure, Margaret Atwood has an ability for the inner voice feministic viewpoint, and the tone of quite a bit of her work appears to show her feeling of political obligation. A proceeding and developing worry with inquiries of maternality and the morals of mothering is available in Margaret Atwood's books and can be followed in the story procedures utilized by Atwood. Accordingly, the stylish decisions made in developing every fiction is indispensably engaged with the moral remark Atwood is making. This arises in its most acknowledged structure I n the political and creative positions taken in The Handmaid's Tale. Of all Margaret Atwood's fiction no single work so expressly looks at the extreme minimization of ladies inside a political setting of such unbendingly implemented paternalistic predominance as The Handmaid's Tale, yet the tragic fate of the novel regularly diverts basic consideration from perusing this message as an editorial on contemporary women's activist issues, explicitly the problematic status of ladies' regenerative rights. Beginning with Atwood's basic spotlight on upheld maternity in The Handmaid’s Tale, perusers can all the more promptly recognize those similitudes between the future society portrayed in the novel and the current social truth of North American ladies whose opportunity to pick early termination or to design maternity keeps on being tested. Atwood addresses the emergency regarding regenerative freedoms through the worries of Gilead's world class male rulers who legitimize necessary maternity in light of a sharp decrease in the North American populace, apparently from the harmful impacts of drawn out ecological contamination as well as from changed admittance to fetus removal. Albeit an assortment of regenerative advances have for some time been accessible to the general public addressed in the novel, these developments have now been disavowed for an approach of authorized organic maternity without response to innovative mediation, recommending that a definitive objective of Gilead's male chiefs isn't the increment of populace but instead the social control of ladies. Subsequently, fatherly experts in Gilead react to the affirmed "emergency" of declining birth rates by standardizing substitute maternity to guarantee its male line of replacements and to deny possibly defiant ladies their previous independence in choosing whether or not to conceive an offspring.
Discourse and Oppression in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is a thought provoking novel about the domination and governing of women by men. It presents a dystopia where freedom for women is restricted because of the new Christian government's extreme policies. This new society, The Republic of Gilead, is described by a woman called Offred. She is a so-called Handmaid, a kind of breeding tool for the republic. The ideology and ideas of this Christian government are presented to us through Offred's first-person narrative. Flashbacks also provide a picture of the society "before" Gilead.
Ideological Representation of Women's Oppression in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Al-Adab Journal, 2021
The abuse of women is an issue that persists throughout the ages till the present time because people are still living in a world of a dominated idea which is known as man is the self and woman is the other. So the objective of this research paper is to argue this global issue using Van Dijk's Ideological Square (1998) as a framework so as to examine the ideologies that underline the use of language in The Handmaid’s Tale. It is hypothesized that the ideology of oppression is exposed in the novel throughout using the ideological strategies of positive- self presentation and negative-other presentation. Ultimately, it concludes that the novelist employs both, male and female, characters to consistently ridicule and offer negative coverage about women and to increasingly align and offer favorable comments about men to present the world of patriarchy from a different perspective.