The Wave
The Handmaid’s Tale: A Literary Analysis
Samuel Solomon Sanders
By
About the Writing
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a chilling tale unfolds as women are stripped of their rights and reduced to mere vessels for procreation, sparking a harrowing exploration of love, identity, and the consequences of a totalitarian society.
The Writing
Samuel S. S.
Bored Satiation
N.A.
5 Abril 2023
The Handmaid's Tale: A Literary Analysis
Imagine, for a second, what it would be like if half of the world's population was suddenly under the very thumb of the other. Dispel your worries, for this scenario is only brought to life in Margaret Atwood's dystopian fiction, The Handmaid's Tale. Or, perhaps, to hell.
After radicals perform a coup and consequential execution of the United States government, women citizens become slowly indoctrinated into complacency. The men of society force a woman designated Offred to lend her body as a handmaid to those leading the new oppressive regime. In a society where bio-contamination is prevalent, and celibacy is a sin, fertile women, called "handmaids, are considered sacrosanct and are used only to carry a fetus to fruition. The regime sent all sterile women to irradiated lands and hung all protesters. Offred, having been forced into a handmaid during her younger years, remembers the time before and strains to remember who she was. She holds onto the time before women were free to read and speak without fearing a whipping and to love and be loved.
Margaret Atwood's much-disputed novel, banned in numerous libraries, is not just a story of a fictitious woman's loveless suffering; it is also a warning to those who may doubt the volatility of the present and love's importance in it.
The ability to love makes a person alive; it is inherent in nature. Without it, being is possible but never living. Throughout the book, Offred is forced by her superiors to chain her hunger for love beneath her feet, resulting in constant melancholia in both her thoughts and her actions.