The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood raises a number of feminist issues in her novel The Handmaid's Tale, a book embodying a vision of a dystopian society, or a utopian society that does not work and does not serve the interests of the majority of its population. The novel is narrated by its protagonist, a young woman known as Offred who has been kidnapped by her government and separated from her husband and child. She is forced into slavery as a Handmaid, or surrogate mother, for a powerful couple that cannot have children of their own. This story is set in a future where such arrangements have become commonplace. Offred encounters not only the enormity of the demand placed on her to be a surrogate mother but a number of other indignities as her society imposes a code upon her, forcing her to dress and behave in a certain way in order not to be punished. Atwood develops here a vision of the place of women in society and uses an extreme situation to comment on the secondary position women occupy in Western society today. The feminist issues this raises have ben addressed by a number of writers and commentators in recent years, and many would not find the nightmare vision offered by Atwood to be that different from the reality of today or that extreme as an extrapolation from the present into the future.

The story is set in a future United States called Gilead. This new version of the U.S. came into being after the President was assassinated and the Constitution suspended, after which an

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rity, a full emotional life centering around husband and children, and an opportunity to express her capacities in the management of her home, she has little cause for discontent (Fremon 12). While this statement is arguable in the way it assumes that women are not discontented under such circumstances, it is clear that for most of history women were expected to be content with this sort of life and were trained for that purpose. Clearly, circumstances of family life have changed in the modern era. Industry has been taken out of the home, and large families are no longer economically possible or socially desired (it is significant that in the quotation from Atwood cited above, the house is described as having been "built for a large rich family" [Atwood 11]). The home is no longer the center of the husband's life, and for the traditional wife there is only a narrowing of interests and possibilities for development: "Increasingly, the woman finds herself without an occupation and with an unsatisfactory emotional life" (Fremon 13). The change in sex roles that can be discerned in society is closely tied with changes in the structure of the family. Sociologists recognize that women have roles in the family and roles in publi

Category: Literature - T