Feminist Issues in 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 novel uses an exaggerated social setting to delve into issues of women's powerlessness and loss of identity such as can be found in our contemporary society, different from the world of Gilead only in degree. The slavery of these women and the resulting powerlessness and loss of identity is comparable to the plight of blacks in the era before the Civil War.

The story is set in a future United States called Gilead. This new version of the U.S. came into being after t

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s era into a projected future produces a warped version of the family unit, one more artificial and less organic than the family of our own time. The reason for this shift is that fewer children are being born, making the creation of a family--and a large family, if possible--a priority. Offred's description of the place where she lives evokes the sense of the past as something that has come back into the present that infuses this novel, extending beyond location and dress to underlying social attitudes: Late Victorian, the house is, a family house, built for a large rich family. . . A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only (Atwood 11). The image of the sitting room evokes class differences not unlike a distorted version of television's Upstairs, Downstairs, with slavery replacing normal servitude. Atwood's novel demonstrates that the role of women in society has long been an issue of social class as well as gender, and the advancement of women in our own time has a strong sense of overcoming class differences and achieving economic parity as well as greater freedom of choice in a number of areas, social, economic, political, and personal. In the pre-Civil War South, attitudes of superiority were use

Category: Literature - F