Margaret Atwood
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Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, presents her protagonist, Offred, in the context of a narrative in which past and present are intimately juxtaposed. The palimpsest reference on the first page of the novel gives the reader an indication of both this approach and the attitude of the narrator/protagonist toward past and present. This attitude is that the past, full of human love and freedom, is gone forever, and the present, lacking such love and freedom, is all that remains, full of regret and loss and fear. The free past, in the context of the palimpsest reference, is erased, and the fascist present is written over the erased past. (As we learn in the Notes, the actual recording of Offred's tale on tape---recorded over previously recorded music---is a literal example of palimpsest.) Of course, the very fact that Offred remembers the past nullifies the suggestion that it is gone forever. Offred may take her memories with her into death, or wherever her captors take her at the end of the book, but the reader is meant by the author to be the recipient and carrier of Offred's memories beyond her end. It is the thesis of this study that Atwood has written this book to affect the reader, to create in that reader a deeper appreciation for love and freedom, and an awareness that, step by step, that love and freedom can be taken away as it was taken away from Offred. The fact that Offred is a woman, and that the book has a feminist perspective, does not prevent both women a
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present) a future which will bring back the past (and its precious freedom). However, at the end of the book, knowing all she does by this time about the ruthlessness and pervasiveness of the forces lined up against her, and just as she is about to be taken away for "violation of state secrets" (377), Offred still maintains the self-deception with respect to freedom under fascism, still imagines that she has at least her body to barter:
I don't want pain. . . . I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power (368).
She believes that she retains some basic freedom to bargain with her fascist rulers, the same physical, body-based freedom she admittedly fantasized about at the beginning of the book. She had not until that point accepted the fact that her body was not hers. Even as she admits it, however, she is unconsciously preparing to adopt another form of ungrounded optimism. As they take her away, she imagines: "Whether this is my end of a new beginning I have no way of knowing. . . . And so I step up [into the van of her captors], into the darkness within; or else the light" (378). There is
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1757
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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