The Role of Women in The Handmaids Tale, by Margaret Atwood - Book Report/Review Example

The Role of Women in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale As she struggles to survive the life she has now, the main character of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale clings to memories of the daughter and husband she lost when the new order took control of what is suggested to have been the United States. This character is able to remember numerous elements of modern society and women’s rights, such as being able to drive a car, travel where she wished when she wished and making her own decisions whether they were of import or not. However, when she was arrested in her attempt to flee across the former Canadian/U.S. border, she lost husband, daughter and life in one fell swoop, now living a life completely different from the one she’d known and not able to discover any news regarding those she’d lost. As she narrates her story, in which women’s rights have been completely removed, Offred illustrates the depth of the cruelty of such removal through the enjoyment of simple pleasures once taken for granted as well as the ways in which women’s individualism and women’s voices had been removed from history. The novel explores the various ways in which women were silenced in the fictional world of Atwood’s creation, but also in the similarly restrictive world of the past. This exploration reveals the damage caused to the individual, who is eventually destroyed or disappears from history, as well as the damage caused to a society that is no longer able to maintain the strength of equilibrium. In her novel, Atwood presents the fictional story of a woman trapped in a post-modern world of strict social structure based upon a rigid Puritan-like religious ideology and a patriarchal worldview reminiscent of the middle ages. Offred, the main character, is assigned the role of a Handmaid, a woman who, because of her background as a sullied fertile woman, has been reassigned in the new world order to provide an elite couple with a child. Offred, her birth name is never disclosed, is considered a fallen woman because she had been married to a divorcee prior to the establishment of the new world order. This association automatically designates Offred as an adulteress, so she is not eligible to become a bride to one of the new leaders. However, because many of their wives are past the age of child-bearing, Offred is valuable in her ability to carry a child. Each month, when she’s at the right point in her menstrual cycle, Offred must have uninvolved sex with her commander while the commander’s wife straddles behind her and holds her hands. By uninvolved, I mean that Offred is not permitted to talk with the man having sex with her nor is she allowed anything more than the essential physical contact. Her commander is similarly not allowed to touch her other than what is necessary for the physical copulation. Offred has very little choice in the matter, she is never given the right to refuse and, by law, is supposed to be given time after the act to allow the sperm a chance to fertilize an egg before going to clean up. Through the narrative, it is quickly understood that Offred has been reduced to the status of an object in every sense of the word and can only retain her value if she can prove she is an object capable of fulfilling its function. The subjugation of her gender experienced by Offred in the Gilead system goes much further than simply taking away her rights to property and family or even movement. Offred is preserved for a single function only, and her every movement or activity is structured with that purpose in mind regardless of her own opinions. She tells us, “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping” (Atwood, Ch. 13). She is so strictly controlled that her exercise habits are monitored, she is not permitted anything she might harm herself with, her diet is prescribed and she is not even able to use lotion for whatever harm she might do with it. Although she is aware of how things were when she lived in a country called the United States, this demonstrates how pervasive this sense is in that Offred no longer even considers herself an individual. She remembers how things used to be, but she cannot imagine thinking of herself now as anything more than a walking womb, one of the state’s greatest national resources and not an individual at all. She has lost all sense of individuality, all sense of value and has given up hope at ever being able to affect positive benefit in anyone’s life. Although it is Offred’s narrative and she is given little ability to interact with other women, particularly other women who are not also handmaidens, Atwood does provide a sense of how other women are treated within Gilead, the new order. One of the first differences to stand out is the idea that all of the women wear the same basic shapeless dress regardless of their role in society, but each role is assigned a different color. Offred wears the color red to designate her role as a handmaiden, but children are clad in white, wives are given blue and servants are dressed in green. Thus, it is suggested that all women within this society have been reduced to the level of object, further emphasized by the idea that no women were permitted to read or do other dangerous, mind-developing activities and the attitude of the commander’s wife, Serena, toward having Offred share her marital bed. Not all women are as constrained as the proper women of Gilead, however. The Commander smuggles Offred out of the house one night to take her to the downtown area and what used to be a hotel. This trip re-introduces her to one of her friends from the old days who now works in much the same capacity as a prostitute. The ability to wear different clothes than the socially ordered outfits of rank and the access to lipstick and lotion immediately distinguish their lives as more flexible than that of Offred, but Offred does not jump at the chance to live her life in this manner, either. As the story progresses, Offred can be seen to be losing her desire for freedom, for the ability to make her own decisions regarding how she should spend her time. While some women, particularly the handmaidens, opt for suicide by whatever means possible, others attempt to reach the dubious safety of an underground railroad, quietly funneling women out of the newly formed country. A pervasive police system further reduces any resistance from women struggling with adapting to their new constraints and what is left is a group of women with no option but to conform with all rules unless someone outside decides to help them. The women undeniably suffer from the change in status, but their removal from society effects not just themselves, but the entire population. As it is demonstrated through Offred’s narrative, the ability to care for others is one of the first things lost by women who are reduced to the status of objects that can be bartered or moved without consent or input. She has lost her husband and her daughter and is unable to even ask about them. She is forced to have sex with a man she doesn’t know while being held by that man’s wife and yet has no say in how this makes her feel. This loss of feeling taking place among the female population is then echoed by the commander as becoming a problem among the male population as well. Offred relates the commander’s thoughts regarding the new state in chapter 32, telling the audience, “The problem wasn’t only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore . . . I’m not talking about sex, he says. That was part of it, the sex was too easy . . . You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage. Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do.” As this quote reveals, simply having control over women is not sufficient to solve the social issues of the old world as it was thought it would. Instead, it has brought new, dehumanizing factors into play for women and men alike. The simple pleasures of life listed in the novel that are taken for granted by today’s audience are evidence of the degree to which women’s voices, women’s opinions, women’s goals, hopes or emotions were silenced. Atwood allows her character to speak directly to us, but it is revealed at the end of the novel that this narrative was a taped and transcribed voice recording found in an old cellar after Gilead had fallen, the fate of the woman recording it having never been discovered. It is noted as remarkable because of its incredible rarity – very few women of Gilead were ever able to make their voices heard or thought to record them at all. Offred’s voice was preserved only through an accident of fate that allowed this one echo to remain of the person she had been. Her description of her life, indicating that such simple joys as playing a game of Scrabble or browsing through old magazines illustrate not only that women were not permitted these luxuries, but that the loss of these simple activities equated to a loss of self (Ch 23). This, too, is carried through in the narrative. She remembers herself as a person early in the novel by making statements such as “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off” (Ch. 7). However, she begins to lose this sense of individualism further in. When the doctor offers her a way out of her situation during her weekly exam, she finds she is actually frightened of attaining the freedom she so recently dreamed of and less recently lost. It is miraculous, then, that she is able to make a recording of who she was and what had happened to her, only driven to this much freedom by lack of choice and luck when she was again forced to change her life, this time by people who evidently, from the simple fact she had a voice to record, had her best interests at heart. This final act of the recording, allowing the reader a sense of the devastating loss in not knowing what happened to Offred, that the full realization of this erasure hits home. Until it is personally experienced, the reader doesn’t begin to feel the horror of losing family in a moment. As the novel penetrates, it becomes clear that not only the women suffered from this unnatural state, but the men suffered as well. Offred continues to hint at this idea that there must be something in the silence of women more than just silence when she talks about Serena’s garden. She says, “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently” (Ch. 25). There is something contributed to the world by women that cannot be contributed when they are silenced but that provide society with something vitally necessary if it is to survive. This something may remain intangible; existing outside of the realm of the definitive, but nevertheless is essential and necessary. A reading of A Handmaid’s Tale is illuminating in many ways regarding the silence of women by emphasizing the details that work to erase Offred’s identity and existence, reduce her to little more than an object and detract from the entire society in so many ways. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. A Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Read More