Margaret Atwood
Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film 1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood.
In addition to writing, Atwood taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2016 for the spirit of political activism threading her life and works.
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The
Handmaid’s Tale
The handmaid’s Tale
is a graphic novel written by Margaret Atwood first published in 1985. The fact that it was a successful novel is beyond any doubt, since it was adapted into
a show in Netflix. There are many reasons why this work gained such a good
reputation as we will see in the analysis of this extract.
The story is being told by Offred, the protagonist, who is a handmaid in the Commander’s house. It is through her that we know the rest of the characters, places and events, since she is the narrator. As we can see in the text, gender is probably the most important feature in the novel because it determines everything, from the roles to the jobs and from having a choice to not having it. From the very beginning we read how bodies are used as a political tool: women are forced to dress in red (or green), and forced to cover their bodies but also their hair. Besides, related to this we find the fact that bodies determine lives: women can only be mothers or maids, but they cannot choose what to do, what job to have nor anything else. Similarly, there are religious terms which become politicised. Although in Gilead there is no separation between the Church and the State, institutions like the police or soldiers have names like the “Guardians of the Faith” and “Angels” respectively. In fact, the very names maids are given is a reflection of how they are treated as simple possessions.- " of-fred"- with no right even over they identity.
One other thing we could highlight in the analysis is the fact that the maid’s clothing is
red, since sometimes colours symbolize the opposite of what the maids are. First
of all, red represents the blood and also fertility, and that way childbirth,
something with great weight in the novel due to the fact that becoming a mother
would change a maid’s life for the better, reason why in page 41 of the extract
we read Offred’s thoughts: “Give me children, or else I die.” However, not every women we see in the novel is a mother, since maids are precisely there to give birth to children for barren women who cannot have their own children. Furthermore, red also
symbolizes passion and sex. Nevertheless, maids do not have sexual relations for the sake of pleasure. But even if they did, they would be having sex with the commanders, that is, married
men and therefore they wouldn’t be as pure as they were suposed to and it would result in death penalty.
All
things considered, though this work, Atwood manages to create a society which is nothing but an extreme representation of how women have been considered through history. They neither own their bodies nor their identities. No wonder, the impact of The Handmaid’s Tale has been huge, something
shown by the readers of the novel but also of the Netflix series’ viewers, as the
way in which women are portrayed within the dystopian city of Gilead is easy to compare
to the ways in which women have been disregarded and discriminated over history.
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