What is “normal”? We spend enough time, collectively, trying to figure out just that, but if women think it’s complicated now, what about women making their way before us? Expectations were rigid, gender roles carefully defined, and opportunities...

How far have we, as women, come – politically, economically, and socially? With a female nominee for president, a tightening of the gender pay gap, and a push towards more family-friendly maternity/paternity leave, a cursory glance would reveal...

A comparative study of Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad reveals that texts are reflective of their context, whereby they reinforce the suited cultural values of its time, composer, and audience. Atwood reimagines the story of...

As human beings, we are fascinated by our past. The past affects society in so many ways most don’t even notice the effect and humans accept that conclusion. Whether it be the language spoken or the city a person lives in, everything around us has...

The human world is shaped by hierarchies and power. There are strata of influence through which people of influence and authority are able to suppress and control those who are ranked beneath them in terms of their social function and prestige....

The novel depicts the everyday-life of Offred – the protagonist – in the Republic of Gilead. Gilead is a totalitarian state and society that has replaced the US. The only goal of this new system is to place women into the center while also...

All societies must develop some form of social order to be able to function. Often times, the society’s government determines the foundations for social order by creating rules, institutions, or practices that group people more effectively....

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood discusses a dystopian society, which reversed the advancements in the feminist movement that came in the twentieth century. Gilead, an enclosed community under the rule of a totalitarian government, contains...

Psychologically humans are wired to have certain feelings, needs, and thought patterns. However, when these are threatened lethal behavior is initiated in order to preserve themselves. By way of illustration, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood...

This novel is an account of the near future, a dystopia, wherepollution and radiation has rendered countless women sterile, and the birthrates of North America are dangerously declining. A puritan theocracy nowcontrols the former United States...

"Feminist readings often discuss the "jobs" that are traditionally assigned to women, such as tending a home, caring for a husband, and bearing children, and the ways in which these jobs are used to keep women in a powerless position. Female...

When the general public studies and analyzes fiction, the plot, exposition of characters, climax, and resolution seemingly serve as the "critical" elements highlighted in its evaluation. Provocative literature, however, employs several less...

Since the beginning of history, language has been the most important means of communication and development amongst humans. Because of language's enormous significance, manipulating it to control a large group of people is extremely effective. In...

Are Winston, Julia and Offred eventually made into ‘reluctantly-selfish’ victims of totalitarian regimes or are they innately ‘pragmatically-selfish’ beings? Discuss in relation to The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984.

Offred and Winston, the main...

‘If I wanted to say just one thing to one person, I would write a letter.’ 1

- Margaret Atwood

Given the feminist reputation of The Handmaid’s Tale – it has been called a “feminist dystopia”1 – it is convenient to make the facile assumption that the...

Camus wrote that “the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely”.

Dystopian novels can be both a mirror and a magnifying glass, reflecting our world and exaggerating aspects of it to...

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a disturbing future dystopia in which all power is stripped from women and left in a male-dominated power structure. Throughout the novel, betrayal remains the over-arching theme, seen in men’s...

There are countless disparities between the society of Gilead and 1980s America. In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the citizens of this dystopian totalitarian state have unconventional reactions to life, death, sex, and violence. When we...

Texts are, by nature, cultural artefacts, intrinsically influenced by the societys from which they emerge. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) offers a “twist of today’s society” – the phallocentric Gileadean dictatorship, as seen through...

Humans can only experience life subjectively: each of us is rooted in our own individual positions that cause us to perceive differing shades of reality. An awareness of this universal condition permeates Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as...

In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, a range of narrative techniques are used to reveal the severity of life in Gilead, a dystopia foreshadowing the corrupt future of American society under a fundamentalist Christian regime. Published in...

Dystopian governments often work hard to erase identity through specific social constructs; they work to force the people they govern into a “cookie-cutter” mold. In literature, this molding is often fought by a person within the society, and that...

Kindness, when given out, is habitually expected to be returned. More often than not it is seen that kindness, in fact, is given so that something else of value may be returned. Kindness is often exchanged for similar invaluable things like...

In the world of literature, it is all about your reputation.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, an Orwellian romp into the near future lead by a female protagonist, received both the kiss of death and the gift of notoriety when it was labeled...