The Handmaid’s Tale: Critical And Scholarly Analysis

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The Handmaid’s Tale
The Handmaid’s Tale has received so much critical and scholarly analysis, so finding something new to say about this piece of literature presents a unique challenge. Atwood has always foregrounded feminism and women’s experience in her fiction and a great deal of her poetry, so I would like to argue critically how Atwood`s innovative narrative forms in feminist fiction are essential to conveying feminist messages such as women’s experience and social critique. The women are most useful when they get children and do what their husbands say as is the case with the Commander and his wife Serena Joy who is opposed and believes the only way to live a more dignified life is to have a child.
in Gileadean society, the female members worth is based on reproductive in the theocratic dictatorship that does not allow them to exercise freedom and their rights, and they mostly need their husbands’ approval to make major decisions at home. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was a seminal novel in the feminist turn from utopian to dystopian writing during the 1980s backlash and offers a critique of religious fundamentalism of a Christian-modeled faith in which women are returned to the status of commodities of elite men and only valued for their reproductive capacities or other limited and circumscribed functions. Atwood’s dystopia employs estrangement to great effect through a setting that seems only a few years into the future and yet, nearly thirty years later, still produces the same sense of horrific possibility. The novel also identifies the kyriocentrism of fundamentalist religious denominations that do not allow alternative narratives for people’s lives and insist on a Christian, heteronormative point of view for all, masking violence against women behind an aura of protecting women from themselves and from men. The Republic of Gilead emerges under guise of improving the society, but limits the rights of everyone using religion to limit what people can do.
Atwood magnifies the impact of establishing a new theocratic society caution about the likely consequences of religious fundamentalism, which places limits on what most people can do. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a Christian fundamentalist regime calling itself the Republic of Gilead has staged a military coup in the New England portion of the United States and established itself as the theocratic government. Although the setting of the book is limited to the surrounding environs of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the text does not make clear how far the nation-state of Gilead actually extends other than to exclude the reestablished Republic of Texas and to forcibly resettle the Sons of Ham (African-Americans) in what was formerly North Dakota. The Colonies of Unwomen (elderly, non-fertile, and otherwise undesirable women) and Gender Traitors (gay men) lie at the environmentally devastated and toxic periphery of Gilead and also function as “the fate worse than death,” the threat of which keeps people in Gilead cooperative with the state and complicit with the regime’s restrictions.
Offred, the protagonist and narra...