Handmaid's Tale I

Historic division of two social groups

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale portrays a dystrophic society in which women reduced to reproductive beings—just skin and womb. Males assert their power by displaying ownership of women as they colonize groups into segregated forms as, “The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field, which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barded wire. (4). Unfortunately, this type of control over “inferiors” has been displayed throughout history. The United States government has repetitively confined social groups like Native Americans and African Americans into oppressive categories. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault provides a “paradoxical relationship between sexuality and power, arguing how power dictates its law to sex” (Malak). In this novel, men and women are categorized into inherent binaries: to fraternize or sororize

Similarly, the protagonist Offred becomes a victim to a prison-like internment facility where her “role” is to have sexual intercourse with their “Commanders of the Faith”. It is explicitly evident that Atwood offers a critique of religion and the coercive state. Under these two institutions, women’s bodies serve as utilitarian instruments. The church-state force, Gilead, condemns sexuality practices to overcome the population crisis. Consequently, Gilead relegates sexual intercourse to a commodity or practice for survival, rather than pleasure. Women then become sexual laborers performing their “duty” to the superior male figures. Our previous reading, Genesis may suggest that woman was created to serve man when he says: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Similarly, the narrator lives to serve the “man” by sustaining the population. However, by doing so, she loses any sexual freedom or rights. She says, “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely” (63). 

Protecting women's rights

Malak, Amin "Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" and the dystopian tradition"