Towards a Greater Understanding of Margaret Atwoods A Handmaids Tale - Essay Example

Towards a Greater Understanding of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood presents the fictional story of a woman trapped in a post-modern world of strict social structure based upon a religious ideology and patriarchal worldview. Offred is a Handmaid, a woman who, because of her background as a fertile woman previously married to a divorcee (making her marriage null and void and herself a close-cousin to a prostitute), has been reassigned in the new world order to provide an elite couple with a child. Each month, when she’s at the right point in her cycle, Offred must have uninvolved sex with her commander while the commander’s wife sits behind her and holds her hands. Offred has very little choice in the matter and is not permitted to speak with either individual during the act, nor has she seen her daughter or her husband since her arrest trying to flee across the former Canadian/U.S. border. As she narrates her story, in which women’s rights have been completely removed, she 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. A patriarchal worldview is also the topic of an essay entitled “Shakespeare’s Daughter” by Virginia Woolf. Investigating the ideas of subjugation as a most horrific cruelty and subjugation as complete removal within this novel, it is helpful to have read “Shakespeare’s Daughter,” an excerpt of a longer speech given by Woolf at a women’s graduation ceremony in 1928 as it provides insights as to how women were subjugated and allows these aspects of the novel to emerge in greater detail. Both novel and essay explore the various ways in which women were silenced and the damage this causes to the individual, who is eventually destroyed or disappears from history. 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. “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). Although she is aware of how things were when she lived in a country called the United States, this quote demonstrates how 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. This cruelty committed to the individual is reflected to some degree in Woolf’s address. She suggests that this sister of Shakespeare, whom Woolf names Judith, was promised at less than 17 years old to a neighboring son. When she protested that she hated the man, she was first beaten for her disobedience and then promised small trinkets as rewards for doing as she was told. “He [her father] would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes” (Woolf, 1928). She is not considered an object, or even a person, but rather an obstinate pet or donkey, needing a carrot to coax her along the few more necessary steps. This is emphasized again as the theatre manager compares the idea of her acting to a poodle dancing. Feelings and goals, personal choice and individuality is not recognized or permitted in either society. The simple pleasures listed in both novel and speech 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, but it is revealed at the end that this narrative was a taped voice recording found in an old cellar after Gilead had fallen, the fate of the woman recording it having never been discovered. 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 person (Ch 23). While she remembers herself as a person early in the novel, “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), she begins to lose this sense of individualism further in. When the doctor offers her a way out during her weekly exam, she finds she is actually frightened of attaining freedom. This simultaneous desire for and fear of freedom is also reflected in Woolf’s essay regarding Shakespeare’s sister Judith. Judith also longs for the ability to make her own decisions, to explore the world or just to be with people she loves. “She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly” (Woolf, 1928). Like Offred, any writing Judith did was done only on the sly, well hidden from view for fear of someone catching her in the act. “Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways,” Woolf tells us, and so, when faced with the option of succumbing to an unhappy marriage or risking her life in running, Judith took the same action Offred did in trying to find a new way of life elsewhere. While Offred was caught by the authorities who dragged her into Gilead at first, she nevertheless managed to escape again, at least long enough to record her history. Judith was not so lucky, however, finding no friends in the outer world to send rescuers in and dying by her own hand having never written a word. This final act of the recording, allowing the reader a sense of a devastating loss in not knowing what happened to Offred, that the full realization of this erasure hits home. Offred hints at this idea that there must be something in the silence of women more than just silence when she talks about Serena’s garden: “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). Judith’s silence is similarly heard as a shout as the concept of losing the beauties gained through such writers as Shakespeare emerges and one realizes that this was done over and over again. While a reading of A Handmaid’s Tale is illuminating in many ways regarding the silence of women, if one were to read Virginia Woolf’s essay first, these ideas become more clear, 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. Woolf, Virginia. “Shakespeare’s Sister.” Guardian Unlimited. (1928; reprnt 2007). May 26, 2007 Read More