The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Theme of Language abused as a Instrument of Power

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead creates an official vocabulary that ignores and warps reality in order to serve the needs of the new society’s elite. The world of Gilead uses titles as more than a way to differentiate one person from another, it uses titles to distinguish the very worth of the person. By making this “vocabulary” an official language, the society at Gilead successfully locked the citizens into an unyielding system defining the female and male roles as completely separate and discriminatory.  Having made it illegal for women to hold jobs, Gilead creates a system of titles. Whereas men are defined by their military rank, women are defined solely by their gender roles as Wives, Handmaids, or Marthas. Stripping them of permanent individual names strips them of their individuality, or tries to. Blacks and Jews are defined by biblical terms “Children of Ham” and “Sons of Jacob,” respectively that set them apart from the rest of society, making their persecution easier.  The Handmaid’s Tale carries on the tradition of the dangers of a totalitarian society. Gilead maintains its control over women’s bodies by maintaining control over names.

"How I used to despise such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk. An exchange, of sorts" (Atwood 11).

Restricting the language of the people is restricting how much of their identity can be expressed because language is a key aspect in expressing your individuality. Yet, since it is regulated, it will be easier to control the people for without language, certain inhabitants of Gilead are left with little to no identity, and those without an identity are easier to control.  Offred loses majority of identity when she sees her little girl happy without her. Towards the end, she begins to accept Gilead as her home whereas earlier she wanted to escape and find her family.

Favorite Quote

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (Atwood 33).

This quotation is from the end of Chapter 6. Offred and Ofglen are standing by the Wall, looking at the bodies of people who have been hanged by Gilead. The sight horrifies Offred, but she strains to push aside her revulsion and substitute an emotional “blankness.” As she represses her natural disgust, she remembers Aunt Lydia’s words about how life in Gilead will “become ordinary.” This is actually my least favorite quote, but I feel it sums the entire objective of the men in this society; conforming the women to their demands.  Aunt Lydia’s statement reflects the power of a totalitarian state like Gilead to transform a natural human response such as revulsion at an execution into “blankness,” to transform horror into normalcy. Aunt Lydia’s words suggest that Gilead succeeds not by making people believe that its ways are right, but by making people forget what a different world could be like. Torture and tyranny become accepted because they are “what you are used to.”

My Thoughts

Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We were warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of The Handmaid’s Tale with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead.  It’s a harrowing tale and no mistake. Atwood presents a future that had me shuddering with dread. Of course, one likes to think that it could never happen, but the plaintive tone of the narrator makes it all seem distressingly possible.  This novel seems ever more vital in the present day, where women in many parts of the world live similar lives, dictated by biological misogyny.  The ending was somewhat abrupt and ambiguous. I would have found it unsatisfying, but a well-crafted epilogue serves to soften the blow and answer some lingering questions.  Overall I found this book incredibly inventive, moving and really quite frightening.

Relevant Images

         

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Analysis of a Symbol

In Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, the novel takes place in a city called One State, where inhabitants see it as an Utopia. The overall structure of One State is cold; everything is made of glass, from tools to buildings. There is no privacy, and a Green wall surrounds the whole state. There is one exception to the glass though, the Benefactor - ruler of One State - is made completely out of iron. He is described as having a "slow, cast-iron echoing voice," and "cast iron hands upon His knees which moved with the weight of a hundred tons" (Zamyatin 205). Iron is a repeated image and symbol throughout the novel because it represents the oppressive weight of the Benefactor. Iron is strong, chains are made out of iron, and the people of One State were oppressed by these chains. 

Another imagery of iron exists between the city's current state of freedom and its mood of the weather. At the beginning of the novel the sky is described as:

"Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love - I am certain I can safely say, we love - only such a sterile, immaculate sky" (Zamyatin 5).

A world without cloud or storm is one of order, and conformity. Where the people are subservient and tame, just as the sky is tame. The most significant cloud imagery is in the storm just before the attempted theft of the Integral and the Great Operation. Here the weather is described with great frequency as being "Wind. Sky made of racing cast - iron plates" (Zamyatin 199). Here in their moment of fury, just before freedom will be obliterated forever by the great operation, the clouds are described as Iron; Wind, a representation of freedom, is described as iron. In the end of the novel, when the people of One State are transformed into mindless drones, the skies once again become calm and tame "It is day. Clear. Barometer at 760" (Zamyatin 224).

Favorite Passages

"Closer - she leaned against me with her shoulder, and we made one, she blended into me - and I knew: This is how it has to be. I knew this with every nerve, every hair, with the sweet pain of every heartbeat. And what a joy it was to give in to this has to be. A piece of iron probably feels just as glad to submit to the precise, inevitable law and clamp onto a magnet. A stone thrown up in the air hesitates for a moment and then plunges down headlong to the earth. And after the final agony a man is glad to breathe his last - and die" (Zamyatin 70-71).

D-503 talks about the inevitability of his desire for I-330. There is no logical reasoning that brings him to the conclusion that he has to be with her, yet he claims to feel complete confidence in this conclusion. This is one of the first times, if not the first time, that D-503 truly feels anything. Before he gets the "soul" disease, all of his conclusions are reached through logic and everything depends upon reason. In this case, he actually feels something without knowing why. D-503 tries to draw parallels between this emotional inevitability and things that can be explained through logic, such as magnetism and gravity. However, the final analogy compares his love to the final breath before death. OneState, as far as the reader knows, has no table for death. Excepting those executed for heresy, it seems that people in OneState still die naturally. Although there are medical reasons for death, it seems arbitrary in comparison to the strictly regimented patterns of eating and sleeping.

"And I hope we'll win. More - I'm certain we'll win. Because reason has to win" (225)

This quote, for me, makes the ending an unwanted one. Caught by the guardians, D-503 undergoes the Operation and becomes an empty, smiling, "happy" person again. What struck me about these closing words is that there is not a convincing explanation for why reason must win, any more than there is a convincing reason why D-503 must be with I-330 in the first passage.  Letting reason win might be one way of living life or organizing society, but it is clearly not the only way. There is also a strange reversal of death here. While the original, soul-less D-503 would have considered the soul-infested D-503 as the destruction of reason and therefore death, the D-503 with a soul would consider the final D-503 dead as well. D-503 first experiences the death of reason, and then experiences the death of emotion. Like a computer wiped of its memory, he is now ready to be re-inserted into society and continue in his utility.

My thoughts of the Novel

            Overall I loved reading this novel. I enjoyed the contrasting life styles to our own. The true nightmare   of We is not its grim picture of society, but the fact that so many of the ciphers, D-503 included, find it a delightful way to live. It quickly sparked conversation in class and was argued with much debate.  There are exceptions, however, including the seductive and mysterious I-330 with whom D-503 falls in love. Such attachments are, of course, forbidden, and D-503 is in anguish over his inability to control his feelings. I felt the connection to his struggle of understanding his own feelings. This constant back and forth frenzy that played in D-503’s head kept me intrigued throughout Zamyatin’s novel We.