Notes

Atwood, however, is careful not to portray women simply as victims. First of all, many women in Gilead support the regime and help to keep other women in line. Wives control Handmaids, and female government officials, called Aunts, enforce discipline on other women. Atwood may be reminding her readers that women have traditionally served to enforce the rules of a patriarchal society, from bearing responsibility for the socialization of young girls to the policing of adult nonconformists through ridicule or ostracism. In a way, The Handmaid’s Tale is about the present as well as the future, suggesting that until there are significant changes in women’s and men’s understandings and social practices, society will continue to be in danger of this kind of repression.

While Offred has admirable traits, including a deep love for her daughter and a powerful will to survive, she also exhibits some weaknesses. She herself often points out that she wishes she appeared in a better light in her story. Unlike her friend Moira and her shopping partner Ofglen, she makes no efforts to overthrow the regime. After she begins her affair with Nick, her existence is totally ruled by her romantic feelings. Even the romantic notion that sexual love can justify one’s existence is called into question in the novel. Offred is living in a dream or a fantasy, lulled into a passive state, not just by her desires but also by a romantic ideology that women are taught by society.

handmaids tale a response to violent second wave feminism

straight woemn lvoe and hate men, were attracted to them but they're sexist and oppressive. Heck offred doesnt try to escape or resist gilead and towards the end just lives passively infatuated with nick and ehr romantic feelings.

The Commander's Wife orchestrates Offred's relationship with Nick, with the hope of Offred conceiving and therefore sparing the entire household from social stigma. Their relationship becomes more than merely another attempt at possible impregnation. Offred falls in love with Nick. This relationship provides 45 deep fulfillment for Offred who believes "It's lack of love we die from" (103).She suffers in Gilead, in part, because she has no one to love. But this illicit love can only take place outside Gilead's domestic boundaries. There are signs within the household of stale "old love; there's no other kind of love [...] now" (103). Because of their bond and the child they both hope she carries, Nick arranges for Offred's escape from Gilead. This becomes her final and most powerful act of resistance. It is, however, problematic. Though Nick helps her escape, love is not necessarily triumphant. We know nothing of Offred's fate or the fate of her unborn child. It is unlikely that Offred and Nick ever saw one another again. Offred's resistance and escape are also problematic at the political level. She forgoes opportunities to spy on the Commander for the May Day resistance because she fears jeopardizing her relationship with Nick. Finally, her escape is motivated by self-preservation rather than a desire to affect social change or solicit public outcry against Gilead. Like Serena Joy and the Aunts, Offred is truly complicit in her own oppression.

The Handmaid's Tale offers a horrific vision of things to come based on the extrapolation of things as they are.-greene
Atwood suggests that not only civil liberties but humanity itself is threatened by an increasingly degraded and dehumanising culture.- angela laflen
Atwood wants us to think that normality is a 'stage that could be dismantled at any moment.'-jG ballard
Notes the mirroring with the women of Gilead and Puritan women
The monthly rape ceremony which follows the scriptural 'and she shall bear upon my knees' grotesquely requires the presence of wife, Handmaid and commander. It synthesizes the institutionalized humiliation, objectification and ownership of women in Gilead.-cavalcanti (both women hummiliated man seems powerful)
the naming system of handmaids can have parrallels to todays equivalent were after marriage a woemn takes a mans name like she belongs to him now vanising her maternal hsitory