The Handmaids Tale Essay

Approximately one year ago, the first episode of the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s famed novel, aired. The story revolves around the life of the Handmaid Offred— a woman who is valued only for her fertility in the new society of Gilead. While the series has stayed mostly faithful to the original version, there is one key difference: in the TV series, Janine, one of the Handmaids, is led to a Salvaging (execution by stoning), but the Handmaids refuse to stone her despite Aunt Lydia’s warnings (Truong). This scene is absent from the novel, and Janine is portrayed as an sycophantic person, who does not seem to have any exceptionally close bonds with the other women. Also in the novel, Atwood suggests that the power

The sex is only one of such rituals. The Aunts are involved in all the rituals involving females, and in two particular—the Salvaging and the Particicution ceremonies—the aunts are responsible for reducing the women’s morality and humanity. In her article Lucy M. Freibert describes both ceremonies: “At the hangings each Handmaid must touch the rope in assent to the murders. At Particicutions, the Handmaids ritually dismember any man accused of rape. The Aunts supply the rhetoric that arouses the women to savagery” (Freibert 284-85). The Aunts moral compass’ has been twisted by their power, and they have seemed to have lost, or buried emotions of empathy as they direct the systematic and ritualistic destruction of a person by women who are otherwise helpless in this world. Looking at the above analysis of the settlers in “The Settlers”, there is a similar underlying theme in both the settlers and the Aunts: without feelings, the genuine connections that stem from the “shared humanity” people have, are ruined making them more likely to disregard the importance of the natural emotions mentioned above, and give in to