The Handmaid's Tale Analysis

In the Novel the titled the Handmaid’s tale, the author Margaret Atwood shows us how Offred desperately desires the knowledge and language that she is being denied. Offred desire the knowledge and language to better her communication, and also to keep her identity strong. One of the prominent themes in the Handmaid’s Tale is the use of language for power; men in this society are seen as the most important, they have their own names, and they keep their identity. Women’s names are taken away from them; they are classified by their gender roles such as wife, Martha, and Handmaid. Erasing these women’s manes is a way of taking away their identity and this makes them not a person but an object. Forbidden women to read put them at a disadvantage place than men because men are allowed to read to educate themselves and become powerful. In this society, access to form of written language is very controlled, and the people that have access to it are people of high ranking authority like the Commander; they are the only ones that can own books, and legally read. By restricting access to information to its people, they can easily control them because they do not have general knowledge about what are being taught.
Offred and the other women are forbidden from writing, and reading. Throughout the novel, Offred desperately desires the knowledge and language that is being forbidden by the Gileadean regime; This is shown at the first chapter where she and the other handmaids learnt each other names by just passing messages from bed to bed; Offred describes it as “We learnt to lip, read, and watching each other’s mouths” (Atwood 4). This scene shows how important names are part of our identity, and these women are learning each other names to ...

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...ly feels about her situation in Gilead since her narration is a contrast of language used in Gildean era and the language used in the pre-Gildean Era. And this contrast demonstrated suppression from the theocratic government.
We communicate our ideas through language, and when power structure put any sort of pressure on the usage of language, it can cause people to rebel. Oppressing language to maintain power in a society will only last for a short period because at some point, people will rebel against it, and this was shown in the Handmaid’s Tale. Women in this society cannot express themselves at they want to, they are being suppress by men. I think that these women should stand up more for themselves because they are as good as men; they should not be degraded because they are not just like men; they also deserve all the rights that men in Gildea deserve too.