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Importance of social control for society
Importance of social control for society
Importance of social control for society
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Comparative Essay-Draft Dystopia refers to society or community that is undesirable and developed to substitute the problem with the world with one another. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and the novelette Words and Music by William Sanders, deal with the creation of irreversible oblivion of dystopian fictions in which the society or community is being oppressed. The authors want to prove a dystopian society is not only furious and frightening but also hard to change. The authors explore the oppression of the authority in a way that their information, independent thoughts and freedom are restricted. Also, the cause of Complacency makes people to accept the oppression without much resistance. Last but not least, language …show more content…
has been a powerful tool for the oppressors to control over the society. (Ask for the use of literary devices). Although the two authors have their novel on the same topic and share a number of similarities within the characteristics of dystopian fictions, they used very different viewpoints and language in the narration of the text. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the civilians of Gilead are under the oppression of the government in many different ways.
In result of the oppression, freedom of speech and movement become a portion of the many restrictions in the Republic of Gilead. In the early stage of the novel, the author wrote, “They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll.”(Atwood 19) Here, Offred is compared herself to a girl’ toy, which needs permission to talk and move. It is a metaphor used by the author to compare Offred to a girl’s toy where the doll represents her loss to the freedom of speech as well as her freedom of movement. The use of metaphor is very important to the development of the story because it relates to the text very dramatically, and intends to be visually appealing. Similarly, in the middle of the novelette Words and Music by William Sanders, the mentality of the guests of the all night gospel singing are occupied by the music from a group called Maranatha. The music is very intensive of which “soaked right through your skin and blended with your breathing and your heartbeat” (Sanders 18). The author assimilates the music to a solution which mixes with the blood stream and heartbeat. The use of metaphor exhibits the physical feeling when hearing the music. Since the Maranatha’s music has a superior influence to human beings, it allows them …show more content…
to further enhance their control over the guests of the concert. Just in the same part of the story, Sanders wrote: “Jimmy turned and saw that the preacher was staring wide-eyed and slack-faced in the direction of the stage. His head was nodding, his shoulders moved rhythmically, ad he shifted his weight from foot to foot in time with the music. He didn’t respond when Jimmy spoke his name; he didn’t even appear to notice when Jimmy jabbed an elbow into his short ribs” (Sanders 19). This quote fully reveals the mentality and physicality of preacher who is fully dominated by the music. The usage of repetition is not only stylistically appealing but also helpful to express the idea of oppression in much more engaging and notable way. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the cause of complacency played a major role in the Republic of Gilead. The author suggests that in a totalitarian state, people will endure oppression willingly as long as they receive some slight amount of power or freedom. In the beginning of the story, the author wrote “I enjoy the power; the power of a dog bone, passive but there” (Atwood 28). Offred used her sexuality to allure the guards, even though she knew it was something forbidden to do, but she enjoyed the feeling of having initiative under the many restrictions of the Republic of Gilead. This quote used metaphor to imply the characteristics of dog bone to the sexuality of Offred, while the guardians are compare to the dogs, which are attempted by the attractiveness of the dog bone. This usage of metaphor illustrated the idea-small amount of power work to reduce and suppress their people to accept oppression. Similarly, in the novelette Words and Music by William Sanders, the protagonist Jimmy Hominy turned into a reassuring state after the assist from his brother Clyde, who help tuning the top three strings of that seven-string and steel-made guitar. Close to the end of the story, Sanders wrote, “He had no name for what he was playing. He had never played anything like it before, even in his imagination; and he knew has he played that he would never be able to do it again. It was a thing only of that moment, as one-time and singular as a snowflake or a murder” (Sanders 27). After Clyde’s assist, Jimmy is overconfident about the fact that he might be able to defeat Seth Abadon, he is exerting his utmost strength, which shows his complacency of the situation. The author not only used repetition to emphasis the expression of thought from Jimmy, and also used simile, comparing that performance “as a snowflake or a murder”, but snowflake is cold but small, and murder brutal, but is a sin, which works like foreshadowing in a way to hint that Jimmy is going to lose. All of the mistakes come from the cause of complacency, which reduce the resistance subconsciously. In Atwood's story-The Handmaid's Tale, religious terms are used for political purposes.
The Republic of Gilead is a theocracy government of which separation between state and religion does not exist. Its official language incorporates religious words and referenced from the bible. For example, “Domestic servants are called “Marthas” in reference to a domestic character in the New Testament; the local police are ‘Guardians of the Faith’; soldiers are ‘Angels’; and the commanders are officially ‘Commanders of the Faithful’” (www.sparknotes.com). In connection between this quote to the text, religious terminology are purposely used to describe people, ranks, and political trickery in pious language. The reference to bible is a metaphor of characters in the novel being compared to the people in the text, in order to imply the characteristics of people in the bible to the characters in novel. Likewise, in the novelette Words and music, religious terms are used not for political but literary purpose. For example, in the middle of the story, a group came into the concert and replaced the Indian performers, from the quote “Brother Seth Abadon, and a group called Maranatha”! that group’s name is “Maranatha”, which usually refers as a curse, and it means “our lord to come” (dictionary.reference.com). The term Maranatha is foreshadowing the following event. The name also symbolizes irresistible, with the meaning our lord to come, the guest have their faith, believing they will be
saved. The author has pick up the danger of being religiously controlled and shows the importance of religious oppression in dystopia. Overall, dystopia is mainly focused on the oppression of the civilians such as bureaucratic control and religious control, which confirmed the difficulty to escape from one of these kind of society due to the possibility of being physically and mentally controlled, as well as losing the intention to fight against the society, but also having the chance to be philosophically controlled. In a society that cannot be worse than it was, one person cannot make such a huge different but all the people should stand up together as one, which will be powerful enough to make a change.
Dystopia represents an artificially created society to where a human population is administered to various types of oppressions, or a human population lives under the order of an oppressive government. The novel Fahrenheit 451 and the film V for Vendetta both effectively display this dystopian concept in their works. The nature of the society, the protagonist who questions the society, and the political power that runs the society are examples of how the novel and the film efficiently capture the main points of a dystopian society. The authors of the novel and the film use their visions of a dystopian future to remark on our present by identifying how today’s society is immensely addicted to technology and how our government has changed over the past decades. Furthermore, the authors use our modern day society to illustrate their view of a dystopia in our
In the two books that we have read this year there has been one common theme, exile. In The Book Thief and in A Handmaid’s Tale, important characters were exiled. For example in The Book Thief, Max was exiled from his country, and in A Handmaid’s Tale, Offred was exiled from the government. The character’s experiences with exile were both alienating and enriching, because they were both of them went through times when they felt out of place and times when they were enhancing their life. The character’s experiences were both similar in the way that they were both exiled by a larger power, such as the government of the country that they live in. But they were also very different because in Max’s situation it was life or death, and in Offred’s situation she had a required place to be, she was going to live. Also the experiences of Max and Offred shed a light on their books, because it gave a different meaning behind them something deeper that was not shown on the surface of the pages. Lastly, from the beginning of the books to the end, Max and Offred’s home place changed, and the home in the beginning became an other place to them.
The screams of the crowd tremble to the sound of the tightening rope. Little by little the tension increasing, and for a moment there is a pause of silence. Snap. As the bodies falls, so do the hearts of the handmaids. This is a common view of a handmaid in Gilead. This spectacle is known as the “Salvaging” or saving any potential threat and purifying Gilead. This showing is a sharp reminder of things that Gilead will not tolerate these acts and wants the repercussions of such actions to be viewed and repressed. The Particicutions roots from the words “participation” and “execution” and are a modified salvaging where handmaids form into a group to assault any threat directly towards them. A prevalent example from The Handmaid’s Tale is the
A place of dystopia can be only defined as an imagined habitation usually with a totalitarian or environmentally degraded appearance in which everything in this society is grody and displeasing to the class of human nature. This place, as awful as it sounds, is only a perspective of the mind, the mind of an evil, sick person who sees imperfection that needed correcting. The book “Night” is a firsthand account of the atrocity that became of men, but the more important lesson this teaches us is of what awful man has already done and that we hopefully won’t do it yet again. A dystopia can also be determined by the nine traits of a dystopian society of which are Propaganda, Information/ independent thought, and restricted freedoms. As well as a
The ability to create life is an amazing thing but being forced to have children for strangers is not so amazing. Offred is a handmaid, handmaid's have children for government officials, such as Commander Waterford. Offred used to be married to Luke and together they had a daughter but then everything changed; Offred was separated from her family and assigned to a family as their handmaid. The society which Offred is forced to live in shaped her in many ways. In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood uses cultural and geographical surroundings to shape Offred's psychological and moral traits as she tries to survive the society that she is forced to live, in hopes that she can rebel and make change.
Early on it is evident that the authority of this society has been changed from a theocracy to a totalitarian government. The first sentence reveals that the current living quarters of the main character, Offred, are located in "what had once been the gymnasium" (3). The narrator recounts the past fifty years in this place from felt skirts of the fifties to the green spiked hair of the nineties. Then she turns to describe its transformation into what resembles an army barrack but is actually functioning as a kind of prisoner of war camp. In these few short sentences, Atwood has described the conditions of a place called Gilead, which is located in what used to be called the United States. In chapter four the author reveals that the current government is waging a war against the church. This is evidence that this society has shifted away from recognizing God as its supreme authority. The narrator then mentions that church song...
Identity is what makes a person unique. It is what distinguishes a person from the other seven billion people that inhabit the earth alongside them. Without an identity, one is another person in a sea of unfamiliar faces with nothing to make them special. The reader experiences this very phenomenon in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as the women have their identities stripped from them in the dystopian, war-stricken society and are forced to be just seen and not heard. Using the protagonist as her tool, Atwood presents the idea that the loss of an identity results in the loss of a person, and a person will do anything to fill the void that needs to be filled.
As the saying goes, 'history repeats itself.' If one of the goals of Margaret Atwood was to prove this particular point, she certainly succeeded in her novel A Handmaid's Tale. In her Note to the Reader, she writes, " The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaiden's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about ...have been done before, more than once..." (316). Atwood seems to choose only the most threatening, frightening, and atrocious events in history to parallel her book by--specifically the enslavement of African Americans in the United States. She traces the development of this institution, but from the perspective of a different group of oppressed people: women.
In The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood, Offred was taken from her husband and child, brainwashed, and then forced into a new house where her sole purpose is to be a walking uterus. In a Brave New World by Aldus Huxley, people are made in a laboratory, no one cares about family, and everyone is high on soma. These two books are both different, but are also very similar. The main thing they have in common is that they are a dystopian society, the government controls everyone, and nobody has the freedom to do/live the way they want. However, why is it that so many authors write books like this? Where the world is controlled by terrible dictatorships, only the people higher up benefit, and the normal every day citizen is screwed? I believe that
Atwood’s symbolic diction reveals a message of power of the society of Gilead, with her
In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, social turmoil after a staged terrorist attack has led to a totalitarian Christian regime. In this dystopian future, the roles of men and women are much different than in today’s society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are unequal because they have no choice about their bodies, their dress, or their relationships.
Dystopia, a word that inflicts feelings of malcontent, fear, a place where abysmal conditions are the new normal, this genre describes a society where everything has and continues to go wrong. This genre has gripped the hearts of many readers and is compelling for people of all ages. The dystopian book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a thrilling book that introduces the reader to a world where the society tries to force everything to be perfect, and danger lurks around every twist and turn. The meaning of dystopia, the characteristics of the genre, and how it is presented in Fahrenheit 451, contributes to how one could understand the dystopian style of literature.
Margaret Atwood, the author of the novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, wrote it as a means to discuss gender in American society. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is an exaggerated example of how our society treats women. Based on what I have learned about the role gender plays in our society there are apparent parallels between Atwood’s book and reality. Many of the issues that have been brought to the Court in regards to gender are also discussed in the novel. One in particular which has been especially relevant in our American society currently is the topic of rape and sexual assault.
1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale are staples of dystopian literature. Each respective author creates a scenario that resonates with their audience. Although these scenarios are different, there are key similarities present in each. In each novel, the government employs psychological stratagems designed to maintain control over their citizens. In each novel, literary works are deemed to be volatile, and are treated as such. But perhaps most interesting, is the approach each author takes in presenting a scenario that appears to be utopic, and presenting it in a way that is dystopic.
The novel, The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood focuses on the choices made by the society of Gilead in which the preservation and security of mankind is more highly regarded than freedom or happiness. This society has undergone many physical changes that have led to extreme psychological ramifications. I think that Ms. Atwood believes that the possibility of our society becoming as that of Gilead is very evident in the choices that we make today and from what has occured in the past. Our actions will inevitably catch up to us when we are most vulnerable.