Existentialism and the alienated young mother in speculative fiction: Ling Ma’s Severance and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Despite being published over three decades apart, Ling Ma’s 2018 debut Severance and Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale share striking similarities, especially in regards to the inner worlds of their protagonists who are placed in dystopian, meaningless worlds. Both novels are masterfully crafted by ivy-league educated female authors and written in the first person. When Atwood was writing her novel in 1985, she was inspired by the rise of the Christian right in politics at the time. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the authoritarian theocracy of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where fertile women, called …show more content…
In the Handmaid’s Tale, Offred finds great value in a personal faith, a way of reaching out and not being a victim of her circumstances, without control. Offred doesn’t believe in a God who could allow these injustices to happen, and still she prays, “I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me get through it, please. Though maybe it's not our doing: I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what you meant.You must feel pretty ripped off. I guess it's not the first time. If I were You, I'd be fed up. I'd really be sick of it. I guess that's the difference between us.I feel very unreal talking to You like this. I feel as if I'm talking to a wall. I wish you'd answer. I feel so alone.Oh God! It's no joke, he said. Oh God, oh God. How can I keep on living.” (Atwood). This quote reveals how Offred can find faith despite being oppressed by a Christian society. She’s able to find meaning in an understanding of God, one who wouldn’t endorse what’s happening in Gilead. In Severance, Candace prays for salvation when she’s planning her escape from the facility. Ling Ma writes, “There is nothing to do but wait. And wait. And wait. I don’t know what else to do, so I close my eyes. I begin to pray.” (Ma …show more content…
This can be demonstrated through the character’s conflict of living without love, the reclamation of Christianity as a metaphor for hope, and the flashback structure of the novels that ultimately come to the conclusion that memory is a powerful tool to discover purpose for one’s life in difficult times. Both of these novels are poignant looks into the lives of characters who have lost everything. Still, these nuanced, complicated women are able to find a reason to keep going, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of hope. References Atwood, Margaret, 1939-. The Handmaid's Tale - "The Handmaid's Tale" New York: Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1998. Ma, Ling. A. Severance: A Novel. 2018. The X-Menu. The
The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood shows the way of life for women in the
The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood is a novel about a totalitarian state called Republic of Gilead that has replaced the United States in which the women of society have been taken away from their families and forced to be
Callaway, Alanna A., "Woman disunited ; Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale as a critique of feminism" (2008). Master's theses. Paper 3505. http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/3505
Callaway, Alanna A., "Women disunited : Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale as a critique of feminism" (2008). Master's Theses. Paper 3505.
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a story heavily influenced by the Bible and has many biblical themes that are used to prove Atwood’s belief in balance. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead which was formerly the United States. The story is told through the perspective of a handmaid named Offred and begins when she is placed at her third assignment as a housemaid. Offred describes her society as a fundamentalist theocracy where the Christian God is seen as the divine Ruler over the Republic of Gilead. Atwood is often thought of as a feminist writer but through this novel her writing is not completely feminist nor patriarchal but something in the middle. Atwood is also someone who described herself as a “strict agnostic”
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.
Margaret Atwood's renowned science fiction novel, The Handmaid's Tale, was written in 1986 during the rise of the opposition to the feminist movement. Atwood, a Native American, was a vigorous supporter of this movement. The battle that existed between both sides of the women's rights issue inspired her to write this work. Because it was not clear just what the end result of the feminist movement would be, the author begins at the outset to prod her reader to consider where the story will end. Her purpose in writing this serious satire is to warn women of what the female gender stands to lose if the feminist movement were to fail. Atwood envisions a society of extreme changes in governmental, social, and mental oppression to make her point.
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 Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood explores the role that women play in society and the consequences of a countryís value system. She reveals that values held in the United States are a threat to the livelihood and status of women. As one critic writes, “the author has concluded that present social trends are dangerous to individual welfare” (Prescott 151).
Neuman, Shirley. "'Just A Backlash': Margaret Atwood, Feminism, And "The Handmaid's Tale.." University Of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (2006): 857-868. Academic Search Elite. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
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.
The Handmaid's Tale presents an extreme example of sexism and misogyny by featuring the complete objectification of women in the society of Gilead. Yet by also highlighting the mistreatment of women in the cultures that precede and follow the Gileadean era, Margaret Atwood is suggesting that sexism and misogyny are deeply embedded in any society and that serious and deliberate attention must be given to these forms of discrimination in order to eliminate them.
Throughout many well-known pieces of literature, writers construct captivating storylines consisting of unique characters, settings, and eccentric societies for the purpose of conveying messages to the reader. In the speculative fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, author Margaret Atwood portrays the character of Moira as a strong-willed, independent, persistent, rebellious woman who refuses to be grinded down by people, specifically men, who are “above” her. In the society of Gilead, Moira is characterized into a distinct group and assigned the title of a handmaid. After being sent to the Red Center, Moira becomes aware of the harsh and discriminatory treatment. Although handmaids are supposed to succumb to the newfound rules and regulations,
A culture of violence affects America. The neoliberal logic of a gun culture atomizes individuals, and has historically led to people abrogating their roles as common citizens. The gun rights lobby has perpetuated an ableist discourse to shift responsibility away from the gun culture. It is not “crazy” people that will kill with guns, but a cultural system that tells people to deal with their own problems that kills people. It is a gun culture that perpetuates the pick yourself up by the bootstraps logic, that praised people for using guns violently. Moreover, the common tagline from gun’s right lobbyists usually goes something like, "pick up your guns and serve your country. These types of ideas are part of a culture of violence that seeps