Handmaids Tale. Explore Atwoods presentation of Imagery. How does it affect your interpretation of the novel?

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Explore Atwood’s presentation of Imagery. How does it affect your interpretation of the novel?

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel, a work of speculative fiction, written by Margaret Atwood and first published in 1985. Set in the near future, in a totalitarian theocracy, which has overthrown the United States government (American fundamentalist republic of Gilead), The Handmaid's Tale explores themes of resistance, oppression and the fight for survival, in such a suppressed society. The novel is written as a dramatic monologue -fictive autobiography. The novel focuses on the life of Offred who is suppressed by society and forced to believe she is a breading machine ‘I am a two legged whom’.

Gilead’s social principles are based on the Old Testaments, where patriarchal authority is justified as the laws of God. However it distorts teachings in the interest of political position. It may be seen as an abuse of the Bible rather than an adoption of its teachings.

The biblical references are none more se present than the names given to people within the hierarchical Gilead system. A Handmaid in the Old Testament sense is someone whose body is the service of the patriarchs.

There is a marked difference between the language Atwood uses to record Offreds muted everyday life, and the language of her real life of feeling and memory, which is expressed through a richly worded vocabulary of images. These register Offreds entirely different perception of herself and her world from the one imposed by Gilead. In her Handmaids role Offred language of description – of her room, the household, her walks, and the ceremony emphasizes her isolation. She deliberately filters out emotion for as long as possible however it seeps in through her imagery. One example of this would be when she likens the blank space on the ceiling where the light fitting has been removed to a ‘wreath’ or a ‘frozen halo’. Behind the blankness lie Offreds fears of torture, injury and death. Sometimes her realistic recording is overlaid by memories of the past closely associated with particular places that she passes on her walks, so that the present dissolves into landscape of memory.

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Atwoods use of puns shows Offreds ability to not be flattened by the doctorial system of Gilead. An example would be when sitting in a chair alone in her room she thinks about the word ‘chair’ and how it may refer to ‘the leader of a meeting’ or ‘a mode of execution’, even working across language barriers where the word has an entirely different meaning where it is the word for ‘flesh’. Such world play is evidence of Offreds sharpness of mind as well as refusal to flatten out language as Gilead does.

Atwood language gives the ...

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