“I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live.” (p.185)
As a result, she is often perceived as an imaginary figure. In a way, she has already lost her original identity, that we are unable to trace her in the future. Here, Atwood is trying to draw the attention that stripping people’s names may as well result in stripping their individuality. Furthermore, she has created a system of titles to oppress women in general.
Class distinctions enable the state to maintain power because people will oppress others in order to have some power for themselves. A system of titles is created to justify the social hierarchy where women are not granted the same rights as men. Men are defined by military ranks whereas women are restricted to the domestic sphere, and are valued primarily upon their functionality rather than their humanity. This suggests that men in the Gilead society are substantially more powerful than women in general. In this respect, Atwood is trying to make the point that language can be a powerful tool to create an extremely misogynistic regime. Moreover, the classification of society is used as a device to dehumanize people. For instance, feminists and deformed babies are looked upon as subhuman, as suggested by the titles “unwomen” and “unbabies”, denoting that these people have no worth in the society. The only reason that they are nevertheless given the titles is to serve as bad examples to create a state of fear amongst the other citizens. The point the Atwood is trying to make here is that language is taken from the outcast Gileadians and the outcast Gileadians are taken away from language.
The Novel significantly emphasizes on the manipulation of language in general because it is an important approach to control the thoughts of people. Many words have been heavily distorted from their original meanings by the Gileadian government, in order to support their political ideology. A classic example from the novel would be “The Ceremony”. It is simply an abuse of the term to create certain false religious impressions in people’s minds, where in reality The Ceremony should be depicted as the act of the commanders having sex with the Handmaids. Interestingly, the term “Handmaid” itself sounds to be a pleasant Biblical word, and yet, it is used to disguise the fact that the Handmaids are actually treated as reproductive slaves. The point that Atwood is raising here is that by fusing religion into new language would often allow the state to gain more emotional support from the society.
Since Gilead is a theocracy, the religious terminology and Biblical allusion of words and phrases plays an extremely vital role in the Gileadian language because by incorporating religion with the political theocracy could almost guarantee the government with infinite power. To be more concise, God is the government itself. Starting with the most fundamental thing, the state “Gilead” itself is named after a Biblical state. Moreover, Biblical uses of language have probably become part of the Gileadian culture, as demonstrated by the fact that the Handmaids are expected to communicate, using preset phrases such as “Bless be the fruit” and “May the Lord open”. People no longer have the freedom to speak in the fashion they prefer. This demonstrates that religious language can be used to justify a political agenda. As a result, people only think in terms of Biblical language; ironically, the society has never read the Bible. Yet, people use language based on the Bible, just by the way they are taught. Nevertheless, locking people into always thinking in a religious manner could somewhat help to limit the questions that the society could possibly raise against the state. This heavy restriction in the verbal language by abandoning old forms of expressions lead to the minimization of the old realities. Once the verbal part of expression is taken away, the non-verbal part could step in as the final stage in the change of language.
The deprivation of reading materials of all kinds and the prohibition to reading and writing allows the government to extensively control the thoughts of people. As people are no longer exposed to reading materials, they could gradually lose their memory, or at least feel uncertain about the meaning of some pre-Gileadian words. These words could be forgotten in the long run and become eliminated eventually. Once people cannot find the right words to express themselves, it is a sign that thoughts are being controlled. To be more specific, people are being stupefied. Consequently, this allows the state to easily rewrite the entire language, just like the “Newspeak” in George Orwell’s 1984. In this respect, Atwood is suggesting that in a totalitarian society such as Gilead, language is to be considered as a dangerous weapon owned by the state.
Through her cautionary novel, Atwood has tried to warn the readers that there would be a genuine consequence if language is exploited. What Atwood is trying to promote to the readers is that words aren’t just words. Language is incredibly powerful for getting people to not look at the reality of things, or for making things to be more emotional than they need to be. Renaming can certainly be used to create a state of fear through distinctive classification. More importantly, it can significantly dehumanize people and take away their identities. Other than that, religious influences also allow the government to control the society psychologically. After all, language is an extremely important device in The Handmaids Tale. A good understanding of how language functions in the novel allows us to become aware of how a totalitarian regime can maintain its power through the control of language.
