if you use any quotes from here the reference is (Dhungana, 2023)

The Handmaid's Tale is studied through various critical

responses from the date of its publication. Regarding the
themes, motifs, language and structure of the novel numerous
critics have debated on the novel from several perspectives.
Interpreting this novel from Marxist perspectives, critic and
Elizabeth Hansot focuses upon the struggle of character in
social structure as:Offred's story is one of groping and
essentially daily domestic labor of crafting selves capable of
surviving her new and impoverished reality. [4] The issues of
haves and haves not are mentioned in Marxism. The coercive
relation of classes and struggle among the social phenomenon
is dealt with Marxist lenses. It is clear that Atwood draws real
historical events to give a strong sense. The rights in the
republics, human behaviour on the basis of class is affected
with sociopolitical context. The critic, Janet L. Larson opines,
“The testimony […] is submerged in sociopolitical
reconstruction that has learned nothing from the Handmaid or
the study of ideology and history”.[5] The Handmaid’s
Tale remains one of the most powerful recent portrayals of
social phenomena; and it is one of the few dystopian novels
that examine in detail the intersection of politics and sexuality.
Gilead's treatment to women is based upon a literal,
fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, meaning that
women are the property of and subordinate to their husband,
father, or head of household. They are not allowed to do
anything that would grant them any power independent of this
system. The historical novel The Handmaid's Tale presents a
picture of the past. It also reflects shifts in perceptions of
historical research in the second half of the 20th century. Even
the historical discipline is criticized, and an argument is made
for alternative historical interpretations and practices. Harold
Bloom in his book Margaret Atwood: Bloom’s Modern
Critical View has traced about the historicity of the novel The
Handmaid’s Tale. He says, “At about the same period that
Atwood began to write poems on war, she also in her
“Historical Notes” appended to The Handmaid’s Tale began to
focus directly on the problems of writing and interpreting
history representing past”.[6] Through the use of interviews
and letters, The Handmaid's Tale connects feminist literary
discourse with historical and biographical context. Bloom
claims in his article "The Story Behind the Story" that the
successful feminist dystopia was inspired by a timely dinner
conversation with a friend about "the more absolutist
pronouncements of right-wing religious fundamentalism."
III. EXPERIMENT AND RESULTS
The body is a place where power is exercised, not only
because physically stronger people can subdue weaker ones,
but also because it serves as the mechanism for systematized
social control. Women’s body in the patriarchal society is
taken as counter part of male. Atwood satires on nomenclature
providing the names of characters associating with possessive
marks, which has the sole purpose of exploiting them but it
was up sided down through the joint effort of handmaids.
They are known as the wife of someone like ‘Offred’(94),
‘Ofglen’(29) .Physicality of women is oppressive in the
dominant culture of patriarchy since antiquity, but still that
female body can also be seen as marking not just gender
difference but also social difference, and tool of power. Due to
cultural meanings related to physical disparities, the body
serves as a basis for both empowerment and powerlessness
based on gender, class, race, and age, all of which are strongly
represented in it. The meaning of the body is associated with
self and moral worth. Self-control, self-power, self-reliance,
and independence all energize the empowerment of the body,
which further strengthens the rhetoric of power in other sociocultural spheres.
This study on The Handmaid’s Tale is done with the
theoretical tool on body. Body is site of empowerment in the
patriarchal Giledean society. The politics of body is the
appropriate lenses to penetrate into the context of The
Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid's Tale consists primarily of
the story of the handmaid in Northern America. Gilead is the
republic where authoritarianism is abolished but handmaids
were vindictive to assist the puritan society. Offred, the
handmaid was compelled to serve the Commander. In the
form of Utopian fiction Atwood has represented a coercive
society where the discrimination between the ruling class
people of commanders and the subjugating class is blurred
with the issue of infertility. The weakness of the higher-class
ruling people's infertility is balanced by the coercive body
politics that actually complicates the social hierarchy by
indirectly strengthening the handmaids, who are used as
agents for maintaining social structure.
Themes covered by Atwood's writings include power politics,
religion and myth, gender and identity, and religion and myth.
Her writings, which frequently draw inspiration from
mythology and fairy tales, are also linked to the technology
that enable remote robotic document authoring. Many critics
have observed her as versatile writer. David Staines in his
article "Margaret Atwood in her Canadian Context" reflects
how Atwood, both as a Canadian and a public persona and as
a set of literary and political concerns, has put ''Canadian
literature on the cultural and literary map".[7] In her oeuvres
she has complicated the traditional representations of literary
phenomena while revealing the time consuming, blood-giving
literary efforts of the70s and 80s, particularly of Canada.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood evaluates the
significance of names, especially the names of female
characters that are associated with the control of a male
International Journal of Engineering Applied Sciences and Technology, 2023
Vol. 8, Issue 02, ISSN No. 2455-2143, Pages 353-357
Published Online June 2023 in IJEAST ([Link]
355
commander. It investigates internal politics as well as gender
and identity. The Handmaid's Tale has generated a lot of
critical debate since its release in 1986. The Handmaid's Tale,
a dystopian survival novel set at the end of the 20th century
just as gender equality was about to be achieved, depicts the
breakdown of the United States and what Christopher Jones
rightly labels as "revigorated hatred of women and the
explosive growth of religious patriarchal fundamentalism."
The story takes place in Gilead, a civilization in the not-toodistant future that
is rigorously stratified. Offred, the main
character, is a Handmaid, a woman who performs
reproductive tasks for the Commanders, the ruling class of the
regime. She is one of the first Handmaids and must undergo
re-socialization at the Rachel and Leah Reeducation Center
before taking on her responsibilities in the Commander and his
wife's home.
The idea of a dystopia has shifted the roles of women and men
in the book from the periphery to the center. As a result of the
authors of Gilead's infirmity and the capacity of women to
have children as a means of freedom, it shows the higher
success of women's culture in Gilead, from the widespread
desire for pregnancy to the cult-like Birth ceremony. Sylvia K
Blood states “presenting information about body image to
women as something all women ‘have,’ as something that can
be identified and measured according to scientific norms”.[8]
Atwood's investigation of gender, identity, and domestic
politics continues in this book. Since it was published in 1986,
the book has gotten a lot of attention. It takes place at the turn
of the twenty-first century, just when sex equality was about to
be achieved. Stephanie Barber Hammer's "The World as It
Will Be Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The
Handmaid's Tale” brings the example of success of the novel.
Hammer has presented the motif of success of the novel thus:
“Atwood has broken into the formerly male-dominated genre
and presented the success.[9] Satire is the most effective trope
in the practices of Atwood's writings, and it is through this
trope that Atwood has presented the success of women and
successful discourse of the society.
Atwood has acquaintance with language, imagery as well as
with the natural environment and female power. In her
preoccupation with individual and collective survival
strategies at physical and spiritual levels, she basically has
foregrounded these qualities. The implications for women of
revising myth and reimagining spirituality are important to
Janet L. Larson, in Margaret Atwood and the Future of
Prophecy says with the reference of The Handmaid's Tale as,
“women can’t be exploited with the reference of Bible. They
have the good judgment and can assist the world with natural
law, connects the crises and atrocities of Western history with
the gender politics of interpretation and advocates to women’s
spirituality”.[5] Women are morally responsible for
procreation and are spiritually led. Her work, including the
creation of novels and the portrayal of the female self, is
characterized by the expression of desire, the acceptance of
spirituality, and a commitment to process and inquiry. The
female characters in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale combine
myth and spirituality.
The handmaids' act of bearing children is not just for their
survival but also for the survival of the Caucasian society.
They felt their subjectivity through their own business of sex
and childbearing. Linda Myrsiades presents in her article Law,
Medicine, and the Sex Slave in Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale as: “the handmaid learns to regard her
function as a business transaction, the delivery of a service
from which she is alienated, much like the sex work of a
prostitute. The exchange value of her service is such that she
comes to enjoy her role, maximizing her value in the swish of
a hip which displays”.[10] The novel has thus presented the
female strata as their more confident self-survival. Beside this,
the future of North American society was in the hand of
handmaids. The aunt, the representative of handmaids is
stimulated to instruct the new culture of Gileadian society to
the newly recruited handmaids. They even teach the women's
struggles for equality in a society where autonomy had caused
rape and violence against women. Additionally, they preach
that the handmaids are shielded from rape and violence by the
limitations on their freedom of movement and communication.
Because The Handmaids Tale takes genuine conditions and
follows them to their natural conclusion if current political and
cultural trends continue, Margaret Atwood categorizes the
book as speculative fiction. Karen Keifer Boyd say, “Atwood
describes that The Handmaid's Tale is a slight twist on the
society we have now".[11] The novel deals with the context of
dysfunctional utopia. The circumstances presented in the
novel, cannot be described as of a utopian society, rather here
A conservative fundamentalist cult governs what is left of the
United States, which is now known as the Republic of Gilead,
in Atwood's dystopia of the near future, but the novel also
offers glimpses of fresh possibilities.
"New" is not quite the right word because many Gileadean
practices were familiar in other times and places, but Atwood
shows us the efforts of Gilead's elite to establish and maintain
a new social order, including a new culture, class system,
gender ideologies, gender roles, and methods of social control.
The story is essentially Of- fred's account of becoming and
being a Handmaid, of power relations in a society where
power is concentrated in the Commanders' hands. The critic
Cheryl Laz in his article ''Science Fiction and Introductory
Sociology: The "Handmaid" in the classroom'' mentions: ''The
Handmaid's Tale addresses three themes broadly
conceptualized as history (especially the tension between
historical continuity and social change), gender, and the
tension between freedom and control individuality and
conformity''.[12] There were three themes as the history,
society and social freedom. Some resent research in English
literature even suggests that a growth in pornography has
reduced the number of sex crimes. Nevertheless, feminists see
pornography as part of the ‘Subjectification’ of women and a
contributory factor in violence against women. They play the
key role to reduce the crime factor. Through the act of
International Journal of Engineering Applied Sciences and Technology, 2023
Vol. 8, Issue 02, ISSN No. 2455-2143, Pages 353-357
Published Online June 2023 in IJEAST ([Link]
356
subjectifying themselves, women are empowered. According
to The Handmaid's Tale, American women are most effective
when they are authentically themselves: varied, diversified,
and nuanced in a way that would astound Aunt Lydia.
This research investigates on female body at the backdrop of a
male-centered autocratic society to find out how the then
institutionalized body policy of Gileadean republican society
itself subverts the subjugating position of women and
empowers them. Even more, the study disrupts the traditional
theocratic and hierarchized society by critiquing its basic
infrastructure at which the very conception of a rank and its
power is crumbled. The study deals with the issue of women
empowerment with the theoretical tools of body politics and
the fourth wave of feminism. Since body politics and fourth
wave of feminism radicalize the traditional definition of
women along with the undercurrents of norms and
conventions shaped by phallocentric patriarchal social
structure, this modality will be the apt tool in order to consider
the women's significant role in contributing to the wellbeing
of a society, and that can be seen as an outcome of their
growing self-consciousness into the awakening of their
subjectivities.
The lines demonstrate Offred’s eloquent sensitivity to the
powers and search for the identity. She expressed through
means of language and narrative, in the course of biography
she got the eloquence of characters; Moira, Ofglen and others.
Sometimes, Offred used to sing song of freedom as, “Amazing
grace, how sweet the sound; Could save a wretch like me;
Who once was lost, but now am found; Was Bound, but now
am free” (64). It proves that she is always in the side of
achievement of freedom. The Handmaid's Tale transcends the
conventional romance by immediately capitalizing on it rather
than by downplaying or criticizing the romance storyline. It
reveals the romance plot, which tackles parenting, mothering,
and the ties between women, in a fascinating way.
The lack of closure at the end is seen as collectively marking
Offred's narrative in The Handmaid's Tale as a feminist metafiction that questions
both patriarchal discourse and the male
quest through the nonlinear design of Offred's narrative and
through the opposition of Offred's narrative to the appended
Historical Notes where Offred's sense of herself as a subject is
constructed rather than as one of predetermined and fixed
identity
Through her experience and thinking back on her past, Offred
ironically uses her voice as a disembodied subject to construct
her subjectivity. Even as she reconstructs her own narrative,
her identity in the book is fully embodied in language. Offred
appraises her body, she says, “It’s the body’s way of seeing to
it that I remain alive, continue to repeat its bedrock prayer: I
am, I am. I am, Still, I want to go to bed, Make love, right
now” (293). By narrating the reconstruction of her body,
Offred investigates her power through her body and attempts
to keep her identity.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood reveals how the
power emanates from her body. The Tale is mainly Of- Fred's
narrative of becoming and being a Handmaid, of power
relations in a society where authority is, on the surface,
centralized in the hands of the Commanders but where the
Handmaid has greater power thanks to the weapon of fertility.
Offred appraises:
I pick the egg out of the cup and finger it for a moment. It’s
warm. Women used to carry such eggs between their breasts
to incubate them. That would have felt good […] pleasure is
an egg. Blessing that can be counted, on the fingers of one
hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. (120)
Women have got the opportunity to work and to be employed
as male. In chapter 28, Offred gets job in insurance company.
So, the boundary of male and female is subverted here. It was
different because the balance of power was totally subverted
by the handmaids through their obliterating power of bearing
children.