The Handmaid ’s Tale 175that when sex is taken away. By weaving bawdy
references throughout the text, Aristophanes man-
dates sex as a more ubiquitous force than violence.
Sexuality becomes the power that fuels the efforts
of Greek women to forge a peace. Exploring themes
of gender and hope more deeply, one finds that in
Aristophanes’s fantasy world, sexuality gives women
the ability to transform a reality in which they would
otherwise have no influence on global affairs.
Ben Fisler
ATWOOD, MARGARET The Hand-
maid’s Tale (1985)
Written at a time when strongly conservative ele-
ments (including antifeminist movements) were
gaining power in the United States, The Handmaid ’s
Tale is a dystopian novel. It imagines a future in
which contemporary utopian ideals for a better
world have been erased and a very dark, nightmar-
ish society has come to existence. In the novel, an
environmental catastrophe has apparently rendered
a large part of the country inaccessible due to radio-
activity, and most men and women in the country
have become sterile. The former American govern-
ment has been replaced by a fascist system, called
the Republic of Gilead, where women are deprived
of their rights and basically enslaved so as to produce
babies and bring the birth rate up. This system is
set up and led by the “Commanders”—men who
used to hold high positions in the old system—who
receive the handmaids in their household and expect
them to bear a child for their sterile wives. It is a
highly hierarchical system in which every man and
woman serves, in some way or another, the Com-
manders and their families. Oppression, gender,
and heroism are the three thematic lenses through
which we will critique a system which, though it is
fictitious, addresses and speaks to very contempo-
rary issues and concerns such as gender power and
discrimination.
Sophie Croisy
Gender in The Handmaid ’s Tale
The Republic of Gilead is a complex and strict hier-
archical system where gender separation is institu-
tionalized and becomes the very root of oppression.
Men and women are subjected to the Law of Gilead,
born out of a mix between the strictest biblical
teachings and the certainties of a handful of Com-
manders. According to the Law, men and women
have traditional heterosexual roles that cannot be
jeopardized, so much so that nonnormative gender
behaviors are eradicated. One time, the narrator, a
Handmaid named Offred (her names comes from
the Commander to whom she belongs, Fred), spots
the dead bodies of two men with “purple placards
hung around their necks: Gender Treachery. Their
bodies still wear the Guardian uniforms. Caught
together, they must have been.” There is no room
for homosexuality in this society, which preaches
the fulfillment of natural (meaning heterosexual)
destinies.
The women in Gilead, if not in charge of menial
household tasks for the commanders, are either the
commanders’ own wives, Econowives (the wives
of the poorest men), Aunts, or Handmaids. The
Aunts are the most visible representatives of the
oppressive gendered system in place as they teach
the last fertile women in Gilead how to become
Handmaids. Though themselves oppressed by the
system, their role is to perpetuate that oppression
by promoting a fundamentalist Christian envision-
ing of women’s role in society. In the Center, and
in Gilead, Handmaids-to-be learn that they cannot
own anything anymore, not even an identity; they
cannot read or write; they cannot want and are not
allowed to complain. When Offred describes her
time in the Center, she recalls the group sessions
during which future Handmaids had to confess their
sins and repent: One of them tells the story of her
rape as a younger girl, and when one of the Aunts
asks the question, “But whose fault was it?,” all the
participants are expected to answer, “Her fault, her
fault, her fault,” and they do so. The sexist argument
that harm happens because the woman was looking
for it becomes the starting point to a cruel redemp-
tive therapy, at the end of which the women-turned-
Handmaids surrender to “the ecstasy of abasement”:
They admit their past worthlessness and guilt as
“Unwomen” (free women) and accept that they will
know redemption only if they “fulfill their biological
destinies.” The active body as “instrument of plea-
sure” and “implement for the accomplishment of