Handmaid's Tale - Parts I - V

Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" is the first novel that I am studying for the topic of Women in literature. This novel is filled with female characters and is also written by Margaret Atwood who is a Female Canadian author. So far in this novel I have found that there are a lot of symbolic references to the Bible. First off, this book uses names such as Angels, Guardians of the faith, Commanders of the faith, and the Eyes of God, for all of the male positions in the town. There are also many references to the bible throughout the first third of the book (parts I-V). Such as when the commander reads bed time stories to the main character Offred, he always reads stories out of the bible. There is also feminism in this novel because of the womens names, for example they are all called either Offred, Ofglen, or Ofwarren which is just saying who they belong to (of Glen). The females in this book belong to their Commander for his sexual pleasure and are thought as though that is their only true purpose in life, to bare the Commander's children. If a pregnancy fails it is always the handmaids fault and never the males because in this community a male is never sterile but it is the women's fault instead. They are also never allowed to walk around town alone, they have to be in pairs at all times. The females have strict rules on how they have to present themselves. They are not allowed to show their hair, reveal any bit of their sexual attraction, they aren't even allowed to read store signs, and they are never to look an Angel or Guardian in the eyes.

"The Handmaid's Tale" main character Offred is a handmaid in the republic of Gilead. (A handmaid is a female servant, who once a month has sexual intercourse with their Commander hoping to get pregnant.) Offred has many flashbacks of her teenage years, in this book they get triggered by events in the present time of the novel. The first one shows us that when she was a teenager she lived in something that was a lot like a prison where they had to walk around the soccer fields all day and slept on a gymnasium floor. This is when she first meets her Commander's wife, Serina Joy. There is also a flash back where it brings her back to when she was just a teenager and her daughter was taken from her in the super market. This is where most of her pain and suffering comes from but when ever she tries to explain the incident she explains it as though it is very foggy in her memory.

So far in this book there is a lot of feminist perspectives on how the republic of Gilead is run and also all of the relations to the Bible that Margaret Atwood interprets into this book.