Handmaid's Tale - Parts VI - X

I have just finished reading parts VI-X of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tail" and in this section I found many more ways that the women are ranked unequally with the males. In this part of the book is when Offred begins to have secret meetings with her Commander, which is against the rules because there is supposed to be a Guardian with her when ever she is with the Commander. This part of the book is when she begins to start to rebel against the rules. She breaks the rules by going down the the commander's room and plays scrabble with him. One of the large rules she is breaking is that she is seeing all of the books on display and is using large words. The Commander also gives her books and magazines to read on her free time, but she does not accept them because she would have no place to put them without them being found. The Commander also asks her something that they are never supposed to ask. He asks her to kiss him when she leaves from their first meeting.

Another main event that occurs in these few chapters is the ceremony of the birth of Ofwarrens child. It is a large ceremony because every single handmaid is supposed to be there to watch the excitement of the occasion. The commanders never go to these ceremonies and just sit upstairs in their rooms waiting to receive the good news. There is relief when Ofwarren gives birth to a lovely baby girl who they call a "keeper". There is a lot of fear that the baby will be unborn or a unhuman. If it is unborn that means that the baby is no longer living when it is received, while an unhuman baby is when the baby is either missing a toe or has some sort of deformity. If there is one of these things wrong then the Handmaid will be pronounced an unwomen and will have to leave immediately.

In these parts I have found many connections to the history of the world. The first main one that I found was from one of Offred's flash backs to when she was a child about the age of 6. It was the time of Hitler, in her flashback she remembers watching TV and on it was a female who turns out to of been Hitler's Wife. Margaret Atwood connects Hitler to the people of Gilead and how they don't accept a certain type of people. Hitler didn't accept Jews and kept them in camps where they would not be fed and would sooner or later die. While on the Gilead's sides they don't accept any babies that are slightly different in ways such as webbed feet, cleft pallet, missing toes, or any other type of deformation that could occur on a unborn child.

Something else I spotted was how their town is actually just the town that used to be Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they are on the campus of Harvard University. The gymnasium floor that she had a flashback too was the gym of the university. Also the soccer and football fields they had to march around where what used to be the university's football field. The Handmaid's are not allowed to leave the town which is actually just the old campus of the university. These are all connections that I spotted while reading this third of the book.