Themes of Humanity in "The Handmaid's Tale
Themes of Humanity in "The Handmaid's Tale
Human beings are emotional creatures. Their feelings steer them in one direction or the next, and greatly determine who they are, and what they do. It is the human environment that triggers these feelings, and these feelings that in turn influence the human environment. They can be either positive or negative in nature, and are central to society and government. Since the government controls a great deal of what we are exposed to, they can control our emotions to some extent. Someone living in a populace that preaches love, friendship, and freedom is more likely to lead a happy life than someone in a populace that enforces fear, ignorance, and abasement. Such is the case in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Gilead takes environmental control to an extreme, and controls almost all aspects of it’s inhabitant’s lives. The handmaids are controlled within society by means of the self worth lowering ignorance, de-humanizing abasement, and the fear instilled by strict consequences to illegal actions.
Gilead’s government has taken away “freedom to” and given “freedom from”(Atwood, 33) to the handmaids. They regulate what they can and cannot know, forcing them into ignorance, and call it freedom. Reading has been forbidden, and “even the names of shops were too much temptation, [and are] known by their signs alone”(33). The only word that Offred is given to look at is “FAITH in square print”(75) on a small pillow in her room. Even looking at this she wonders, “If [she] were caught, would it count?”(75). They are so used to not being able to read, that even at the sight of words and letters, they take precaution, and fear consequence. It was at the red center that the handmaids are first pumped full of the brainwashing propaganda that makes them think in this manner, “Once a week [they] had movies”(151), “old porno films from the seventies and eighties”(152). These movies are used to make them hate the role women had played “in the days of anarchy”(33), and turn them against their past. They are successful in this, and make women believe that “[they] are containers, it is only the inside of [their] bodies that count”(124). Handmaids are “kept on some kind of pill or drug, that [was] put in the food”(91), so that...