How different it was to be from the loose ungoverned part I had acted before, and how much happier a life of virtue and sobriety is, than that which we call a life of pleasure."(moll Flander, Chapter 38). By this choice of words, Defoe contrasts sobriety and pleasure and the conclusion could be that there is no pleasure for the virtuous. By "life of pleasure," he means, of course, rather the life a whore than anything else, but the ambiguity remains. At that stage, like Offred, Moll, who could also be called "Ofthebanker" lived through all the various possibilities a woman had at her time. By using her most powerful tool, her sexuality, she attracted all kinds of men and manipulated them into taking care of her, one way or another. She also used her intelligence to manipulate the women around her, but her success in doing it was also because those women were not as innocent as one might think. She remained an outsider just as Offred remained an outsider in Gilead. Both of them would he done almost anything to stay alive, in constant fear of being exposed for their real inner thoughts and severely punished for that. The people, especially the women in Gilead, although all of them not in charge for their own destinies anymore, including Offred, were manipulated to the point of taking pleasure in hurting...
"The problem wasn't only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore... I'm not talking about sex, he says. That was part of it, the sex was too easy... You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage. Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do."(the handmaid's Tale, Chapter 32). That was the Commander's explanation-excuse for having founded the horrible society Offred became the unfortunate part of and this time Moll may be compared to him when it comes to the lack of feelings. She also acted mostly without feeling anything at all and the consequences of her way of living were as disastrous as those of the Commander's and of others like him. Only he was part of a world he helped building that reduced half of its people, the women, to he state of animals and some of the men to criminals, while Moll's conduct only affected the life of those around her and herself.
As Canada has become less wild, many of these obstacles have been recognized by writers to exist internally, as Atwood says: "no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being." Grim survival is that sort of survival which overcomes a specific threat which destroys everything else about one, such as a hurricane or plane
Not only do the handmaids have no privacy; they sleep with their masters under the watchful eye of the wives. Their days are segmented and scheduled. Women lack autonomy and their bodies belong not to them but to the oppressors. One of the most poignant reminders of the low position of women in Gilead society is the invasive and coercive medical examination required for all handmaids. "When I'm naked
Handmaid's Tale Atwood Creation of Alternate World About the Book The book Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood is the tale of a woman named Offred who belonged to the Republic of Gilead. Some particular details were published at the time the novel that recommended Gilead's time frame to be in the current since the State of Gilead is now appears as the new form of a northeastern American State. The story is a
Margaret Atwood set out to depict a society in the future, one that in her eyes had characteristics that needed to be solved from the present. This novel is dystopian in nature which presents a dysfunctional society in the future as seen in the eyes of the author. It is however instrumental to note that most of the works of fiction that are set in the future, are actually meant
And "civilized" also means being corrupted by rampant economic temptations and in the process, ruining the land; and the narrator goes to great lengths to show that she "...wishes to not be human," which is a linking of "guilt and self-knowledge," according to Janice Fiamengo's essay (in The American Review of Canadian Studies). Essayist Fiamengo quotes Atwood from a 1972 interview (Surfacing was published in 1972) in which the author
" (Atwood, 4) the seamless convergence of the warm familial title 'aunt' with the image of this corporal mode of enforcement helps to underscore a society that is violently hostile toward independence, particularly contextualized by its treatment of women. There is an element of forcible control over these women that smacks of government imposition, a key element of the society and the primary mode through which the rights of women
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