Handmaid's Tale
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood shows how women cannot attain true love without freedom. Offred never loved anyone throughout her life. The reason for this was because she was never given the opportunity to love someone. Offred thought she loved her daughter and her husband Luke, however she was too controlled to know what love meant. The fact she wasn’t allowed to do everything from reading, writing, to interacting with most people also contributes to why she couldn’t understand the true meaning of love. Offred was living in a state of confusion in which things or situations didn’t make much sense to her. For example, she didn’t understand the type of work the Commander did or who an “eye” worked for. She only knew what she saw, which wasn’t enough for her to understand the meaning of love. Offred thought her husband Luke and her daughter loved her but she never said that she loved them. She would think about images from the past and reflect on what they might have been doing at the time; however she had no clue as to what had happened to them. One time when Offred was lying in her bed
Offred’s sense of reality was numbed by the lifestyle she was forced to live. The fact that she wasn’t allowed to talk to certain people and she was segregated into a certain group showed no individuality. When someone is forced into a group, they aren’t themselves anymore, they are apart of the group. Offred also doesn’t understand the meaning of love because she is abused by the commander. The commander mentally and physically strips Offred’s emotion of love. He does this mentally by using her to keep him company or another word to use her as his own escort. Her sense of love becomes even more broken down when she is forced to have sex with the Commander. Explaining how Offred’s body is abused she writes, “If he were better looking, would I enjoy this more? At least he is an improvement on the previous one, who smelled like a church cloakroom in the rain; like your mouth when the dentist starts picking at your teeth; like a nostril.” (pg 95). Atwood is showing how Offred is stripped of her freedom. Because she is being forced to have sex with the Commander, she questions when she would beg
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Approximate Word count = 753
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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