Handmaids Tale Analysis

War and political conflict can affect the human body to a self-destructive point. In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale we see traces of the effects of political conflicts and war on the characters. The main characters in the novels have experienced fragmentation of the body and identity as well as isolating themselves from the society surrounding them. Caravaggio, Hana, Almasy, Offred, and the Commander all have the same emotional and psychological characteristics of vulnerability.

The fragmentation of the body is demonstrated through imagery in Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale. A person experiencing any sort of conflict automatically pulls himself or herself away from the source of pain, whether it is emotional or physical. In The English Patient, the effect of war is especially seen on Almasy’s body. “There is a face, but it is unrecognizable” and he has forgotten who he is, because he has pulled away from society (Ondaatje 28). Almasy’s body is a story of his anguish through the conflicts of nations at war; from being the enemy of one country to then becoming it’s ally,

Fragmentation of a person’s identity is just as easy as fragmenting his or her body. Hana believing that everyone she comes close to or loves dies. In order to forget her past she “continued her duties while she secretly pulled her personal self back (Ondaatje 178).” Hana is used to keeping herself busy enough to erase her own emotions and feelings, instead she focuses on her patients as well as their fears and anguishes. “I courted one man and he died and the child died. I mean, the child didn’t just die; I was the one who destroyed it,” she obviously is despaired over the loss of this child and man (Ondaatje 85). The mirror is also a symbol of identity. “She has removed all mirrors and stacked them away in an empty room,” thus believing that by just removing the mirrors she can erase some part of herself from the past, all the painful memories of losses in her life. Almasy also suffered a great anguish, in the desert; the loss of Katherine made him want to erase any memory of his past. He slowly started recalling some of his past, with the help of morphine and a slowly approaching death. Throughout the days of him retelling the stories of his desert dwellings, he focuses on the facts of Katherine. In his retelling, he comes to realize his love for Katherine was from the beginning, and his fear of ‘being owned’ was part of his tapered identity. He pushes Katherine away even before he has realized that he already let her into his heart, “When you leave me, forget me (Ondaatje 152).” When he finally realized what he lost when Katherine died, he died himself. He had no other reason to go on living, that is why he never made an effort to recall his past after the crash, because he felt that there was no past without Katherine; who showed him how to live. This detachment is similar in The Handmaids Tale, Offred would steel herself, “…would pretend not to be present, not in the flesh,” during the cerem

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