The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood :: essays research papers

The role of a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead is ultimately to breed, and nothing more. Cooped up in a nondescript room with nothing but her own thoughts and painful memories for company, the narrator, Offred, shows more signs of retreating further and further into her own world, and becoming slowly more insecure throughout the course of the novel as her terrible new carriage continues. The most common and by far the most disturbing slip of this is the use of imagery and symbolism in the book. Many everyday items and observations argon likened to some kind of sickening or furious image, which indicate that Offred isnt really all that stable for example a removed inflammation fixture is described as being like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out.Other examples of this atomic number 18 describing a Guardian of the Faiths face as unwholesomely tender, like the come up under a scab and likening half-dead, flexible and pink worms to lips. A tourists stiletto heels be delicate instruments of torture fluffy clouds are thought of as headless sheep and urinals look oddly like babies coffins. The commanders Wife herself is described as having a chin seize like a fist. Further on in the book, when Moira has been violently punished for faking an illness ... she could not walk for a week... They looked like drowned feet, conceited and boneless, except for the colour. They looked like lungs. All these violent, disgusting images are evidence for Offreds deteriorating state of health. Other similes mentioned are not so much violent as they are strange at one stage, Offred compares herself to a beak of toast. The author as well as uses colour as a powerful symbolical device. The colour red is referred to many times in the novel, most notably when Offred describes herself as a Sister, dipped in blood. This image in special refers to menstruation, a process the Handmaids prolong grown to dread as it proves they have failed once again. The reo ccurring image of the tulips in the garden also relates to this they are also red and compared to blood... a darker crimson toward the stem, as if they had been cut and are beginning to heal there.and all of the references can be likened to Tulips, a song by Sylvia Plath, written about her time in a intellectual illness ward.We are informed, primarily in Chapter Two, that any object that whitethorn aid suicide is strictly out of bounds in Offreds accommodation.