Response One of The Handmaid's Tale

In the novel The Handmaid's Tale by Margret Atwood, a controversy the main character, Offred, recalls is the situations in which her mother is present. Offred remembers how her mother used to bring her to the burning of the pornography magazines. At the time, the mother thought nothing of it, except she didn't let Offred read the magazines. Offred's mother was an alcoholic, a very nasty one at that. When she would visit Luke and Offred in their home, her mother would make remarks about how awful her life was or how awful Offred and Luke's life was. She would say how the people in her society thought that having a baby sometime after thirty-five would cause defects with the baby and all sorts of problems. Offred's mother didn't head their "bothersome" warnings and claimed she could "run rings around you [them] any day. I could have triplets and walk out of here while you were still trying to get up off the bed" (Atwood 120). In essence, Offred's mother was a hard pill to swallow. She didn't take anything too seriously and was a very tough woman. It is ironic that Offred remembers her times with her mother when Offred is having difficulty dealing with the Gilead society and what she is used for. Her mother would have stood up and protested the use of woman for their bodies, as she had done about the pornography. Since Offred's mother was such a no-nonsense type of person, one would think that Offred would at least have some of her personality. Quite the opposite. Offred even said "No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well" (181). Offred is nothing like her mother and that's what makes her independent in a place where rights are squashed. Her mother is the hell-raiser, her mother is the tough one, her mother is the fighter. Not Offred. If Offred's mother were still alive, it would bother her quite a bit that Offred had not tried to escape Gilead.

My favorite line in the novel is "If your dog dies, get another" (187) probably because it sums up the whole book nicely. It is emotionless, just like the Gilead society is. They have stripped away any sort of feeling out of everything: prayers, intercourse, and even human communication. The simple line itself depicts the lives of the handmaids. If one of them does not produce a child, then she is shunned and shipped away to the Colonies. Then a new handmaid would take her place, acquire her name. If a handmaid commits suicide, the Commander would get another one. The short, blunt comment is almost scary. It's scary to think such a thing of a human being. Of course, the dog is a metaphor for the handmaid in this novel that killed herself before Offred was assigned to that Commander.

I actually really liked the novel. Even though it was frustrating with all of the feminist details, it was interesting because the ideas that Margret Atwood criticized are a part of our society today. She wasn't very far off in her mockery and I think that that's what made it interesting. It was different seeing our society projected in a cruel way and we were allowed a reason to disagree with many aspects of it. It made us like ours better and made us think about all of the wrong things we were, or currently are, doing.