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 provided her own thoughts and painful memories for company, the narrator, Off departure, shows many signs of retreating further and further into her own world, and becoming slowly more unstable throughout the course of the novel as her dread new life continues. The most common and by far the most disturbing example of this is the use of imagery and symbolism in the book. Many common items and observations are likened to some kind of sickening or violent image, which indicate that Offred isnt really all that stable for example a removed loose fixture is depict as being like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out.Other examples of this are describing a defender of the Faiths face as unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab and likening half-dead, flexible and pink worms to lips. A tourists stiletto heels are delicate instru ments 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 clenched like a fist. Further on in the book, when Moira has been violently punished for faking an illness ... she could not base on balls for a week... They looked like drowned feet, swollen 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 piece of toast. The author also uses colour as a effective symbolic 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 extra refers to menstruation, a process the Handmaids have grown to dread as it proves they have failed once again. The reoccurring 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 poem by Sylvia Plath, pen about her time in a mental illness ward.We are informed, primarily in Chapter Two, that any object that may aid suicide is stringently out of bounds in Offreds accommodation.