Handmaid Selected Passages From the Term Paper

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" (Atwood, 4) the seamless convergence of the warm familial title 'aunt' with the image of this corporal mode of enforcement helps to underscore a society that is violently hostile toward independence, particularly contextualized by its treatment of women. There is an element of forcible control over these women that smacks of government imposition, a key element of the society and the primary mode through which the rights of women are disrupted.

Certainly, the aggression which seems to be an increasingly inescapable aspect of the is channeled toward the female gender as a whole in Atwood's novel, even as Offred struggles to recognize this. She herself ponders the meaning of the valued traditionalism in her society; "A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?" (Atwood, 7) it is clear that, far separated from the notion of femininity as something more than an object through which sex and procreation are performed, the protagonist is veritably incapable of recognizing that which she has lost.

This is at the crux of our discussion, and at the heart of the novel, where we can begin to see that considerable forces have levied their authority in order to detain, and in some ways reverse, the progress of the female gender and the dismantling of obsolete gender roles.

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As the passages here denote, the thrust of 'traditional values' is actually a retrenchment of those prejudices that have long defined so many patriarchal societies. The alarming nature of life at the center of the Atwood text is reflective of the constant conflict in our society between traditional values and those which point toward the progress of an egalitarian society.

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