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Atwood's Look Into the Future

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Atwood’s Look into the Future

Margaret Atwood used The Handmaid’s Tale to depict the possible future of the United States. Atwood takes current societal, economical, political, environmental and gender-related issues and uses them to create a possible future that is just as oppressive as the country’s past, leaving the reader to contemplate what they can do as a human being to protect this earth, and/or society from becoming a country “established by religious fanatics who have dismantled the republic, liquidated the opposition and replaced out present political system with a quasi-military infrastructure,” (Kendall 149). Atwood brings up such issues as money, a predominantly male government, the environment, and the value of a woman’s body throughout the text in an effort to bring to light some of the typical controversies of present time. “Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out,” (McCarthy 150). Atwood makes her warnings clear through the Tale she has written.

Atwood uses a common middle class woman, in an effort to sympathize with the majority of women in the United States, also known as Offred, to paint the picture of the futuristic, or dare I say historical, times. “[Offred] is simply a warm, intelligent, ordinary woman who had taken for granted the freedoms she was to lose—the freedom to love, the freedom to work, the freedom to have access to knowledge,” (Johnson 149). All of us take these things for granted as we meander day to day. As we had our eyes opened as a nation with the events of September 11, we were cocky with a sense of power and security unable to be penetrated. Is this what Atwood is saying about women? Are we, as women, breaking

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