In the novel, environmental failures and political battles have led to a totalitarian regime that takes a literal but selective view of the Christian Bible to be the guiding pressure behind a radical restructuring of society. A social standard is set up for women, who are assigned unique roles relying on their usefulness to propagate the new, male world.
We learn about this new government, Gilead, from a narrator who has been abusively and horribly brainwashed into this new system: a handmaid called Offred (her assigned title due to the fact she is Commander Fred’s handmaid). The society that produces Gilead has suffered a severe drop in population due to mass infertility, which has been attributed to environmental tragedies such as chemical spills and nuclear fall-outs, as well as the long-term use of birth manage and abortions.
The upper-class people of Gilead make up “traditional” households the place the other halves (and ladies in general) are valued especially in their useful role as the producers of children. In this society, where most people are unable to produce healthy offspring, females end up desperate in their wish to be in a position to deliver a child. The “handmaid” is developed as a social group of fertile girls brought in to provide the upper-class couples who have failed to procreate with children.
The treatment of handmaids in Gilead is not morally acceptable. They are forced into service, where they are raped and forced to have a child that they are then separated from, all for the purpose of birthing extra children for the families that count number to the society. The position of the handmaid is a variety of pressured surrogacy in this society, the place of having children is valued to an excessive degree, and where the cost of the female is regularly exhausted by using her potential to produce them.
The want for children, twisted and institutionalized, although it is in Gilead, of the path, is not foreign. The Bible quote used to encourage the disrespect and abuse of the caste of Handmaids isn’t a foreign emotion to many: “Give me children or else I die!” Rachel says when she fails to have children. The desire to endure youth is frequently a deep one for many people – to have the relationship to a growing and maturing phase of your family, to have this extraordinary form of immortality, there are many exceptional colors that ought to make up this motive.
