As I reading the novel, The handmaid s tale, I recognized the Republic of Gilead, is a country, which is not only under the religious theoretic rule, but also dominated by the masculine power. All the men in the Republic have various of privileges that the women do not have. In the first 100 pages of the novel, I realized handmaids have think about using their bodies to make a deal with those Angle in order to escape from the red center, therefore, it hints from the beginning, men have greater power in the Republic.
In the Republic, everybody has been ranked. The ranks of women, like Aunt, Martha, and Wife are specifically gendered words that mark the status of women. Therefore, regardless of her rank, a woman’s central feature is her sex. Even a Wife, the highest-ranking woman in the republic, is defined in relation to a man, her husband. Words such as Commander, Guardian, and Angel name men’s various ranks of power, but the words themselves do not reduce individual men to their sex alone.
In the novel, we always see those words like unwomen, unbabies but we never see the word like unmen, it means there are no sterile men in the Republic s ideology and only women have defective in the eyes of the Republic s law. Moreover, men in the Republic are not defining through their bodies functions, but women do, the major purpose of women in the Republic is to reproduce baby. If those women fail to produce baby, they will declare as unwomen, and will be sent to the colonies and die in there.
In the novel, we can see that all aspects of women s life were being highly regulated, their speech, writing, reading, job, economic independence or even their name. Those handmaids are never given individual names; the Republic regards them as objects or rather as state property and if giving them individual, unchanging names, those will undermine their position as state property. Therefore, the Commander names every Handmaid. (For instance Offred to Of Fred ) The Handmaid s names mark them as the property of the Commanders in whose homes they in currently.
Their names will be change again when they move to another new households. I have no experience of living a country like the Republic of Gilead and I think there is no such regime existing on the earth. Nevertheless, indeed, the privilege is existed in all now day societies. Not only between two different genders, but also between dual/multiple groups/classes of people, for instance, rich people dominate the whole state economic and made a bad influence to middle/low classes people; a political party dominated a state, which provide benefit to those who are willing to bound with them and persecuted the other.
