How Do Margaret Atwood and Khaled Hosseini Present the Oppression of Women Through the Characters of Offred and Laila?
Atwood and Hosseini both present female oppression dramatically through the main characters of Laila and Offred. Both show females in a corrupt society where the treatment of women is unthinkable for a modern reader. The characters are developed through narrative structure, language and action to create a striking view of female oppression.
The narrative structures are integral to portraying female oppression and are different for each text. The first person narrative of “The Handmaid’s Tale” uses a number of different techniques – distancing, flashbacks and reconstruction to effectively present an emotive view of female oppression. Offred’s first person account increases the emotion because the readers feel her pain more directly, “I can remember screaming.” The use of emotive language and short powerful sentences presents Offred’s unbearable pain of being separated from her daughter. Distancing is used, “thoughts must be rationed,” to reflect how Offred is coping within the repressed society as well as emphasising how torturous and difficult the society is to live in. The ‘Night’ sections are patterned throughout the narrative and they help to reveal Offred as an individual to the reader. The character’s isolation “Where should I go?” is both ironic and distressing because her reality is that she is trapped; this emphasises the only thing Gilead couldn’t take away from her old life was her memories and imagination. The reconstructed narrative allows the reader to question the reliability of Offred because it is all from her memory. Atwood uses the “Historical Notes” to provide a challenging voice “Some of them may have been filled by our anonymous author.” Pieixoto undermines the narrative by suggesting it is false, which could allow readers to doubt Offred’s construction even further. Alternatively, the contradicting male voice can be interpreted as an added male domination embedded into the narrative, agreeably this can be interpreted as Atwood emphasising
The narrative structures are integral to portraying female oppression and are different for each text. The first person narrative of “The Handmaid’s Tale” uses a number of different techniques – distancing, flashbacks and reconstruction to effectively present an emotive view of female oppression. Offred’s first person account increases the emotion because the readers feel her pain more directly, “I can remember screaming.” The use of emotive language and short powerful sentences presents Offred’s unbearable pain of being separated from her daughter. Distancing is used, “thoughts must be rationed,” to reflect how Offred is coping within the repressed society as well as emphasising how torturous and difficult the society is to live in. The ‘Night’ sections are patterned throughout the narrative and they help to reveal Offred as an individual to the reader. The character’s isolation “Where should I go?” is both ironic and distressing because her reality is that she is trapped; this emphasises the only thing Gilead couldn’t take away from her old life was her memories and imagination. The reconstructed narrative allows the reader to question the reliability of Offred because it is all from her memory. Atwood uses the “Historical Notes” to provide a challenging voice “Some of them may have been filled by our anonymous author.” Pieixoto undermines the narrative by suggesting it is false, which could allow readers to doubt Offred’s construction even further. Alternatively, the contradicting male voice can be interpreted as an added male domination embedded into the narrative, agreeably this can be interpreted as Atwood emphasising
Bibliography: • Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Virago Press Limited, 1987 • Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. • O’Keefe, Bernard. An Approach To ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. 1993. • http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/19/featuresreviews.guardianreview21