How Does Margaret Atwood Establish and Develop a Dystopian Narrative in Her Novel ‘the Handmaid’s Tale’?

Throughout Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded state is created through the use of multiple themes and narrative techniques. In a dystopia, we can usually find a society that has become all kinds of wrong, in direct contrast to a utopia, or a perfect society. Like many totalitarian states, the Republic of Gilead starts out as an envisioned utopia by a select few: a remade world where lower-class women are given the opportunity interact with upper-class couples in order to provide them with children, and the human race can feel confident about producing future generations with the potential to see past divisions of classes. Yet the vast majority of the characters we meet are oppressed by this world, and its strict attention to violence, death, and conformity highlight the ways in which it is a far from perfect place. Atwood is tapping into a national fear of the American psyche and playing with the idea of American culture being turned backwards and no longer standing as the dominant culture. Atwood engages the reader by recreating events that have previously happened making the ‘dystopian’ world more relatable and, therefore, more frightening.

Two of the most important themes of The Handmaid 's Tale are the presence and manipulation of power and freedom. The ideas of power, freedom and confinement are closely entwined and constantly on Offred’s mind. It is often the case, however, that these can be muddled with what is free and what is bound. Auntie Lydia thinks ‘there is more than one kind of freedom… Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.’ This suggests the belief that; despite all that the women have lost, Aunt Lydia and Gilead argue, they are free now. They have "freedom from" things like sexist catcalls and potential abuse from strangers. They