How Does Margaret Atwood Use Feminism In The Handmaid's Tale

In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood, the main character is a woman known to the audience as Offred. She exists in a sort of dystopian country known as the Republic of Gilead, where men hold the political and familial power, while the women are nothing more than property, maids, and vessels. Offred is one of the few fertile women left in the country, so she is assigned the task of giving birth to babies for specified households and is given to a household headed by a character known as the Commander. As the novel progresses, the reader learns of the wife’s resentment towards Offred, Offred’s friendship with a woman called Ofglen, and bits of Offred’s life before being forced to become a Handmaid. The reader also learns of the relationship formed between Nick, the chauffeur, and Offred. Using these main characters and the general conflict between Offred and society, Atwood is able to effectively portray a running theme throughout the novel; feminism. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman in proper society could be categorized in some the following groups: Wife, Aunt, Martha, Handmaid, or Unwoman. As David Coad stated, the
Atwood’s intended response towards such a society was to find a way of preventing such a thing from occurring in real life. Gorman Beauchamp notes that she tried to prevent the reader from “being too obtuse to see that Gilead lurked just around the corner” (Beauchamp 2009). She makes Gilead a more plausible occurrence by not providing much detail about the country itself, relying on the reader’s mind to fill in the blanks. As the fear of such a thing occurring becomes legitimate in the reader's mind, it automatically searches for ways around losing control to an unknown government. The most likely solution that reader would come to realize is feminism. Without it, what better way would there be to ensure a prevention of such a loss of