The Handmaid's Tale

"I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It's the only things they've given me to read. If I were caught doing it, what would it count? I didn't put the pin cushion here myself." This excerpt from Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is an example of the struggle that the Handmaids and the other various female characters throughout the book face. Offred's struggle is only one of many potential stories that Atwood could have acknowledge. This book could have just as easily been The Martha's Tale or The Wives' Tale or even The Econowives Tale. But why did Margaret Atwood choose to make it central on the Handmaid's struggle? What made Offred's story the one she chose to write about? I believe that the novel was written from the point of view of a Handmaid in order to maximize the emotional toll on the readers. How could the story of a housemaid instill the same emotion as that of a woman who is passed around men in order to carry their seed and treated as nothing but a womb and a pair of ovaries? The answer is simple, it wouldn't.
Atwood's use of faith in this novel is miraculous, creating a society blinded by their faith in politics, creating a nation of overly pious zealots, where fear and faith rule their lives, and their reproductive cycles. The Bible is used a symbol of both undying faith and the sugjugation of women in the novel, where the Bible is steadfastly followed, quite literally, in everything it says, and while the 'Good Book' is followed so rigidly, women are not permited to read it, or anything else for that matter, in fear of them rediscovering themselves. The Commander read to his women, from the bible, on a regular basis, on the night of the Ceremony, in order to pass on the righteous knowledge held within, and therefore out of reach for any lacking the correct genitalia. The Bible is used in the novel as more than just a symbol for the zealotry that's taken hold of the Republic of Gilead, it's used in order to bring the opression to readers in a physical sense, to force us, as observers, to truly understand what it is to be a woman in the new age of the world.
The entire novel centralizes on Offred's new life in this world of men and God and her reminisces of what it was to be a woman, a wife, and a mother before all of society was controlled by the holy men of the military. The idea that women were forced to give up their lives to their husbands or other suitable men is heart-wrenching, that Women were forced to be second-class citizens due to their lack of equipment below the waist is a terrible, foreboding thought. However, Atwood's use of language throughout the novel, and her stunning skill in the use of devices displayst he terrible world of Gilead in a remarkable way so that, while being a tale of woman's struggle against the government and opression it keeps the attention of the reader in a hopeful way, holds our attention raptly so much that readers hope for Offred's suffering to end and for women to be liberated.