Women´s Voice in the Handmaid´s Tale

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In the Handmaid's Tale, men are dominant in Gilead society, playing a superior role in it, meanwhile, women are not allowed to have a voice or opinion. The women of this society have to demonstrate complacency and passivity because they are inferior to everyone in society, especially the men. The lack of the handmaid´s voice is linked to their existence depending only on their fertility. They lose all their possessions, memories, families, etc. They do not even have a name, being named according to the names of their commanders. 


“ This attitude of complacency is evident when Offred explains, Aunt Lydia said it was best not to speak unless they asked you a direct question. Try to think of it from their point of view, she said, her hands clasped and wrung together her nervous pleading smile”.  - Aunt Lydia 


This extract demonstrates how women should not speak unless people in charge of Gilead society give them the right to do so. The idea of having Aunts to force the rules and watch other women in this society is contradictory, in the sense that they act superior to other women, such is the case of the Handmaids, but still remain inferior to men. 
 
The idea of being passive and complacent acts as a parallel to the idea of women being brainwashed in society. Offred says the following when talking about the difference between the way women were treated before and after Gilead: 


“ Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom too. Now you are being given freedom. Don’t underrate it”- Offred, The Handmaid's Tale
  
Apart from being prohibited from voicing their opinions, feeling passion, speaking unless they are given the word to or love anything, women in Gilead are indoctrinated to sacrifice things and believe it is a way of demonstrating complacency to society and authorities as a whole. 


“ Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it”- Offred, The Handmaid's Tale 

Here, Offred says that women in Gilead society have to work at being passive, ignorant, and complacent of the situation they are currently living in. This is an example showing that women must act passive and complacent. 
 
However, not all women in the novel lack a voice, such is he case of commander's wives, who have an amount of influence and power in Gilead's society, especially over the Handmaids. Their role enforces and controls that patriarchal basis, playing a major role in the establishment of Gilead's Republic. They are women who are considered pure and virtuous by the regime's standards.

Despite their high rank in the society of Gilead, they are also constrained in various ways, and their work can be taken away in the case of misbehavior towards their husbands. Their power is not applied over everyone, such as the handmaids and others below them. They are below them, and lack, therefore, power over them, being still subjugated by the patriarchal society of Gilead. This can be seen in the case of the wives that are not fertile and are forced to watch their husbands the time they have sex with handmaids.

Aunts are women were very powerful and rich before Gilead. They possess the highest status among all the working female in the society of Gilead. They are the enforcers and instructors of Gilead's women. They have power over the handmaids by forcing and hypnotizing them into the society's beliefs. They control and own the handmaids by preaching and preaching about values and religion of the new society. They have the power as well to have anyone sentenced to death.


References

The Handmaid's Tale- Margaret Atwood

https://blog.pshares.org/the-handmaids-tale-and-the-silencing-of-a-womans-voice/


Written by Hanane Er-rouisse

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