Exposé d’Anglais sur « The Handmaid’s Tale »

Sujet n°2

Feminism :

1. Definition :

Feminism is a movement which wants that women are more important than men and it wants to improve situation of women in the society.

2. Offred’s Mother as an example for the feminist movement:

Offred’s mother is the perfect feminist character in this story and we will use this character to describe feminism. Feminists wanted abortion rights and the banning of pornography. In chapter 7, Offred remembers a scene when she was a child and went to the park with her mother where there were women burning pornographic magazines. [P.48 -> READ.] They burn pornographic books and magazines because in those magazines women are treated like objects, not like human beings. Feminists want stop that women are treated like sexual objects, and in Gilead women are just objects, objects to produce children. In chapter 20, on page 130 & 131, Offred remembers when her mother came to her home and told them about her problems and ideologies: “A man is just a women’s strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn’t a nice guy and all but he wasn’t up to fatherhood” Here we can clearly see how Offred’s mother thinks about men, and how much she hates them. At this time, Offred wasn’t feminist and she didn’t like what her mother said about men.

3. Anti-feminism in Gilead

a) Lost of personality

Gilead is anti-feminist. The society is completely directed by men. As feminist writer, Margaret Atwood shows that this society can’t function well. This exaggeration of anti-feminism attracts the reader to the feminist side, which equalizes the story. Offred also rebels against this society and has feminist thoughts because she thinks that the time before Gilead was better. But she never expresses her thoughts, she keeps them inwardly. This society is like a step back in comparison to the 70’s, when women wanted to be more than just the ones who do the