The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Throughout The Handmaid's Tale there were so many allusions to the bible, they pop up everywhere like the weeds in the garden I used to grow. Gilead, the town that Offred lives in, is a land of peace and relaxation in the bible. But Gilead in the novel is not like the biblical Gilead, in fact, it is just the opposite. The society is on the knife's edge of civil war, outside of Gilead there are rebel groups trying to overthrow the society; while inside of Gilead the Handmaids have their own secret society called Mayday which allows them to pass on news of what is happening in the society. Tthe term Handmaid is also biblical, Handmaids were female servants and in the bible when the wives could not bear children they gave their handmaid to their husband to bear children for them.  In the novel the Handmaids do just that, have babies. Similarly the store names are also an allusion to the bible, for example Milk and Honey in the novel this store is a produce store but in the bible it was a place where the land was fertile, both in crops and children. This image contrasts with the the Gilead in the novel which is fertile in neither food nor children. Where it is such a big deal when there are oranges in the store and where the City is so desolate in children that they need to assign handmaids to the Commanders. Atwood uses these contrasting images in the allusions to show how society twisted the bible in order to fit what the society needs. They need a higher birth rate, so they say since handmaids are in the bible it is right and not sinful to have one. There needed to be a reason for people to agree to this new society, or at least to keep everyone calm enough so that most people will not fight against it, so they named the city Gilead; a name that has a relaxing and pleasant feeling attached to it.

"I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it" (Atwood 39). 

This quote is my favorite in this novel. In Gilead Handmaids are not allowed to speak, or read , or talk to other people because Gilead silences all women, even the wives, but Offred is rebelling against the society by telling her story of Gilead, even if it is not to someone directly. And creating this story gives Offred some power in her rebellion, she gets to create the "ending" of the story. What I also like about this quote is that it shows her hope that there will be and ending to this story, that real life will start up again and she will find Luke, her daughter, her mother, and Moira. That she will be able to tell this story to them. Also if she tells this story it will give her the strength to get through her life in Gilead until the end of her story. This quote shows her hope that she will pull through this and escape and shows it also her rebellion against Gilead by not giving control of her mind and thoughts over to the society, that is why it is my favorite quote.  

I liked The Handmaid's Tale a lot because it was a very thought provoking novel, it made me think about the bible and it made me think about our government and compare events in history with events in the book. I also liked the ending before the Historical notes, it let your imagination decide if Offred escaped or if she was captured by the Eyes. I didn't like how Moira gave up fighting against the society while she was in Jezebels, I have to say I was hoping for Moira to lead a rebellion against Gilead and when she gave up I was very disappointed and a little scared about what would happen then. I do like how Offred did not really give up though, she did at one point but then she started to fight back again, I was happy when Offred started to fight back again. I did not like the Commander at all, well I shouldn't say that, in the beginning while we were first getting to know him I thought he was just as chained down by society as Offred was, just as lonely, but then after a few almost sexist comments from him and after he took Offred to Jezebels I realized the he may have been lonely but he was not chained down by society like Offred. To me at the end the Commander struck me as a shallow man who only cares about what he wants and not how it might affect others. I didn't like how he used Offred just to get what he wanted.    

We By Yevegeny Zamyatin

Sentence structure is one of the elements that captured me in this novel.  The way that Zamyatin wrote We shows D-503's emotions better than any other way he could have written it. D-503's emotions are shown through the use of ellipses. In the beginning there are not many ellipses, they only show up once in a while, but when D-503 starts to develop a soul they occur more often. Because D-503 begins to feel emotions such as love and jealousy; also D-503 begins to think in a more philosophical way, before he only thought scientifically. The ellipses allow the reader to feel the emotions as if they were their own, instead of just reading print on a piece of paper. Also the ellipses allow the reader to fill in the blank of what D-503 is feeling, for example:

"But the elevator was already humming down, down, down... She had taken R from me. She has taken O from me. And yet... And yet..." (Zamyatin 77). 

The ellipses allow much more raw emotion than a description of D-503's emotions would. It is easy to know what d-503 is feeling while he says, "And yet... And yet...". D-503 is realizing that he loves I-330 even if she has taken everything from him. 

"But fortunately, between me and the wild green ocean was the glass wall. O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! It is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that Wall, we isolated out perfect machine world from the irrational ugly world of trees , birds, abd animals..." (Zamyatin 90-91). 

 This is one of my favorite quotes in the novel We. The Green wall separates the city from the outside, or the "savage" world. Keeping pristine scientific, mathematical thought inside and philosophical, questioning thought outside. In this quote the Green Wall reminded me of the wall that the society put up in their own minds so they only have rigid, unfeeling, scientific thought, not natural thought. And this wall is only brought down when they cross over the Green Wall and see the beauty of nature through their own eyes. When D-503 crosses over the Green Wall with I-330 he sees nature and the beauty of the world and that unleashes deeper thoughts, he starts thinking more poetically and less scientifically. D-503 realizes that just because he does not understand something or because there is no one definite answer, it is not irrational. D-503 realizes when he crosses over into the wild beyond the wall that the Green Wall does not keep out the unneeded from OneState, it keeps everyone in from the freedom of thought outside OneState.


I  like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I like the growth of D-503's emotions and soul, it irritated me when he followed the many rules of the society without complaint. When he started to break away from conformity I practically did a happy dance. Tthroughout the novel I had mixed feelings about I-330, in the beginning I did not like her, she seemed like someone who was dangerous, like she was just out there to hurt people. But then as I got to know her i started to like her because she was the leader of a group of people standing up for freedom. I also liked the stream of consciousness style of writing, it is a little hard to understand what D-503 is talking about sometimes but it is a really interesting style of writing. I also liked the people who lived outside the Green Wall, it was a little bit odd to find out that they were furry humans, but it seemed to me that the hair symbolized that they are the closest to nature, or the beings with the most freedom. their thoughts are not strangled by the tyrannous society on the other side of the wall. One thing that I did not like was D-503's constant reference to math, it annoyed me that he would compare people to irrational numbers, people are not unchanging numbers, people change and grow, also some of his references to math confused me.