When I was preparing for my AP Literature exam last year, my teacher mentioned that Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is one of many works that AP students have written their essays on in the exam. If you are not familiar with what I’m talking about, there is one component of the exam that requires students to select a literary work with enough academic credibility to answer a question on a common theme in literature. Having studied the novel, I can now see for myself how this novel’s themes would make an effective essay for an AP Literature exam.

Given the state of Gilead’s oppressive laws on women and in particular the Handmaids, I initially expected that Offred, the novel’s protagonist, would be an active resistor against the state. Much surprisingly, Offred is rather passive despite her experience of heartbreaking tragedies (e.g. separation from her family) and the fact that her mother was a fervent feminist. However, after having read Shirley Neuman’s commentary on The Handmaid’s Tale, I happened to have realized that Atwood intended to use Offred’s characterization to represent the attitudes of younger women in the 1980s. As Neuman explains, these women generally took their freedoms for granted and were not overly appreciative of their mothers’ efforts in the rigorous struggle for women’s rights. From this respect, I would make the argument that the novel intends to satirize the growing complacence of the younger women at the time of the novel’s publication. As a continuum to this, I looked at a poem that I studied back in high school titled, “It’s Dangerous to Read Newspapers”, which was also written by Atwood. This poem does well to reinforce the novel’s notion that passiveness in the worse case scenario ultimately contributes to conflicts taking place in the real world. As Atwood writes, “I (poem’s narrator) am the cause” of the different examples of turmoil that Atwood mentions in the poem.

Having mentioned about the poem, here is a link to the text: http://watsonpoetry.wordpress.com/how-to-analyze-a-poem/

Another interesting aspect of the novel is its various similar themes to George Orwell’s renowned novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. One example of this would be the idea of censorship. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the state of Gilead purposely forbids women from reading as a preventative measure against potential uprisings. Similarly, the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four also practices censorship through the modification of factual information. On this note, I also made the observation that the various societal titles in Gilead are comparable to the names of the different ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four given that are all incredibly ironic. This appears to be characteristic of totalitarian states. A real-world example would be North Korea, where the country’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Strangely, North Korea is arguably the most totalitarian state on the planet.

In retrospect, I honestly have to admit that I regret not having read The Handmaid’s Tale back in high school. Despite that I had actually forgotten the question that was on my AP Literature exam, I can be sure that the themes in this novel nevertheless would have definitely proven suitable for practically any question that might have appeared on the exam.