The Oppression of Women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Marchella Audria Pandelaki. 2021. The Oppression of Women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (Supervised by Abidin Pammu and Andi Inayah Soraya).

This study aims to explain the oppression of women by a patriarchal regime in a literary work entitled The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The objectives of this study are: (1) to know what forms of oppression do the women characters have to deal with that are portrayed in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, (2) to find out how the women’s characters resist the oppression the come up against that are described in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and (3) to analyse the relation between the women’s oppression and it’s resistance in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with the types of feminism.
The method of research that is used in this study is descriptive qualitative method. The data source of this study is The Handmaid’s Tale novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1985 with 250 pages in total. Moreover, the technique of the data analysis that is used in this study is based on Genetic Structuralism theory by Lucien Goldmann which gives attention to both intrinsic and extrinsic elements of a literary work. The extrinsic elements that is described in this study focuses on the theory of Feminism or the movement to end sexist oppression in social, economic, and political aspects. Not to mention, there are several kinds of feminism according to its history and emphasis, namely liberal feminism, socialist/marxist feminism, and radical feminism.
The results of this study indicate that in The Handmaid’s Tale, the regime called Republic of Gilead which ruled by the patriarchy applies numerous forms of oppression towards the women characters: their rights as a woman were abolished, they were being put into hierarchy according to their social roles, they were forbid to speak, think, and do freely. As a woman in a patriarchal society, they were only functioned as a tool for the government to overcome the decreasing population. Thus, the women characters find themselves resist the oppression they encountered in their own various ways. In the end, it is visible to pinpoint how certain characters’s thoughts and actions is relevant with the idea of a Radical Feminist.