General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: FEMEN Protests: Nobody Asked This Group to Speak For Oppressed Muslim Women [View all]Zorra
(27,670 posts)It is most certainly an instructional work.
Social Critique
The Handmaid's Tale comprises a number of social critiques. Atwood sought to demonstrate that extremist views might result in fundamentalist totalitarianism. The novel presents a dystopian vision of life in the United States in the period projecting forward from the time of the writing (1985), covering the backlash against feminism. This critique is most clearly seen in both Offred's memories of theslow social transformation towards theocratic fascism and in the ideology of the Aunts. Atwood's motivations for writing the novel, reflecting the above statements, can be found in the interview appended to the 1998 version of the novel. She says, "This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions" (394).
Atwood mocks those who talk of "traditional values" and those who suggest that women should return to being housewives. For Serena Joy, a formerly successful TV personality and public speaker, the religious and social ideology she has spent her entire long career publicly promoting has, in the end, destroyed her own life and happiness.
Atwood also offers a critique of contemporary feminism. By working against pornography, feminists in the early 1980s opened themselves up to criticism that they favoured censorship. Anti-pornography feminist activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon made alliances with the religious right. Atwood warns that the consequences of such an alliance may end up empowering feminists' worst enemies. She also suggests, through descriptions of the narrator's feminist mother burning books, that contemporary feminism was becoming overly rigid and adopting the same tactics of the religious right.
Most notably, Atwood critiques modern religious movements, specifically fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, with a reference to Islamic fundamentalism such as the theocracy founded in Iran in 1979. An American religious revival in the mid-1970s had led to the growth of the religious right through televangelism. Jimmy Carter, then president, had avowed his renewed and reaffirmed Christianity; Ronald Reagan was elected as his successor using a specifically Christian discourse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale#Social_critique