The Handmaid’s Tale Critique Essay Example

society, as well as the absence of choice and free will.

Throughout the book, the narrator makes references to or compares women to flowers. For example, the Commander and Serena Joy's house is completely explained in floral imagery: there's a "watercolor picture of blue irises"  in the narrator's room; the bathroom is "papered in small blue flowers, forget-me-nots"; the master bedroom is decorated with "a starry canopy of silver flowers". The first thing the narrator finally works the nerve up to steal is a daffodil from one of Serena Joy's arrangements. Even Jezebel's, where the Commander takes the narrator, is decorated with flowers.

Flowers are also used to disguise things that are ugly or terrifying; the narrator compares the bloody mouth of a hanged man, for example, to the "red of the tulips" in Serena Joy's garden. Flowers are often considered symbols of beauty or fertility. In The Handmaid's Tale they're given special attention as objects that can bloom and grow at a time when few women can. From a technical standpoint, flowers are also the part of a plant that holds the reproductive organs. They're constant reminders of the fertility that most women lack.

It seems the older Wives are seeking to hang onto their attractiveness and fertility by decorating themselves with flowers and tending gardens: "Many of the Wives have such gardens, it's something for them to order and maintain and care for". Serena Joy takes a bizarre pleasure in mutilating flowers: when the narrator sees her chopping them awkwardly, she wonders, "Was it some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers? The fruiting body" . Perhaps these are attacks Serena Joy would like

to make on the Handmaid, who can be seen as a flower living in her house. The idea of eggs comes up frequently in the book.

With each mention we're reminded that they're part of a human woman's reproductive cycle, even though usually what the narrator is doing is eating them. She usually has them for breakfast, eating eggs so she can make her own healthy eggs. When, one night, she falls asleep in her closet and terrifies Cora into dropping her breakfast the next morning, it's an egg that falls to the ground and has to be thrown away. One day at breakfast the narrator thinks, "I think that this is what God must look like: an egg… To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure" . She adds that she is living "The minimalist life.

Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want? " . The narrator's attitude toward eggs alludes to what eggs symbolize in Christianity. If the egg can be seen to contain God and pleasure, a whole world, the narrator wonders, perhaps she should not desire anything else. In her next thought, however, she worries that she's been given the egg and these feelings so she won't want anything else. Even philosophical abstraction and meditation has been undermined by Gilead.