Month: November 2020

The prologue opens up with the Nurse setting the scene, giving context to the audience which is important because that is where we get our first impressions of who Medea is as a person. The nurse gives a lot of backstory to Medea as a character, which is when we understand that Jason, her husband, abandoned her to marry into the royal family. The first impression that we end up getting of Medea is that she is a passionate, frightening woman who has an irrational hatred for Jason and her kids due to trust issues and her kids potentially acting as a reminder of Jason. We also get the impression that she is miserable; not eating, essentially doing nothing, and therefore as someone who is not able to care for themselves.

In the Parados, The Chorus further represents the idea of Medea’s irrational hatred by speaking directly to her, saying “Check this passionate grief over your husband which wastes you away”, essentially telling her she’s wasting her time grieving over her husband and should instead be moving on. This makes us feel pity for her as a character.

This creates a shock effect for the audience when Medea is finally revealed to us, as she is completely different from the first impressions that we would have had. When Medea has her monologue, it reveals to us that perhaps her suffering and anger isn’t as irrational as we thought them to be.

The theme of gender inequality is used to allow Medea to characterise her suffering to the audience. For example, she says “I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child”. In the context of when the play was written, men’s role in society was usually to go out and fight in the front lines, while the role of women was to bear and care for children. Therefore, by stating that she would rather do what a man does, three times, which is arguably more risky and dangerous, it shows to what degree she is suffering. The theme of gender inequality and gender roles is further explored, specifically regarding the lack of a women’s ability to have free will. For example, “we must accept him as a possessor of our body” and “divorce is not respectable; to repel the man, not possible”. This shows the contrast between the ability of men to do as they please while women are forced to tend to the men.

In a thesis by Alanna A. Callaway, she argues that the power structure of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood also critiques the feminine roles that support and enable the repression of other women. Is Atwood’s novel ultimately a feminist work of literature, or does it offer a critique of feminism?

The thesis transitions the focus of The Handmaid’s Tale from the consequences of patriarchal control and “traditional” misogyny, to the matriarchal network, and a new form of misogyny: women’s hatred of women. An example that comes to mind is the role that women play in society. Women can be separated into four distinct roles: Wives, Marthas, Aunts, and Handmaids. It can be argued that the power structure of Gilead, which places Wives over the Commanders, does not accurately reflect the mission of feminism of creating equality amongst men and women, as in the case of Wives, women are instead placed in a superior position to men. Furthermore, the subdivision of women into classes creates a sense of hierarchy between them, such that the oppression of women is not necessarily brought upon by men, but instead by other women instead. Another key example that comes to mind is when the women brutally assault the man, which again is a misrepresentation of the feminist movement and is actually more reflective of more extremist, anti-men values that a vocal minority of feminists have.

On the contrary, because the Handmaids’ role in society is diminished to a reproductive role, it can also be argued that the novel puts to light the oppressive nature of the power structure of Gilead as a reflection of society in the real world. The loss of individualism of the Handmaids through the loss of their names, being named based on the name of their Commander diminishes the women as distinct members of society and makes them no more than a reproductive chamber. The oppression of women is not sparse within The Handmaid’s Tale, however the empowerment of women as a collective masks the fact that part of the oppression is not coming from men, but from other women.

Perhaps it’s possible to say that Atwood’s novel is a call to action – not necessarily for women to rise up against patriarchal-like modern societal norms, but for women to become aware of the radical strains that the feminist movement can result in. The thesis states that Atwood witnessed a version of this backlash when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale during the early 1980s; the conservative revival in America and Britain was a counter-assault on the progress women had struggled for during the 1960s and 1970s.