Precis

1. In "'The Handmaid's Tale' and the Dystopian Traditions" (1987), Amin Malak argues that "while the major dystopian features can clearly be located in //The Handmaid's Tale,// the novel offers two distinct additional features: feminism and irony." Amin Malak highlights these ideas by evaluating the feminine struggle as women are turned into sex slaves ("power-sex correlative") in a state that "claims to be founded on Christian principles"(1). She again highlights irony by identifying how Atwood uses a women to denounce feminism ("Aunt Lydia, functions, ironically, as the spokes person of anti feminism"). Malak analyzes the practices of this dystopian misogynistic society in order to help readers appreciate the careful art of Atwood's novel. Malak addresses an audience who has knowledge on the novel at hand and speaks to them with a didactic tone with hope to change their views on the work and enlighten them to the authors complete intentions of the novel.

2. Shirley Neuman, author of "'Just a Backlash': Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and //The Handmaid's Tale" (Summer 2006)// connects the society in //Handmaid's Tale// to the sociopolitical climate of the 1980s and asserts that "Atwood's Gilead represents an extreme backlash against the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s." Shirley Neuman supports her claim by alluding //A Handmaid's Tale// to Atwood's first novel, //The Edible Woman//, George Orwell's dystopian novel //1984// and the sociopolitical atmosphere between 1965 and 1985. Shirley Neuman relates //A Handmaid's Tale// to many other pieces in order to prove her assertion that "Gilead represents an extreme backlash against the feminist movement." Neuman directs her essay at critics of //A Handmaid's Tale// who fail to see the connection of the novel to the time period in which it was written. Neuman writes with an highly informative and formal tone that remains constant throughout.

3. David Coad, author of “Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (2001) studies the symbolic importance of sheets, veils, and canopies in the novel. He relates these images to the idea by jacques Derrida of the “hymen as a feminine trope.” David Coad uses the logic of the hymen to discuss the effect the veil has on the worth of women in the society of Gilead, and the overall relation it has to the world today.