Kiran's Utopias and Dystopias Blog

      The Commander is somewhat of a weird topic in The Handmaid's Tale. While he definitely supports the Republic of Gilead, he seems to want the illusion of love. He goes against the structure that he helped to set up in order to try and actually feel something with Offred. He seems to truly believe that women had "too much freedom" despite being such a romanticist. Also, based on the second ending, it is likely that the Commander was the one who designed the outfit of the handmaids, which is completely counter to the fact that he sneaks Offred out to the brothel in a completely different outfit.  The commander seems to be an extreme contradiction who wants to both oppress women and also be loved by those same women. He has created these rules and at the same time thinks that it's fine to break them.

      At the end of The Handmaid's Tale, we have what seems like a time skip into the future with historians discussing the events of The Handmaid's Tale. This ending somewhat changes our viewpoint on the story of The Handmaid's Tale, since their discussion shows that it is entirely possible that Offred never even existed. Perhaps the story was just Mayday propaganda. Along with this is the fact that we still don't know the true ending of Offred. Even if this ending suggests that Offred did exist and that Nick truly helped her escape, we have no idea if she actually made it across the border or if she was caught along the way. Though this does help to paint the first ending of the book in a better light, it still leaves one wondering what truly happened to Offred. The good news is that it does seem like Gilead eventually changed.

     Throughout The Handmaid's Tale, we're introduced to the underground resistance movement known as Mayday. This movement is shown to be very similar to the Brotherhood from 1984, as a kind of hidden movement that we never actually see. However, whereas the Brotherhood is shown to be either non-existent or too small to actually do anything, we never see the organization of Mayday. We only hear about it from different handmaids. Even at the end, it is unclear if Nick is working with Mayday or, similar to Mr. Charrington from 1984, a spy. This changes how we might think of Mayday. Perhaps Mayday is just a lie used to keep the handmaids in check. Depending on how we look at the end of the book we can see Nick as either tricking Offred or actually trying to help save her. Or perhaps even he is being tricked.

  The severity of the problems in the original 1984, as well as the likelihood of them happening, just increases as time goes on. With newer and newer technology that could be used to spy on us, the thought police could be almost unnecessary. There would be no safe places. The importance is that we prevent it from ever getting to that point by securing our basic rights and fighting to protect them. The good thing is that this is what America is based on, though it is not impossible for what happens in 1984 to happen here. It is important that we as people keep enough power that the government cannot do anything it wants with impunity. This also includes the bigger business and such that have hands in our government. It is important that the small number of people at the top should not be able to control the much larger amount of people at the bottom. This is really the only way of preventing 1984 from happening today. But another important idea is, if 1984 does start to happen, the...

       At the end of the novel, we see Winston crying, as he believes he has finally beaten his own feelings and has true love for Big Brother. But are those tears truly out of love for Big Brother? Or have his repressed feelings come back to haunt him? Winston doesn't seem to have truly let go of his feelings. He seems to have buried those feelings extremely deep, but no matter how deep they are, these memories still exist in his mind and he seems to be unable to forget them, no matter the torture he goes through, or how much time passes. He has a suitable "defense mechanism" against the thoughts that come up, quickly burying them in his mind with his love for Big Brother, or using the newspeak idea of crimestop, albeit not properly, as the thoughts come to him before he is able to stop them, although he is able to stop the thoughts as they come. But has he truly given up home? We know that he has given up Julia, but will he be able to achieve his goal of being agai...

 In the reading, we see that O'Brien describes that the Party is not working for the people. They know what they're doing. They just want power for the sake of power. They say that they aren't even trying to be a "stupid hedonistic Utopia". They want the world to become more and more merciless, they want all science, art, and literature to stop. They want no love, except for Big Brother. This is very different from the dystopia we see in Brave New World. In Brave New World, we see a society trying to be a Utopia, and for some people it is, but from a different point of view we see a Dystopia, creating its own societal norms. However, in 1984, we see a society willingly and knowingly becoming a Dystopia. The society isn't even trying to be a Utopia, and from no point of view is it a Utopia. Even the people who accept society are scared of it, with the thought police existing, and their children always having the possibility of giving them up for the smallest th...