The Handmaid's Tale Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

The Handmaid's Tale - Essay Example Offred From her point of view, the story is narrated taking the audience through flashbacks, asides, and digressions to highlight her relationship with other characters and show the change in the society. She was disunited from her family following her capture and sentencing to the indoctrination centre. As a handmaid, Offred is forced to have relations with her master so that she can bear offspring for the infertile wife of the commander. She is depicted as an intelligent, perceptive kind woman, who bears enough faults to make her human. She is a single mother and feminist whose determination has seen her survive the worst of days in the new rule. Offred has a dark sense of humour, which helps her absorb the shock of the prevailing oppression and injustices. Moira is illustrated as a dear friend to Offred with their relationship dating back to college years. She is depicted as fiercely independent and capable of defending herself against the odds that face her as demonstrated when s he demands for her rights at the Centre. Moira is regarded as the logical one and offers the voice of reasons to uplift the spirits of her friends. As such, she represents courage and hope in a bleak future, traits that seem rare under the prevailing conditions. In addition, Moira is demonstrated as athletic, tenacious, irreverent and enormously resourceful. She also provides an alternative to the meek subservience and embrace of one’s fate with a rebellious nature as she defies Gilead values. Moira rejects male-female sexual interactions to instil defiance over authority since the Gilead rule does not support gay tendencies. Her problem with authority is cemented by her rebel actions against the fear that grips the society and escapes from the Centre. Moira’s personality can be equated to that of Offred’s mother who seems to have a kind of authority over the narrator. Offred and Moira have the will to live despite the losses they have experienced with the regim e change. They engage each other to uplifting their spirits and keeping the faith that all will be well despite their current predicament. This illustrates the level of care and compassion held by the two characters. They both are active feminists seeking freedom as they yearn for normalcy and the end of the social injustices. However, Moira has had successful attempts while Offred seems contend after she meets Nick, the Commander’s chauffeur. The Commander He is described as a grey-haired, semiretired military official to whom Offred is assigned to as a handmaid. He is illustrated as an intelligent man with a collection of books, which he enjoys reading as a scientist and a market researcher before the coup. The commander is among the founders of Gilead and as such is responsible for the current suffering and oppression in the society. However, he bends the rules helped forge by engaging Offred in a clandestine relationship where she visits his office. He is illustrated as a sympathetic man towards Offred and he seeks her companionship, though for selfish reasons. The commander is lonely and unhappy in his marriage; therefore, the relationship he establishes has selfish motives and does not care about the risk he puts Offred in. In this way, the commander plays the victim and prisoner, from which he seeks solace. He is morally conflicted as contemplates abdicating his role in the Gilead government,

Discuss the impact of British colonial rule, and in particular the Essay

Discuss the impact of British colonial rule, and in particular the regulations regarding witchcraft accusations and oracles, on the framing and methods of Evans - Essay Example Most of the world’s knowledge of witchcraft during that period and beyond in fact came down from Western Europe, where it was believed that many people practiced witchcraft, something considered evil and frightening. Scholars believe that witchcraft in Europe was part of a very ancient religion that existed long before Christianity. Thousands of witch trials were held there at which people were accused of witchcraft. These witch trials were later replicated in massive proportions in Salem, Massachussets in the US, another former British colony, where suspected witches were hanged and burned at the stake. So it must have been nothing new for the British to come upon the practice of witchcraft in many African territories that they colonized. Much like their forbears in the Middle Ages, their reaction to witchcraft in Africa was one of fear followed by a desire to persecute and eliminate the source of that fear. This is exactly what the British tried to do in Azande, a territory that straddles the boundaries of Sudan, Zaire and the Central African Republic. Under the 1899 Anglo-French Convention, the French who competed and fought with the British in Africa ceded the Azande to the British. Forthwith, the British established a military outpost there which military occupation gave way to civil administration in 1920. The Azandes lived in the watershed area between the Nile and Congo rivers to which they were resettled from the wilderness by the British after the first World War. They never returned to the jungles. When the British gave Azande some independence, it set up a civil service system manned by career people generally from the upper classes in England. A British colonial governor and a legislative council ruled the territory alongside the native chieftains. One of the first steps taken