Page 72 - Bullying in The Handmaid's Tale

Bullying is a despicable concept.  The idea that someone should find him or herself to be more significant than another person, and manifest this sentiment through the torment of this “lesser” person, is absolutely immoral.  In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, societal guidelines are dictated by a gender-based social code (established by men) that inhibits bullying in the forms of sexism between men and women and classism between women and other women.  Atwood’s interpretation of the threats of the increasing sexism and classism that exist in our modern world is an exaggeration of what might actually come to fruition in the future.  However, this text is a good example of the negative threats that gender-based bullying poses on our society.  Atwood approached a modern concept by giving it a futuristic twist, a tactic we saw George Orwell employ in his novel, 1984.  What I appreciated about Atwood’s interpretation of the concept of gender-based bullying was her use of first-person narrative to engage the reader in the story through the protagonist’s thought process.  In this way, readers are privy to witnessing the backwards nature of the world Atwood created through the mind of a character that is sympathetic of others, thus providing the theory that human compassion has the potential to stay intact, even when society cultivates negativity based on gender differences.

In one particular scene, found on pages 71 and 72, Atwood presented a situation in which the protagonist was forced to belittle another woman, yet she felt guilty for doing so. The scene, though brief, is of a handmaid (Janine) who had been raped as a youth.  After repeating her experience at “Testifying,” a gathering at which the handmaids shared personal stories, though the truthfulness of these stories was never certain because “it was safer to make things up than to say you had nothing to reveal” (71), she was tormented by the rest of the women, who chanted “crybaby” at her, and told her that the rape was her own fault.  This aggressive bullying caused Janine to break down emotionally and eventually believe that the fact that she had been raped had actually been her own fault – that her promiscuity was the instigator.  Though, “for a moment, even though [the handmaids] knew what was being done to [Janine], [they] despised her” (72).  The moment that Offred, the protagonist, lapses out of her brainwashed mentality is when she admits, “I used to think well of myself. I didn’t then” (72).   Atwood uses Offred’s self-reflection to show that Offred is still emotionally removed from the “system,” though she is physically a part of it.

Atwood’s presentation of the concept of bullying and its intricacies between genders and within separate genders provides readers with the opportunity to see societal circumstances that should not be allowed to come into existence in our modern world.  I appreciate that Atwood was able to convey the protagonist’s guilty conscience by establishing a first-person narrative from Offred’s perspective.  This provided readers with a reminder that, even when society cultivates negativity based on gender differences, human compassion has the potential to persevere.