Wo Dystopias Focusing on Confinement, Isolation, and Surveillance

Lauren Bartkovsky

Literature and Human Experience

15 November 2015

Two Dystopias Focusing on Confinement, Isolation, and Surveillance

The Handmaids Tale and The Hunger Games are two dystopian novels that focus on the totalitarian societies that use confinement, isolation, and surveillance to control their people. It is through this repression that we witness the evolution of our two protagonists.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, a grown woman, who is sad and soulful as remembering her former life, slowly taking and almost conforming to the circumstances of her new life, she finds solace in the small pleasures.  In The Hunger Games, Katniss, a teenaged girl struggling to keep her family alive, forced to become a reluctant hero and symbol of hope for a desperate society.  These two novels show us two different transformations that occur when two ordinary people are placed in extraordinary situations created by oppressive tactics.  One person becomes compliant in her plight, and the other a hero.

In The Handmaids Tale, The Rebpublic of Gilead has replaced The United States.  In this new society women have no rights beyond what their bodies are able to yield.  They are not allowed to work, to own property, to read or to write.  Offred was a wife and mother, and had a normal life before Gilead.  The New Republic deemed her life “void”, and so she became a handmaid for The Republic of Gilead.  Basically, used as a vessel for reproduction, and assigned to elite couples who are unable to reproduce on their own.  Offred had been taken from her life by The Republic to be re-educated (i.e. brainwashed) into her new role as a handmaid.  

As a handmaid, Offred is allowed no privacy and yet no real companionship, she is isolated yet surrounded by people. Her freedom, like that of all women in Gilead, is completely and utterly restricted.  She may only leave her home (the assigned home of her “commander”) for supervised shopping trips and mandatory walks (necessary exercise). Even the door to her room must not be shut entirely.  Everywhere she goes she is aware that “The Eyes” are watching her, the secret police of the new republic.  The quote in The Handmaid’s Tale, “a rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze”, is one that symbolizes confinement and isolation (Atwood, 165).

Throughout the beginning of the story Offred remembers her husband and her daughter. She misses small simple pleasures and choices she used to have; smoking a cigarette, looking directly into a man’s eyes, and close friendships.  Even her clothes are an outward symbol of her new life.  There is a moment when out shopping Offred sees Japanese tourists in clothes she used to enjoy, short skirts, bright lipstick. Now she is dressed in what can only be described as a bright red burka, complete with jihab, yet prettily called “wings” by the Republic of Gilead.  Covered from head to toe, hidden, and yet her station as handmaid is glaringly proclaimed by her required clothing.