Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Handmaid's T:can you make this into a poem with words ending with 'o' and have some kind of a rhyme scheme?

The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in a hypothetical dystopian future of the United States. The U.S. government has been overthrown and replaced with a theocratic regime called The Republic of Gilead. In this totalitarian society, the role of the average woman is no different than that of a slave. Because the society is facing a shrinking birth rate due to toxic waste pollution, all middle cl women are forced to perform the role of ‘Wombs with legs’, the so-called Handmaids. One of these women is Offred, and she is the narrator of the story. She has a strange name, but this is her name because she is literally ‘of Fred’. Fred is the name of the government leader who owns her and determines her future. She has been igned to Fred and his wife Serena Joy to have a child for them. If she is shown to be capable of having a baby, she will be safe in her society and won’t be challenged by her next master. But if she fails to have a child, she will be declared an “Un-Woman”, and will be sent to ‘concentration camps’ to clean up toxic waste in one of the many regions that have been corrupted throughout the Republic of Gilead. This barbaric treatment is naturally unknown to foreign visitors. Outsiders are only allowed to see what the government shows them and this limited picture certainly excludes the wall where people are executed. Offred’s existence questionable and her story is discovered at the end of the novel, as a collection of tape-recordings of her memories about the days before the government was overthrown.

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