Nazi oppression of Jews compared to Gilead's subjugation of women in The Handmaid's Tale

Parallels Between Gilaedean Patriarchy and Nazi Totalitarianism

The feminist era, which began in earnest at the tail end of the protest age, entered American society into a period of mounting awareness of the imbalances which had inherently persisted in the home, in the workplace and in the images presented by the media. Gradual shifts began to take place, both in the way that women communicated for the first time as a collective their individual hopes and dreams and in the way that women fought for access to the same social opportunities which awaited American men. These changes, still quite certainly observable today by the presence of women at every level of government, professional occupation and social strata, have been nonetheless diminished by what we may suggest through the lens of Margaret Atwood's groundbreaking 1985 satire, the Handmaid's Tale. The novel's examination of the sexual objectification and social subjugation of women at an extreme pitch on par with Orwellian conceptions of social decay through indolence helps to demonstrate what is today, more than two decades later, a justified urgency. Though certainly the dystopian nightmare of Atwood's story has not come to pass, the persistence of prescribed gender roles, of governmental patriarchy and of the fostering of both of these by religious conservatism to impact the shape of American society is worthy of alarm. Through these three characteristics found in Atwood's novel, we can see patterns which are present in today's social context, where the diminished incentive to continue to fight for equality, due to relative gains, has produced an actual regression in the struggle for gender equality.

The alarmist nature of Atwood's work as represented in the Gileadean totalitarian world may be justified by historical examples of the intersection of policy and prejudice to the effect of institutional subjugation and exploitation. The conditions facing women in Atwood's story seem to imply that the failure to resist inequality -- such as occurred in the 1930s and 1940s through Nazi mistreatment of the Jewish people -- may lead to outright abuse and destruction. And indeed, the parallels are observable, with women enduring the brunt of a distinctly male sense of collecitvist identity on par in its obscurity of individual rights with the onset and execution of the Holocaust.

Indeed, the entirety of the Holocaust was precipitated by a hard-line ideological predisposition toward German nationalism, at least as such a concept was defined by the National Socialist Party. Though World War II and the upswing of Hitler and the Nazi regime are events which revolved around military confrontations and international proxy battling, the European continent played host to a far more unconventional wartime operation. As the Nazi party portrayed it to a surprisingly receptive population, the quest for German national pride and success was to be defined not simply by victorious emergence from the war but by a purification of the people. While this provided an impetus for the larger war, wherein conquered nations would undergo a cultural Germanification, it was also the theoretical basis for the nefarious plans for which Hitler had begun to lay the groundwork even before the complete inception of war. Herein was the primary justification for the extermination of various groups of impure ethnicities which compromised the nation's strength. In the midst of a devastating economic depression, and seized by the promises of Hitler's dramatic subversion of the ineffective central leadership in parliament, the German people actively embraced the scapegoating which was directed toward a number of groups, most specifically the Jews. Ultimately sending to their deaths 6 million Jews and 5 million more of assorted ethnicity or crime, the Nazis succeeded in weaving through the German psyche a culture of acceptance for the rightness of the 'final solution' that called for the full genocide of the Jews. There would be an overwhelming institutional force underlying policies of inequality and hatred that finds common ground with the same as expressed in Atwood's work.

The notion of the government as a 'bigger brother' in this story is produced in the ironic insidiousness of 'family' as it is formed in the handmaids' quarters in Gilead. Here, we are given the impression of a society that is rigidly imposed upon its inhabitants by force presenting itself as simultaneously benevolent and formidable in its authority. From the perspective of our protagonist, we learn both of the oppressive nature of this society and of brand of sardonic observation which Atwood will bring to the proceedings. Describing her surroundings, Offred observes that "Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts." (Atwood, 4) the seamless convergence of the warm familial title 'aunt' with the twisted psycho-sexual image of this corporal mode of enforcement helps to underscore a society that is violently hostile toward independence, particularly contextualized by its use of an aggressive phallic symbol in its treatment of women. There is an element of psychological control over these women that smacks of government distortion, a key element of the Gidean society and the primary mode through which the rights of women are systematically undermined.

Here, there is a direct parallel to pre-Holocaust Nazi society. Particularly, within the context of a uniquely invasive fascist government, prompted to the diminishment of privacy rights and civil liberties by instituting sweeping social reforms directly effecting individual opportunities, freedoms and status, those such as Jews who were deemed un-German would be immediately subjected to conditions of greater imposition and restrictiveness. A host of new laws and parameters would come into existence with primarily the intent of demonstrating the more limited movement and entitlement of Jews. Aggressive symbolic gestures such as the forbidding of intermarriage, the closing of Jewish businesses, the segregation of Jewish school-children and the eventual segregating of all Jewish residences to ghetto enclosures would be used to create a psychological subjugation such as that into which the women of Gilead are told to have been born. The dehumanization which was a primary feature of German propaganda against Jews may be seen here in Atwood's writing as well.