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...

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.
Herein, the relationship between the reference to livestock and the collected inhabitants' primary role of reproductive service may also not be lost on us even as we consider that women on the whole in this society are consigned to an extremely limited and singular role as a vessel for procreation. Karen Stein indicates in a 1996 journal-published critique that "in the guise of a repopulation program, Gilead reads the biblical text literally and makes it the basis for the state-sanctioned rape, the impregnation ceremony the handmaids must undergo each month." (Stein, 195) That policy interests proclaimed for the people becomes a direct path to the sexual abuse of an entire gender is indicative of a society with deeply rooted needs and desires to satisfy what have been deemed immoral impulses through a rigidly structured system that forbids the investment of lust into the proceedings and yet consistently applies the violations noted above against the subjected women.

Atwood's novel is a social critique which remains current and disturbingly connected to the past. The pressing concern that the persistence of inequality and oppression of individualism may ultimately lead to internal societal destruction as occurred in Nazi Germany is voiced with clarity and purpose in the novel at hand.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. (1985). The Handmaid's Tale. McClelland and Stewart.

Stein, Karen. (1997). Margaret Atwood's Modest Proposal: The Handmaid's Tale. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Vol. 148.