The Handmaid's Tales Analysis

“Culture is so influenced by its dominant religions that whether a writer adheres to the beliefs or not, the values and principles of those religions will inevitably inform the literary work.” (Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like A Professor) Thus, the traits of characters from the dominant religion’s stories appear in literacy across the globe. One figure that often appears in literature is a symbolic Christ, because the world resides in a Christian dominated culture. There are distinctive qualities that make a character the symbolic Christ of a story, such as forgiveness and being tempted by the devil. The handmaid Offred is the Christ figure of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, because she posses qualities such as previously mentioned. Firstly, Offred is a Christ figure because she can be described using similar adjectives as those that apply to Christ. The primary physical example would be that both are last scene at the age of thirty-three. Another interesting similarity in their physique is that both are described as having brown hair. Now, arguably this is weak evidence when it stands alone. However, when put into context with both characters’ lives the similarity is much stronger. Both of …show more content…
She is brave and forgives and in the end escapes this world’s cruelty. She gives light to her life and what the world is like through her story. Offred teaches people that if the world continues the way it is then a government like the Republic of Gilead could rise and women could be oppressed. Her story foretells what could be and yet at the end still gives hope for a reformed world. Yet, like Christ, her story can be hard to understand because, “[v]oices may reach us from [history]; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.” (The Handmaid’s Tale,