Handmaids Tale Analysis

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“The Vulnerability that Comes Along with War”


War and political conflict can affect the human body to a self-destructive point. In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale we see traces of the effects of political conflicts and war on the characters. The main characters in the novels have experienced fragmentation of the body and identity as well as isolating themselves from the society surrounding them. Caravaggio, Hana, Almasy, Offred, and the Commander all have the same emotional and psychological characteristics of vulnerability.
The fragmentation of the body is demonstrated through imagery in Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale. A person experiencing any sort of conflict automatically pulls himself or herself away from the source of pain, whether it is emotional or physical. In The English Patient, the effect of war is especially seen on Almasy’s body. “There is a face, but it is unrecognizable” and he has forgotten who he is, because he has pulled away from society (Ondaatje 28). Almasy’s body is a story of his anguish through the conflicts of nations at war; from being the enemy of one country to then becoming it’s ally, from gaining the understanding of love to the loosing it before he completely understood it. Hana also has been affected emotionally and physically by the war. “When he had first seen her after all this time she had looked taunt…Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself” to detach herself from what was happening around her and focusing on her patient, Almasy (Ondaatje 81). Caravaggio on the other hand was physically fragmented through the war and political conflicts surrounding them. His thumbs were removed because he was a thief of the enemy. The enemy thought that this would be a lesson well learned, but Caravaggio still a thief in the end. He doped Almasy on mor...