How Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Exposes Patriarchy, Power, and State Control

It’s exactly this sensibility that makes The Handmaid’s Tale such a chilling and enduring critique of surveillance and authoritarianism. Published in 1985, yet eerily resonant today, the novel imagines a theocratic regime where women’s bodies become state property and every movement is monitored.

Atwood famously noted that she included no technologies or abuses that hadn’t already occurred somewhere in the real world, grounding the dystopia in lived history rather than speculative fantasy. The result is a story that feels less like a warning from the future and more like a magnification of the patriarchal logics already embedded in modern societies.

Buy Here: The Handmaid’s Tale

In this blog, we’ll explore how Atwood’s feminist vision, shaped by decades of writing about autonomy, gender, and power, culminates in a narrative where surveillance becomes the ultimate tool of control. The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t simply depict oppression; it reveals how systems of watching, recording, and policing become ideological weapons, reinforcing a social order built on fear and obedience.

Living in the Panopticon: Surveillance as a Tool of Patriarchal Control

Writing in the realm of science or speculative fiction—as Atwood classifies The Handmaid’s Tale—allows an author to explore ideas beyond the limits of realistic fiction. In the novel, various “Compu-” devices track and regulate the Handmaids’ lives: a Compucheck monitors their movements, a Compubite processes their grocery purchases, a Compudoc records medical visits, and the Commander even uses a Computalk and a pocket computer for tasks as simple as scoring Scrabble.

The most chilling example is the centralised “Compubank,” which allows the regime to erase women’s financial existence “in one single digital blow.”

“they‘ve frozen them ... Any account with an F on it instead of an M. All they needed to do is push a few buttons. We‘re cut off”

Although these details are minimal compared to the heavy technological control in dystopias like 1984 or Brave New World, they reflect Atwood’s awareness of the growing role of computers in everyday life during the early 1980s, when she wrote the novel.

The inhabitants of Gilead must live in fear of what Stephanie Barbé Hammer recognises as “a very different kind of technology ... the technology of power which Michel Foucault has called discipline”. Everyone in Gilead, and the handmaids, in particular, are “caught up in a network of surveillance and counter-surveillance”.

We see the menacing force of this network in the novel‘s opening chapters, where Offred describes her fear of being watched. Offred is watched not only by the powerful men in her life—namely, the Commander to whom she is assigned for the purpose of bearing his children—but by everyone else, too.

Gilead is filled with structures that echo Bentham’s Panopticon: guard towers staffed with armed sentries, high posts equipped with sweeping floodlights, and fortified borders marked by walls and constantly monitored by soldiers. Gilead is so under constant physical and mental observation.

In his study of prison discipline and Panopticism, Foucault observed that solitary confinement was the primary punishment for unruly inmates. Citing Ducpetiaux, he notes that isolation is believed to shape a prisoner’s moral character, allowing religious influence to regain its force. Foucault adds that the whole penal system ultimately centres on the solitary cell—figuratively inscribed with the reminder: “God sees you.”

The Handmaids and others endure this kind of isolation in their rooms for hours a day. The rulers of Gilead are also mysterious; just like the watch-house guards, it is unclear who they are, where they are, and what they do.

Moreover, The Handmaid’s Tale also depicts forms of control exerted over men. The novel frequently highlights the male gaze, which Offred strategically manipulates to exploit its inherent power imbalance. As she and Ofglen return from the market, Offred deliberately draws the soldiers’ attention by subtly using her body. She says,

“…I know they‘re watching… They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little…I enjoy the power…They will suffer, later…They have no outlets now except themselves, and that‘s a sacrilege”

Through technology, surveillance, and gendered power, The Handmaid’s Tale reveals how totalitarian systems control both bodies and minds, leaving even the smallest acts of resistance charged with meaning.

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Two Legged Wombs- Feminism in The Handmaid’s Gilead

“You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will have no memories, of any other way.

She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.

She said: Because they won‘t want things they can‘t have.”

Individuality, identity, and freedom are core elements of human life. When these are taken away, a person is reduced to little more than a shell—alive in body but empty in spirit. This is the fate of women in Gilead, who are treated inhumanely and reduced to their reproductive capabilities.

In addition, it becomes difficult to find one's actual sense of self as a result of the annihilation of women's individuality. Gilead systematically erases women’s individuality through enforced names, clothing, and rigid social roles. Their self-expression is stifled by uniforms that signal their assigned functions, and even their names are stripped away and replaced with labels meant to mark them as property. Offred, a Handmaid held captive by the regime, reveals this loss of self when she states―

“My name isn't Offered, I have another name, which nobody uses anymore because it's forbidden,"

Offred feels as though she is vanishing and losing herself because her real name has been outlawed.

Women in The Handmaid’s Tale are ―two-legged wombs, that‘s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. The dictatorship uses a variety of strategies to carry out this essentializing definition, including branding the majority of infertile women as "Unwomen," categorising the female population by reproductive potential, ruthlessly re-educating the handmaids, and forbidding most women from reading or writing.

Women in Gilead have no freedom. There’s no freedom to live, eat, read, write, or move without permission and constant surveillance. Women in Gilead did not even have the freedom to escape, to die.

“It isn‘t running away they are afraid of. We wouldn‘t get far. It‘s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

and

“They‘ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.”

Death, like life, was not a choice for women in Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale endures not just because it imagines a horrifying future, but because it exposes the mechanisms that make such a future possible. Through its blending of feminist critique, technological surveillance, and the systematic erasure of identity, Atwood demonstrates how oppression rarely arrives all at once—it is built slowly, through laws, language, fear, and the quiet conditioning of everyday life.

Gilead’s power lies in its ability to watch, to define, and ultimately to reshape the very idea of what it means to be human. Yet within this darkness, Atwood also carves out moments of defiance, reminding us that resistance can exist even in the smallest gestures: a look, a memory, a name. In showing how fragile freedom becomes under authoritarian control, Atwood urges readers to recognise and protect the liberties, identities, and voices that are too easily taken for granted.

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