![]() Wives, Handmaids, Marthas all share this overriding preoccupation with procreation, and in many ways it unites them, even though the relationship between the three groups is inevitably tense. This – occasionally desperate – desire of women to procreate is what the patriarchs of Gilead use as a means to control them, or, more precisely, it is what leads women themselves to cooperate with the state to the exclusion of almost all their previous political and economic rights, solely in return for the possibility of at least some women having children. ![]() ![]() White males in The Handmaid’s Tale react to this with a programme of extreme crisis management in which producing children suddenly becomes society’s overriding priority females, by contrast, display a more visceral and emotional need for children in the novel. One of the most interesting aspects of Atwood’s dystopia is the idea of how a society might react to a massive fall in the birth rate. ‘Give me children, or else I die.’ – This phrase lies at the core of the first epigraph to the novel which is taken from Genesis 30:1-3. ![]()
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