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How can one analyze The Handmaid's Tale through a Marxist lens?

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Analyzing "The Handmaid's Tale" through a Marxist lens reveals the class struggle and exploitation of labor. The handmaids, akin to the proletariat, are exploited for their reproductive capability, producing babies for the ruling class, the Commanders and their wives. This reflects Marxist themes of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, exploiting the working class's labor. The handmaids' lack of control over their bodies and offspring mirrors the proletariat's alienation from the fruits of their labor.

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In Marxist theory, a small class of wealthy and powerful people call the bourgeoisie control the means of production (they own the factories, banks, and large businesses, etc. in a nation). They have most of the money, which they keep for themselves. They amass this wealth, according to Marx, by exploiting the labor of a large group of working people called the proletariat. In Marxist theory, the proletariat creates the wealth of a society through their labor, which the bourgeois class legally steals by grossly underpaying them.

In The Handmaid's Tale , the handmaids represent the proletariat. They can produce something of quite great value in this society, where the birth rate has fallen dramatically: babies. However, they are basically enslaved and allowed no ownership or control over their bodies or the babies they produce. These babies are stolen by the wives of the commanders in whose homes the handmaids...

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live, as if the wives bore them themselves. As in capitalist society, the ruling class has developed a complicated ideology, in this case biblical, to justify this theft.

Marx would understand this situation of handmaid oppression as mimicking the reality of the way the working classes are robbed of the fruits of their labor by the bourgeoisie.

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First of all, Marxism can be defined as: "The system of thought developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, esp. the doctrines that class struggle has been the main agency of historical change and that capitalism will inevitably be superseded by a socialist order and classless society" Marxist Theory. (n.d.) Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary. (2010).

In view of the above definition, you could analyze The Handmaid's Tale as related to the power of the labor force. Specifically, in this work, the labor force is made up of the women, the Handmaids, who are literally unpaid sex workers. According to Marxist Economic Theory, the "economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it" (Wikipedia). The Handmaids have the "Labor Power" according to Marx, as without them, there would be no procreation, no continuation of the people of Gilead.

However, there are two levels of this Labor Power. Offred and the Handmaids have the ability to produce children, essential for the survival of Gilead. However, Serena Joy also has Labor Power which she wields when she manipulates Offred's sexual encounter with Nick. Through this Labor Power, all women become commodities (goods) in this work. In the case of the Handmaids, they do not realize they have power as all their individuality is stripped of them, yet they are the labor force necessary to the men. Gilead is not yet a 'classless society' but one of the struggle for power and the conflict that ensues in that struggle.

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