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Relationships - Coggle Diagram
Relationships
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Romantic relationships
Montag and Mildred
We only see their marriage in the novel even though we know that other characters like Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps are also married. This absence could suggest that society is lacking in love and human connection.
Mildred could be a caricature or a parody of a 1950s housewife. Her robotic response could parallel the results of a lobotomy, and her sleeping pill addiction could parallel the widespread reliance on opioids by suburban housewives.
Montag appears to be a conventional 1950s husbandwho earns money for his wife's consumerism. E.g. she wants a 4th parlour wall. He can even get violent and verbally abusive, as shown when Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps visit and he wants to "scare the hell out of them."
Their marriage crumbles as there's no connection. E.g. They can't remember where they first met: "A silly empty man next to a silly empty woman."
"The homemaker, that's me, is the missing part."
Offred and Nick
Offred uses Nick to fulfil her most basic psychological and physical needs, and this renders her complacent: “I no longer want to leave… I want to be here with Nick.” Here, Atwood is exploring how people survive in dystopian conditions - all we need is a few "concessions."
Coral Ann Howells believes that Offred’s position is much closer to the “traditionally feminine role of woman as a social mediator”: “Though she resists the brutal imposition of male power in Gilead, she also remembers the delights of heterosexual love and yearns to fall in love again.” Her love story with Nick resists the typical damsel-in-distress narrative. Offred is using Nick to fulfill her own psychological and physical needs, which offers a female perspective that is often missing from love stories told from a male perspective.
It could be argued that Offred projects her own internalised misogyny onto him: "For this one I'd wear pink feathers... if that were what he wanted."
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