Mental Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Religion as a Tool for Social Coding

This paper strives to consider the ideological representation of the events and after-effects of apocalypse in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The segmentation of the various events grooved deeply in the novel leaves numerous traces to be explored. Behavioral constraints of the characters as extrapolated in the plot seem more committed to throwing back what they do not voice than what they utter. Such nonconformity engenders the scope of vertical study of the text to explore the hidden mental causes of the effects that readers discern on the surface of the story. The way Atwood perceives the future, shrinking individual identity of her characters, plays a significant role in communicating her concerns related to the patterns, she was able to identify in the society around. Symbolic coherences and chain of actions of the oppressors and non-reactive response of the oppressed present a hidden and academically neglected human tendency to such occasions. Such comportment of the characters in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale may be reviewed as mental and existential collapse which can further be delineated as a mental apocalypse followed by the environmental one. A detailed qualitative research to scrutinize the above mentioned concerns as well as observations will not only contribute to the expedition of the text that has been taken for the study but will also attempt to go beyond the traditional and linear pattern of using theories in literature and will explore the content's purpose to show the mirror to the society as the idea of religion being used as a tool to alter the social order holds potential learning for the society in general.