THE HANDMAIDS TALE ESSAY

Rhetoric
The Handmaid’s Tale final essay – The Death of Love
Lippman

I would like you to write a five paragraph essay on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The topic of the paper is “the death of love.” It’s a big topic, general, but that’s cool. Your job is take the bigness of it and make it small.

In your introduction you need, as always, to include your thesis, the mention of the book, and a small and general rumination on your thesis. You will be talking about love and so you need to define, for the sake of your argument, what you think love is. I would urge you to stay away from the general clichés—love is when two people come together as one; love is the sharing of your complete self, etc. Try and come up with a more engaging definition of love like, love is what it means to accept full responsibility for all the joy and sadness in one’s life.

Then you need to write three body paragraphs. How to go about this? Well, after you have defined love in your intro, in your thesis, find three examples from the text that “speak” to your definition. Then, analyze the moment in the book that pertains to thesis. That is, find three moments in the book, then talk about them analytically in the context of your thesis. E.g. If your thesis is: “Love is the act of one person talking to him/herself to feel good about his/her situation," then go the novel, find three examples of this “occurrence” and analyze. With the above thesis you could use, for example, the moment when Offred talks about God, to God. In a sense she is loving herself, yes, because she is trying to understand how she feels. See, what I am getting at.

You need to do this three times. Once per body paragraph. Also, you need to incorporate one quote per paragraph, as it pertains to the moment you have chosen in relationship to your thesis.

Lastly, a conclusion. The conclusion SHOULD NOT be a reiteration of your introduction. You should INTRODUCE A NEW IDEA in the thesis.

This essay should also SING. Remember all that fun stuff we did last term. Remember your voice, the one you started writing, playing with. Well, don’t abandon it here, just because this is an analytical paper.

Have fun with this puzzle.

Due Date: January 19th, 2010.