Literature: A Form Of Legal Education

Swarangi. Vikas. Bhagwat, BBA.LLB, IFIM Law School, Bangalore

INTRODUCTION

Gulzar sahab’s ghazals and Daffodils by William Wordsworth is my kind of literature. These pieces of writings have been interpreted by my younger selves at various instances of life and I still go back to these when times are hard for me. Margaret Atwood has provoked my ability of thought to such an extent that my research paper analogically connects her novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to the 21st century era which gives me a glimpse of the 1985 world.

The Handmaid’s Tale is the narration of what a heinous living experience one can go through if one has the will of survival. It is a novel written in a dystopian era which portrays the torture and injustice faced by people then. The novel is set at a time when there was a sudden decline in fertility rates as a result of sexually transmitted diseases and environmental pollution after the civil war in the United States of America. The Government of Gilead established a totalitarian and a hypothetical Christian form of governance in which the laws from the Old Testament (a set of books containing laws maintained by Christian community) shall be imposed upon the modern society. The people who withheld the power to rule the citizens of the United States of America were believers of absolute patriarchy and communism. As the number of fertile women were less than the ones who could not bear children, the ones who could get pregnant easily were kidnapped and were forced to engage in sexual intercourses with officers of a high rank so that they, along with their infertile wives would have an heir and the power of ruling the state would not be given to anyone else.