The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale was a book that had so many contradictions that stood out to me. It tried to take away the feminity of women by dressing the in dresses that left them shapeless, in hats that covered their hair and their voices taken away and keeping them silent. But at the same time, it wanted the feminity at its rawest and purest having to do with fertility and conceiving. It was as if in one aspect they wanted them to be real women and in another they wanted to hide it from the world. The society was so confused with what they wanted women to be and how they put them out there was frustrating.
Something else that I noticed about The Handmaid's Tale was the title. I wondered why "Tale" was used and not "hardship" or "nightmare." Usually when I hear the word tale I think about princesses and a tale about princes and magical forests and unicorns and rainbows. Not Commanders who force poor women into conceiving babies and a society that uses the Bible and its control to scare everyone into doing what they want. I think that it was titled that way to show that from the outside, much like the title is meant to show how wonderful and succesful and beautiful that everything is, but in the inside, much like the pages, are filled with disturbing images of women being oppressed. Even when the Japanese tourists came, they couldn't even determine whether the women were actually happy, they needed to ask it.
As I was reading, I sometimes compared the storyline to a chess game. The women were the pawns, unimportant until they were truely needed and often sacrificed. They could have also been the King, targeted, trapped and unable to move anywhere without consequence. They couldn't escape the society. I thought of the commander as the Queen. Able to do pretty much whatever it wants, and often overpowering especially to the pawns and other pieces. Without the Queen in a chess game there isn't much of a game. Same with the society. Without the Commanders who would impregnated the women and continue the society? I thought of the other younger men of the society as the rooks. They have freedom but the can only move backwards, fowards and sideways, not diagonal, and not quite as much power as the Queen. I thought of the game itself as the society, as if they had set everything up as a cruel game to see what would happen and so they could control things their own way, much like the pieces are controlled by the player.