In the times of anarchyLiving in a country like the United States of America is considered a privilege. The freedoms to which American citizens are entitled, declared in the Constitution, make the United States an attractive and envied democracy. It would be unlikely to imagine these freedoms being stripped from American society. However, Margaret Atwood describes the United States as a dystopian society in her novel The Handmaid's Tale. The first society is modern America, with its autonomy and its liberal customs. The second, Gilead, a far cry from modern America, is a totalitarian Christian theocracy that absorbs America in the late 1980s to save it from widespread pollution and a declining birth rate. The main flaw of Atwood's Galadian society is the justification of human rights violations. This justification only limits the freedoms citizens experience and undermines their once liberating rights, such as the prerogative to explore sexuality. Gilead's only freedom is freedom from all other freedoms, or as Aunt Lydia would describe it, freedom from the anarchy unveiled in the first society. The novel's protagonist, Offred, uses two sets of images to tell the great difference between a "freedom of" and a "freedom from" society. It reminds the reader of a photographic clarity of her previous life as an American woman with freedom, and also those of her present life as a handmaid or slave of the Republic of Gilead. Aunt Lydia, responsible for teaching the enslaved women of Gilead how to be handmaids, attempts to fill the women with disgust at the dangers of outlawed practices, such as pornography, adultery and abortion, while encouraging admiration towards the only reason why handmaids are at home everything, fertility and pregnancy. These outlawed practices that Gilead prohibits, however, are human rights afforded to citizens of the first society , modern America, was given “freedom.” Offred has the “freedom to” explore her sexuality in modern America. Although she would be hanged in Gilead for her adulterous acts with Luke, Offred managed to allow herself to be absorbed by the passion and love in the former United States. According to Aunt Lydia, however, free love and lust are some of the reasons why anarchy occurred. “There is more than one kind of freedom,” she tells the handmaids: “Freedom from and freedom from.” "In the days of anarchy, it was freedom. Now you are given freedom by. Don't underestimate it" (Atwood, 24).