Zusammenfassung der Ressource
The Handmaid's Tale -
Context
- Cultural Context
Anmerkungen:
- Atwood = a Canadian writer - studying the unique relationship between the USA and Canada both in real life and as represented in The Handmaid's Tale
- outsider to the united states - iunsettling vision of the American guture
- Biblical
Anmerkungen:
- - 'stem of an apple' - apple reference connotes Eve's original sin and cross both redemption and crucifixion - woman's fate is a consequence of their own desires
- 'we were falling women'
- ' all we've done is return things to Nature's norm'
- Literary context
Anmerkungen:
- - George Orwell describes the political, military and institutional horros of his dystopian societies in 1984 + Animal Farm - MA - describes mundane things - w/ female narrator - interesting spin on a traditionally masculine literary form
-Atwood's dystopian vision is still closely linked with Orwell's Animal Farm - the pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and apples, the elite of The Handmaid's Tale get the ferile women.
- Chaucer
Anmerkungen:
- Title
- Piexioto - 'appended...in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer'
- The Red Shoes
Anmerkungen:
- Chose between marriage and work - a woman cannot have both
- T.S Elliot
Anmerkungen:
- 'objective correlative' - objects, situations or events can be used in literature to represent characters or emotions
- costumes in HMT
- Dystopian fiction
Anmerkungen:
- - Subverting traditional narrative forms and patterns
- Offred's narrative is glossed - by a male academic - ironic
- Social and historical contexts
Anmerkungen:
- 'If a woman's place is in the home, then what? If you actuslly decide to enforce that, what follows?'
- perceived commentary anti-feminist backlash against the progressive social change that had taken place in previous decades'
- Atwood's fears about women's rights, religious fundamentalism and a major nuclear environmental meltdown
- Yet - HMT = particlly prophetic - relates to current issues such as:
- the potition of owmen under the Taliban
- The use of unethical reproductive technologies + surrogacy arragements
- government surveillance of their own citizens
- the persecution og gay men in some parts of Africa
- Impact of pollution and climate change
- Not Science Fiction
Anmerkungen:
- Atwood has stated that HMT is NOT science fiction - 'a slight twist on the society we have now'
- American right-wing fundamentalism
- 'Afghanistan and Iran 'where women are treated in the same light as they are in Gilead's society - some ways better, some ways worse'
- Afghan life bearing a strong resemblance to Gilead - women are no longer allowed to work and female education was withdrawn
- Mullah Qallamuddin - 'women must be completely segregated from men'
- Victorian women
Anmerkungen:
- - middle class women were confined to the home as wives and mothers - sheltered from the corrupting knowledge of the outside world
- Britain women had to give up many professions on marriage - this law applied to teachers until 1945
- regarded as their husband's possessions
-'Angel in the House' - their role wa to be gentle, expressive homemakers - Offred has lost her true identity and become a man's possession
- Winged women
Anmerkungen:
- - Satirical humour to expose the hypocrisies and absurdities of Victorian society
- Second wave feminism
Anmerkungen:
- - Women worked in greater numbers during both wars
- Government campaigns to persuade them that it was harmful to be away from their children for long periods
- many women began to resent being confined to a domestic and passive role
- women were becoming more politically active
- - The men too were forced intop narrow role - Nick
- Radical feminism
- equality of right and opportunities
- Gender differences are socially and therefore, patriarchally, constructed
- Cultural feminism
- celebration and acknowledgement of gender difference
- Teddi Holt
Anmerkungen:
- Holt
- founded MOM (mothers on the march)
- 'woman's rights' were a threat to her own rights as a 'free citizen of the US' and crucially as a 'homemaker and a christian mother'
- Opening quotation
- Handmaids
Anmerkungen:
- Costumes
- Nun's costumes, school girls' hemlines, faceless woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser box
- 'Dutch milk maids on a wallpaper frieze
- German prisoners of war in Canadian P.O.W camps in 2nd world war - Handmaid's = prisoners
- Nun's like the Prioress? A woman of vast sexual experience like the Wife of Bath? A prostitute? A concubine? Little Red Riding Hood?
- Political and environmental context
Anmerkungen:
- - Atwood supports the Green Party of Canada - HMT is set in a society that has brought environmental disaster upon itself by poisoning the planet to the point of rendering many of its inhabitants sterile
- Humankind has defied and defied Mother Nature through its arrogant overuse of advanced technologies
- Offred - 'Women took medicines, pills, men sprayed trees'
- - The Blights th\t led to Gilead's fertility issues relate both to environmental issues and issues relating to sexual liberation of the 1960s
- Rise of religious right-wing fundamentalism
Anmerkungen:
- - Rise of these groups in the USA in the 1980s, with strong backing from President Reagan - concern over abortion, divorce, growth of the gay rights movement. They looked back to America's Puritan inheritance.
- Gilead's tyrannical practices are based on international historical modles as well as contemporary political atrocities in Latin America, Iran and the Philippines - 'Denay, Nunavit' - recognition of our world and our shared moral responsibility for it
- warning about Gilead's attempts to redefine female identity in reductively biological terms