Chapters 33-36 Flashcards
What do Ofglen and Offred attend in Ch. 33?
A “Prayvaganza”
What do readers find out about Janine and her baby?
She slept with a doctor to get pregnant, and the baby was born with birth defects after all.
What are Prayvaganzas?
Weddings for the Wives’ daughters, mass ceremonies in which girls as young as fourteen get married.
What does Offred remember the Commander telling her?
(women & freedom)
He insisted that while Gilead has taken away some freedom, it guaranteed women safety and dignity. Now all women have spouses, and they are not left alone to care for children, beaten, or forced to work if they do not want to. They can “fulfill their biological destinies in peace.”
Offred notes that women are not allowed to fall in love. What does the Commander respond with?
Arranged marriages work better than falling in love.
After the services, what does Ofglen say to Offred?
The subversives know she sees the Commander in private. She urges Offred to find out everything she can.
In Ch. 36 what does the Commander give Offred while (possibly) drunk?
A skimpy outfit decorated with feathers and sequins. Something women were strictly NOT allowed to wear.
The Commander asks to take Offred out, when she agrees, where do they go?
An alley. He slips a purple tag around Offred’s wrist, instructing her to tell anyone who asks that she is an “evening rental.”
Using feminist rhetoric, what points does the Commander make?
Society should not force women to spend their entire paycheck on daycare; it should value the work of mothering; it should not allow fathers to run off and abandon children; it should not allow domestic abuse.
In Gilead, none of these conditions officially exist.
How does Offred deflate the Commander’s argument?
She points out that such a society, while removing some uncertainty and unhappiness, leaves out the possibility of freedom. Arranged marriages are, by definition, the opposite of free choice.
In Ch. 32, the Commander comments that men could not feel before Gilead. Why is this untrue?
Men had (and still have) all the rights, if anything it is women that have had the ability to feel stripped away from them.
The next generation will have no memories of Gilead, why?
Aunt Lydia’s sinister comment that Gilead will eventually “become ordinary.” - generations after Gilead won’t have to live through the society that Offred does.
Using Aunt Lydia’s sinister comment about Gilead “becoming ordinary”, what is Atwood suggesting here?
Atwood suggests that this closing of the horizon is the dark power of a totalitarian society. Once people cannot imagine anything other than oppression, oppression becomes ordinary.
