Context Flashcards
Atwood - anything can happen
“Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances”. (2017 intro to novel)
Atwood - speculative fiction
“There’s a precedent in real life for everything in the book. I decided not to put anything in that somebody somewhere hadn’t already done. But you write these books, so they won’t come true.”
Leigh Hunt’s - “The Blue-Stocking Revels”
Shelley outshined by other fames
“And Shelley, fourfam’d,—for her parents, her lord, / And the poor lone impossible monster abhorr’d.”
Alanna Callaway argues that, while The Handmaid’s Tale does examine the
‘consequences of patriarchal control and ‘traditional’ misogyny,’ that there’s a more sinister
more violent form of misogyny:
“women’s hatred of women.”
Who introduced the term banality of evil?
Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt in her report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Arendt’s central idea is that Eichmann wasn’t a fanatic or a sociopath but an average person whose complacency with oppression allowed for unspeakable horrors. While in The Handmaid’s Tale, the Commander was driven more by ideology than Eichmann arguably was, the comparison is still relevant, as even if a person is not explicitly evil on an individual level, they can still perpetuate, advocate for, and enforce evil and oppressive ideas for their benefit.
The early-modern monster ‘Wonders and the Order of Nature’ Parke and Daston
‘for Christians… The monster or prodigy was a sign of God’s wrath.’
Anti-porn feminist Robin Morgan
‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’
Shelley 1831 intro
‘frequently refers to herself as a mother who gave birth to an artistic vision that took a will of its own.
Let ‘my hideous progeny go forth and prosper’.
Percy Shelley - Preface warns reader…
‘…nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.’
