Context

Question 1

Atwood’s studies

Answer 1

she studied Victorian novels that influenced her belief that novels should be about society as a whole, rather than the characters’ specific lives

Question 2

Atwood’s research

Answer 2

on 17th-century American Puritans, who created a rigid and inhumane theocracy based on a few choice selections from the Bible which influenced Gilead

Question 3

Responds to modern US

Answer 3

responds to moderns US political scene

the religious right with its moralising tendencies was gaining power in America as the backlash to the left Free Love and Feminists movement

Question 4

Reagan and the New Right

Answer 4

Ronald Reagan’s presidency heralded a new era of politics: where massive amounts of funding for the Republican party started to come directly from Christian groups and lobbyists. This is seen as a danger to Attwood, who uses Gilead as a warning for the danger of failing to ‘separate church and state’. His return to traditional ‘family values’ was seen as an attack women’s rights by second-wave feminists.

Question 5

Roe v Wade

Answer 5

a landmark Supreme Court case which established a woman’s legal right to an abortion.
This case is seen by U.S. feminists as something to protect. Subsequent government administrations have chipped away at the protection for women’s rights issues.
Gilead is a dystopian world which imagines a total annihilation and reversal of Roe vs. Wade, where women are reduced to ‘two-legged wombs’. Nightmare now realised!

Question 6

Phyllis Schlafly

Answer 6

• an American conservative who campaigned against the ERA, believed that women couldn’t be raped in marriage: “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape”. Schlafly balanced strong family values with politics: she unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Attwood is perhaps parodying activists like Schlafly, publically campaigning for conservative values who are then punished by the system they help to create: Serena Joy is arguably a parodied, satirical figure, desperately unhappy in the life she has helped create for

Question 7

Postmodernism

Answer 7

a genre which engages with fragmentation, meta-narratives, unreliable narrators and intertextuality. The ‘historical notes’ at the end of the text reinforce the ‘fictional’ nature of fiction - Offred’s story has been transcribed and is now existing as part of a lecture

Question 8

Second Wave Feminism

Answer 8

the 60s and 70s saw major breakthroughs for women’s rights in America: access to contraception, increased voting rights and access to abortion. Gilead reflects the societal fears of the vulnerability of these rights.

Question 9

Significance of religion?

Answer 9

HMT shows that religion can be used as an excuse to reduce women’s rights, a political tendency which continues to occur over the world

Question 10

compared to other dystopias

Answer 10

in an essay about the book, Atwood compares it to 1984, Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange- all with political undertones, that suggest that they worlds they portray aren’t far from our world

Question 11

written

Answer 11

1985, West BERLIN

Question 12

published in

Answer 12

1985

Question 13

literary period

Answer 13

feminism

Question 14

setting

Answer 14

Cambridge, Massachusetts under the government of the Republic of Gilead, which has replaced the US

set it here as she thought it was the last place such a thing could happen

Question 15

point of view

Answer 15

first person limited

Question 16

HMT was a response

Answer 16

to the growing political and social conservatism in US in the Regan era

also from her experiences travelling in Afganistan and Iran in the 1970s, when women’s rights were being stripped from them

Question 17

“utopia”

Answer 17

comes from the greek for ‘perfect place’ utopia = ‘no place’. Pun

Question 18

The Bible

Answer 18

• the bible’s fundamentalist passages (such as patriarchal control of women) are used as a foundation for the political system: ‘give me children or else I die’.
  This Old Testament story is used as a pretext for mass removal of women’s rights and reduction to their generative function. Atwood is perhaps commenting on the compulsion for humans to selectively use religious texts for their own gain.
  Harvard - The establishment is synonymous with culture, knowledge and progression: Atwood chooses its wall to be ‘The Wall’ in Gilead where dissidents (political, religious, sexual) are butchered and displayed as a warning and enactment of power. Is Attwood using a symbol of such power to emphasise the degradation of Gileadan society?

Question 19

Relevance of Dystopian fiction like 1984 and THMT?

Answer 19

and HMT have taken on a new relevance following the election of Trump

with the American Institution bent on defunding abortion clinics, many have noticed parallels with HMT. Women protesters dressed as Handmaids

Question 20

The Canterbury Tales -

Answer 20

written by Geoffrey Chaucer, Medieval, these tales were an example of masculine dominated literary canon. Is Atwood challenging by giving voice to oppressed women?

Question 21

Orwell’s influence

Answer 21

showed her that it isn’t labels, like Christianity or Socialism, that are bad, but the actions people do in their name

Question 22

HMT and O+C

Answer 22

they both extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and produce a half prediction, half satirical novel

Question 23

ustopia

Answer 23

Atwood coined the phrase - a mix of utopia and dystopia

the utopia in HMT is the past

Question 24

initially welcomed

Answer 24

as a feminist text - more recently, its speculative warnings about theocratic rule have become even more pertinent

Islamic revolution in Iran 1979

Question 25

like Well’s ‘Time Machine’

Answer 25

it posits a future of humanity which has regressed, rather than progressed