Critics Flashcards
“Poetry and prayer are very similar” - Carol Ann Duffy
Not about Handmaids but referring to personal religious upbringing and it’s influence on her poetry
Handmaids religious themes
“The novel is a prediction of the horrors of cultures so frightened by normal sexuality that it codified and prescribed all such procreation, and created hierarchies of life and death around it. It is a brutal horrifying culture.” - Linda W. Wagner-Martin
About Gileadean society
Agree
Post modern typicality
Criticism
“it is powerless to scare” - Mary McCarthy
Atwood herself
Disagree
She uses events relevant to contemporary society to evoke a fear within readers
“The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock - just like the book” - Owen Gleiberman
On 1990 film adaptation
Disagree
Criticism of society
Use of contemporary events
“often more like dire warnings than satires, dark shadows cast by the present into the future…they are what will happen to us if we don’t pull up our socks” - Atwood
Description of dystopias
“by an irony of history, it is Offred the silenced Handmaid who becomes Gilead’s principal historian when the oral ‘herstory’ is published 200 years later” - Carol Ann Howells
Offred’s storytelling
Agree
However her words are manipulated and organised by male historians so whilst she may be the principal historian her voice is still overwhelmed by men
“not a propagandist but an observer; her work merely reflects the reality of an uneven distribution of power between men and women” - Heidi Macpherson
Atwood and feminism
Agree
Emphasised by her use of contemporary events
“this does not make ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ a ‘feminist dystopia’…giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things” - Atwood
THT not being a feminist dystopia
Agree
“…nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or that it is not doing now” “the projected trends on which my future society is based are already in motion” - Atwood
More speculative fiction than science fiction
