Epigraphs - The Handmaid's Tale Flashcards
What does the Sufi Proverb “In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones” mean?
My interpretation:
Some rules don’t have to be written down, they should be obvious.
Others say:
Humans will do whatever it takes to survive.
What does this epigraph mean?
Jonathon Swift, A Modest Proposal, “But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal…”
“But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal…”
Atwood’s book is satirical, just like Jonathan Swift’s, A Modest Proposal, which argued that the problems of starvation in Ireland in the 1700s could be overcome by the roasting and eating of Catholic children.
Both Swift’s ‘Proposal’ and The Handmaid’s Tale are exaggerated to the point where they become unacceptable and repulsive. This is to highlight the real tendencies the satire is addressing.
Rachel and Leah “Give me children, or else I die” - Genesis. What is the point of this extract as an epigraph?
THT discusses how society might react to a massive fall in the birth rate.
White males in The Handmaid’s Tale react to this with a programme of extreme crisis management in which producing children suddenly becomes society’s overriding priority; females, by contrast, display a more visceral and emotional need for children in the novel. This – occasionally desperate – desire of women to procreate is what the patriarchs of Gilead use as a means to control them, or, more precisely, it is what leads women themselves to cooperate with the state to the exclusion of almost all their previous political and economic rights, solely in return for the possibility of at least some women having children. Wives, Handmaids, Marthas all share this overriding preoccupation with procreation, and in many ways it unites them, even though the relationship between the three groups is inevitably tense. Women, seen as a whole gender, are given the chance of children; in return, they accept oppression and subservience to powerful men, who have created a lifestyle in which they are rewarded with both a successions of concubines as well as free access to the services of state-supported prostitutes.
