Fear

Question 1

Attwood autotorial purpose as a speculative fiction writer and how she hopes to evoke fear of the future

Answer 1

• attwood warns against apathy during a republican chritian right government and writes her speculative fiction as a story of all that has come before
• she was very upset when THT won a prize for science fiction as she argues her fiction harks to a time which is very possible

Question 2

Quotes supporting attwood as creation of fear to warn her authorital purpose against apathy

Answer 2

• ‘Don’t you know how many women’s lives, how many women’s bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?’ The physical imagery is cautionary and calls to the more brutalist first wave feminism movement such as the suffragettes, by setting the flashbacks in a very modern appearing time attwood evokes fear at the idea of the apathy of many of her readers
• ‘guess that’s how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.’ Shows how fast change can come about and how quickly change in a theological totalitarian government can come. Again rings true to the modern world as the technological shift at the time was already seeing the loss of portable money when the credit card was created in the 50s
• attwood sets the book in Cambridge with the authorial purpose of reminding the readers of when the puritans banished any religious and moral opposition
• overall, fear is created through the novels authorial purpose of serving as a caution of the dangers of apathy

Question 3

Fear of the power of science

Answer 3

• attwood characterises the modern day overusage of scientific développement as catastrophic and consequential through her depiction of the colonies

Question 4

Fear of the power of science quotes

Answer 4

• attwood was an environmental activist and a prominent member of Greenpeace and thus feels that science such as mining and fossil fuel burning, a byproduct of scientific and technological expansion in the modern day. Therefore she uses the futuristic setting of the colonies in order to caution against the worst outcome of neuclear warfare and disaster
• attwood has written a novel on the Chernobyl disaster and thus the colonies draw from this idea, the danger of science when pitted against the natural world
• ‘they reckon you’ve got three years maximum’ shows the dangers of sciences capabilities and how it can so easily end in death
• ‘your nose falls off and your skin peels away like rubber gloves’ the grotesque simile here presents a fear of the extent of science as it completely morphs the human body into something not of true identity, showing how science can completely corrupt the human race.

Question 5

Religious fear of science

Answer 5

• attwood characterises science as incompatible with religion in gileadian society and explores fears of how the removal of science in place of feverant religion can have dire societal consequences

Question 6

Science as feared by religion quotes

Answer 6

-‘These men, we’ve been told, are like war criminals. It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive.’ Shows the brutality of the removal of science and warns of the rise of the religious right and how it may squash the autonomy of the scientific world
‘What she’d just showed us was a film, …a pregnant woman, wired up to a machine, electrodes coming out of her every which way so that she looked like a broken robot’ this simile shows how even offred is conditioned to feel that scientific development is immoral and wrong

Question 7

Paranoia in the novel as an insidious way to create power and thus how fear creates power

Answer 7

constant fear of survielance leads a all to feel they are being watched (Foucault theory of panopticism) and conditions them thus to suppresses their physiological state, breeding distrust and conformity and subjugation

Question 8

Fear as an insidious way to create power, the power of fear qu0tes

Answer 8

• they arrest a man in public with no warning and entirely uncalled-for violence just to get into people’s head.
• Offered recalls arrest of a Martha ‘fumbling.. for her pass’ which shows distrust is rife
• even call their spies the ‘Eyes’, all to get into people’s heads as it connotes the idea that eyes are EVERYWHERE
• ‘she is my spy, I am hers’
• ‘perhaps he is an eye’
  -‘gilead is within you’ and ‘under his eye’ are repeated taglines of the regime. Entire regime plays off the idea of constant surveillance