Handmaid tale quotes - where they are Flashcards
“If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some trade-off, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.”
Chapter 1 - Night section
women stripped of power and identities - bargain through bodies.
“We” - speaks for all Handmaids at once, lost individuality
“We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouth. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”
Chapter 1 - Night section
Speculated her name is June - not in the rest of the book.
trading names - holding onto individuality.
“This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am being wasted. Why do I want?”
Chapter 2
“They” - Offred is powerless to those in charge,
Traditional values - Home-making, domestic work. reproduction
“Waste not want not - Victorian associations - objectifying herself
“They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll”
Chapter 3 -
Inanimate object, loss of humanity under regime.
Relationship with everyone is limited - scripted religious phrases.
Serena Joy/ Offred - based off of class differences
To be seen - to be seen - is to be - her voice trembles - penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable, she called us girls.
Chapter 5
Aunt Lydia’s allusion to sexual activity - reflects religious doctrine.
implying that women must aim to be pure.
Patronising women by calling them girls - hierarchy of power
The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still.”
Chapter 7
We can interpret Offred as passive and accepting of oppression.
‘owning’ time - cannot legally own anything else
“We were the people who were not in the papers. we lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between stories”
Chapter 10 -
Before Gilead - political Apathy
“We instead of “I”, acknowledging she’s not alone.
describes privilege before Gilead.
Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.
Chapter 11 -
Semantics, state doesn’t recognise male sterility.
Atwood emphasising civil rights being taken away.
The law is sacred - actually a set of rule made up by those in power
She looked disgusting: weak, squirmy, blotchy, pink, like a newborn mouse. None of us wanted to look like that, ever. For a moment, even though we knew what was being done to her, we despised her.
Chapter 13
Janine ‘testifies’ about her gang-rape and abortion.
Lydia encourages women to blame her - blaming victims of sexual assault, misogynism
To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time.
Chapter 15 -
flips male gaze on its head. Women observing him - scrutinising him - women not permitted to be looked at.
I do not say making love, because that is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There isn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.
Chapter 16
struggling to describe the Ceremony.
humiliation and absence of love - disconnect from her body completely.
denies it’s sexual violence - a feminist perspective would contest this.
Offred believes she has a choice - certain death in colonies, or institutionalised, repeated rape.
The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it.
Chapter 18 -
shaken after the Ceremony, Offred thinks of Luke.
Cycling through potential scenarios she can imagine.
An example of survival mechanisms.
The chances are one in four, we learned that at the Center. The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells.
Chapter 19
Recurring theme - environmental decline due to human activity.
During the 1980s, environmental concerns around toxic waste - anxiety over these concerns was growing in society.
Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.”
Chapter 21 -
Offred calling for mother, after witnessing labour. Giving birth is communal occasion. example of individual rights takes away.
Gilead there is a “Women’s culture’, though not a utopia her mother campaigned for.
Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is the metaphor. It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s device. It’s the way things are. Aunt Lydia did not actually say this, but it was implicit in everything she did say.
Chapter 24 -
First sliver of opportunity for Offred, Commander interested and bending rules.
highlighted tropes in the novel, highlighting how we’re never far away from a social dystopia.
