Paper 2: The Handmaid's Tale

Question 1

Structure/ Narrative voice (A02)

Answer 1

1st chapter- “we yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air” complex marriage structure starts in media res forcing the to work a little harder for comprehension
The eagerness to embrace the future is combined with a fear of its realisation, an effect that is cleverly transferred to the present at the semi-colon when the gym ceases to be a place of past yearning and becomes a venue of some sort of regimented pas

Narrative voice: Atwood provides us with 1st person narration, lots of reflection though speaking in present- continuous
INDIRECTION- Offred’s rel

Question 2

Dystopia

Answer 2

Sense of concealment: “inside….under….behind….between”
“Pure speculation”

Social control/power:
“The night is mine”
“As long as”

Surveillance:
“Eyes”
“Subhuman”
“Banished to distant places”

“People who don’t conform”- conformity and subversion

Question 3

Context (AO3) and Critic (AO4)

Answer 3

Atwood wrote this novel shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Britain- a period of conservative revival in the West partly fuelled by a strong, well organised movement of religious conservatives who criticised what they perceived as the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s