The Handmaid's Tale Flashcards
There is no true rebellion in Gilead
'’He smuggled me in”
“Just another crummy power trip”
Feminism coming full circle to misogyny
“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women”
“Men are sex machines and nothing more”
No loyalty or love even before Gilead
“she was calling us, crying, accusing”
Women hate each other
“You could have left me something…Just like the other one. A slut.”
Atwood’s optimism
Offred’s record is a “reproduction” - from a postmodernist view she becomes less of a victim
Atwood’s pessimism
“foreplay is what you do on a golf course”
“hesitate to use the word document”
Permanency of Gilead
“it’s genius was synthesis”
Gilead removing mental replacing with physical
“I compose myself. My self is now a thing I must compose”
Gilead industrialising women
“I am a national resource” - ecofeminism would say subjugation of women = subjugation of nature = machinery
Simone de Beauvoir on replacing mental with physical
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” - the opposite to Gilead
Gilead does not control by stimulation
“maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men”
“possibly this is how I’m expected to react. If I have an egg, what more could I want?”
Gilead as a theocracy induces hysteria
“Only women who are fruitful and women who are barren”
“Give me children or else I die.”
“heretical set of Quakers”
Groupthink
“The soft chanting envelopes us like a membrane”
Atwood on feminism
“If feminism is dealing with women as independent entities, then I’m a feminist”
Atwood on Serena Joy
“I don’t believe women who have been to college…and then say they aren’t feminists”
