The Handmaids Tale Context

Question 1

When was the book published?

Answer 1

1985

Question 2

Who opposed abortion and had strong views on the role of women in society in America?

Answer 2

Religious groups

Question 3

Context on how women led their lives

Answer 3

Women’s right to choose how to lead their own lives was seen by many members of right wing religious groups as contrary to role of women prescribed and set up in bible.

Question 4

Context on where Atwood wrote this book

Answer 4

She began writing in West Berlin
Followed events in Romania where women were forced by the ruling regime to have babies
China=forced not to
Iran=traced the advent of the repression of women under the Ayatollahs.

Question 5

Where was the handmaid tale set?

Answer 5

Massachusetts where the Salem witch trials were.

Question 6

Where was atwoods dystopia set?

Answer 6

Gilead- depicts a society in which religious extremists have taken over and reversed the progress of the sexual revolution.

Question 7

What was the threat of antifeminism in the 1980s?

Answer 7

Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment = fear that antifeminist tide could prevent further gains for women , turn back the clock.

Question 8

Why dystopia?

Answer 8

It allows her to experiment which isolates certain social trends and exaggerate negative trends to almost act as a cautionary tale.
Satire is very obvious but humour is short in supply, jokes are dark , bitter and pervasive= insane society.

Question 9

What is a speculative fiction?

Answer 9

A setting differs markedly from the world inhabited by the reader.

Question 10

What does handmaid mean?

Answer 10

Archaic or biblical word for a female servant

Question 11

What does tale mean?

Answer 11

A personal testimony.
Childish = infantilised and dehumanised = sex toys for Male pleasure.

Question 12

What does genesis 30:1-3 in the epigraph mean?

Answer 12

Biblical justification for the rape of subordinate women- uses someone subordinate to her to fulfil her duty and wants
Predatory and no consent =forceful

Question 13

What does a modest proposal epigraph mean ?

Answer 13

Draws comparisons to the famine where the satirical solution is for parents to eat their children . Similarly, the issue here is the lack of fertility,the solution is Gilead.

Question 14

What does the Sufi proverb mean?

Answer 14

Immorality can still happen even though we know that they’re wrong. Nothing is impossible, foreshadows a warning.

Question 15

Quotes from the extract “ enforced childbirth is slavery”

Answer 15

‘ a gift that cannot be rejected is not a gift, but a symptom of tyranny.’
‘ it is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.’

Question 16

Quotes from ‘ haunted by the handmaids tale’ by Atwood

Answer 16

‘ i made a rule for myself: i would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time.’
‘ the handmaids themselves are a pariah caste within the pyramid: treasured for what they may be able to provide- their fertility- but untouchable otherwise.’
They are functional rather than decorative.’

Question 17

Quotes from when a marriage becomes a jail sentence

Answer 17

The criminalization of miscarriages can be traced to the case of Brittany poolaw’s pregnancy. She was sentenced to to 4 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter when she was 21 years old for having a miscarriage when she was 17 weeks pregnant , long before a fetus reaches viability.

Question 18

Quotes from the Supreme Court issuing its final decision, overturning roe vs wade and insuring that abortion will become illegal in 20 states.

Answer 18

‘ i invented gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real.’
‘I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched . Silly me.’
‘Women were deliberately excluded from the franchise…women were not to be represented or governed by their own consent-only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands.’
Women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who posses them. They belong only to the state.’

Question 19

What does the witch trials in Salem show about women?

Answer 19

The mass hysteria reveals what little power women had in society, they could not defend themselves from these accusations, made against innocent women due to personal vendettas

Question 20

What dis reagan’s religious beliefs led to the proliferation of?

Answer 20

Right wing Christian groups in 1980s who warned about the “Birth Dearth”, or falling birth rate

Question 21

Where was support for these right wing Christian groups were high?

Answer 21

Strong in the ‘Bible Belt’, the southern states where church attendance was high.

Question 22

What did the American senator Phyllis Schlafly say about the role of women ?

Answer 22

She travelled the country mobilising women in support of her views: “ if marriage is to be a successful institution, it must… have an ultimate decision maker, and that is the husband” and “it is women’s role to support men in their positions of higher authority through altruism and self-sacrifice.”

Question 23

How can Serena joy also be a victim through recent trump vs Harris elections? From the conversation report ‘Trump represents a specific type of masculinity – and it’s dangerous for women’

Answer 23

Trump has surrounded himself with men who promote the stereotype of the alpha male, demean childless women and promote a version of family values that takes away from women’s autonomy. This narrows the bridge between gilead and today’s USA.

For men, Trump represents “hegemonic masculinity”, the exalted position of men at the top. In this view, aggression, control and dominance are all admirable traits and highly socially valued.

For some women who voted for him, this might be a familiar personality that they’ve seen in their fathers and husbands. Link to Ruth Irene Kalder who married Amon Goeth[ the commandment of Plaszow concentration camp near Krawkow and murdered innocent children and women for fun and trained his dogs to tear people apart. Her attraction to him might be created from a familiar environment she experienced- both desensitised from the horrors of war. Perhaps war/ oppressive regimes makes people forget their moral values which links to the wives who are so desperate for a child] a wider symptom of totalitarianism.

And Phyllis schfly who perpetuated this. Serena joy’s function is to customise her husband’s power and accessorise and fashionalize his masculinity bc of the image of how a man looks more powerful when he is married [ women subservient and abide to the treaties the men make]

Question 24

How does nazi germany link to the new regime by the sons of Jacob and the aunt’s re-eduction of the handmaids?

Answer 24

Nazi Germany is its rotten heart: the idea that stability can be overturned overnight=swift