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‘Even 1984, that darkest of literary visions, does not end with a boot stamping on a human face forever, or with a broken Winston Smith feeling a drunken love for Big Brother, but with an essay about the regime written in the past tense and in standard English’

Atwood (on 1984)

‘clock don’t strike thirteen…something ,already, is amiss in this world. One of its dimensions, time, is subtly out of joint’

Waddell

‘dust plays a major role in this novel, not only as a marker of social and economic disrepair, but also as a sign of death’

Waddell

‘establish the physical texture of life in Oceania in the sense that they reiterate, through repetition, the drabness and dinginess of its citizens and architectures’

Waddell

‘the Hate is a form of perverted sexuality, a redirecting of the sexual drive into paranoia and xenophobia’

Waddell

‘those who take part in the Hate are unable to imagine sexual encounters except as acts of grotesque fierceness, thereby annihilating their capacity for intimacy (and, through intimacy, for resistance)’

Waddell

‘the oppressor’s greatest enemy is emotion’

Desmet

‘nescessary to keep its subjects in a constant state of intellectual sedation’

Desmet

‘Once the belief in an afterlife was lost, the alternative hope for an earthly utopia played directly into the hands of cruel dictators’

Bowker

‘Belief in God, he thought, was all to easily replaced by belief in a Stalin, a Hitler or Mussolini’

Bowker

‘The ubiquitous telescreen functions as a monstrous alarm clock, reminding Winston that time does not belong to him’

Finigan

‘As Lyndsey Stonebridge has pointed out, many readers of 1984 remember its depiction of rats, but few people remember its depiction of refugees’

Waddell (and Stonebridge)

‘When Winston eventually states that he and Julia are ‘the dead’, what he really means is that they are bound to become the ash-like, dusty remnants of a failed revolution.’

Waddell

‘For while 1984 is most obviously a novel about surveillance culture, and about the terrible power of totalitarian systems, it’s also a novel obsessed with forms of loathing. We’ve already seen this in the form of state-sanctioned mass enragement’

Waddell

‘it is repeatedly insinuated that O’Brien is rather less honorable than his appearance lets on. In spite of the ‘trick of re-settling his spectacles on his nose’ that gives him a ‘curiously disarming’ and ‘in some indefinable way, curiously civilised manner’, O’B is also a ‘large, burly an with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face’

Waddell

‘The main instrument of surveillance in Oceania is the telescreen, but children have become another monitoring means with which to keep the population in line’

Waddell

‘Contrary to BNW, the use of technology in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 does not claim to improve life for its citizens’

Desmet

‘As [Orwell] saw it, the Catholic Inquisition provided the model for both fascist and communist totalitarianism, and gauleiters and commissars were just the priests and emissaries of a new and cruel religion of power’

Bowker

‘Orwell’s main argument against religion was that it turned individuals into pawns, hampered progress towards socialism, and opened the way to dictatorship’

Bowker

‘Hell is often what you get when you try to impose heaven’

Atwood

‘War is what happens when language fails’

Atwood

‘the rare and desirable would include fertile women, always on the human wish list, one way or another - and reproductive control’

Atwood

‘I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time’

Atwood

‘[women] are functional rather thsn decorative’

Atwood

‘Those who lack power always see more than they say’

Atwood

‘a hopeful act just to write anything, really, because you’re assuming that someone will be around to [read] it’

Atwood

‘Salem was much more dignified…Salem at least had rules for the trials’

Atwood

‘things do go around in circles’

Atwood

‘Political disagreement is political disagreement; Political disagreement with a theocracy, is heresy’

Atwood

‘Difficult to create dissident networks when you are restricted to stock phrases like ‘praise be’ ‘

Davies

‘The situation in Gilead is a return to female illiteracy’

Davies

‘Internalise the values of the ideology that traps you’

Davies

‘Not only her prime function, it is her only function’ [on her status as a ‘walking womb’]

Davies

‘Alienation is almost complete, particularly given what she has to go through every month, during the Ceremony’

Davies

‘Women’s bodies belong to men in this novel’

Davies

‘Offred is not merely in search for an identity but instead she seeks to retrieve the identity of her life’

Desmet

‘poetic language is foregrounded in Atwood’s novel as an instrument of liberation’

Desmet

‘In this way, Atwood confirms Julia Kristeva’s view of poetic language as a linguistic revolution because of “its opacity, its refusal to let socially imposed meanings remain self-evident” ‘

Desmet

‘it’s a story about a government that exploits fear of Islamic terrorists to crush dissent, then blots out women’s reproductive rights. It’s about fake news, political trauma, the abnormal, normalized’

Nussbaum

‘the patriarchy fears these different identities [created by different clothing] and considers them a threat because they ‘trick’ the previously mentioned body politic by creating distinguishable identities which are consequently harder to control’

Barkass-Williamson

‘Offred’s [body] a symbol of her perpetual servitude’

Barkass-Williamson

‘Jezebel’s the power elite’s whorehouse’

Stillman and Johnson

‘leaves only gossip (with its combination of accuracy, slippage, and disinformation) as an independent source of knowledge’

Stillman and Johnson

‘Gilead’s political power grows out the barrel of a gun, utilises repressive laws and politics, and is solidified by the isolation of each woman, the fragmentation of her social world, and the reconstruction of each woman’s world into Gilead’s mould’

Stillman and Johnson

‘They use the norm of scholarly distance to avoid judgement’

Stillman and Johnson

‘relations are so weakened, degraded, and debased that…modes of domination and control of physical force, political power…are internalised by those subjected to the regime’

Stillman and Johnson

‘The Handmaids mechanically reverse a catechism of guilt and blame’

Finigan

‘The physical and symbolic remnants of the ‘time before’ are like Pre-Gileadean New England itself, either renamed or hence evacuated of all prior significance’

Finigan

‘Love itself has been sacrificed on the altar of biologism’

Finigan

‘academics meeting in conference betray Offred by their obsession with form not content, their misogyny, their tolerance of evil in the name of objectivity, and their concern for their own prestige and pleasure’

Harris

‘Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already’

Atwood

‘The regime operates under the guise of a strict Puritanism, these women are not considered a harem, intended to provide delight as well as children’

Atwood

‘Men often ask me “Why are your female characters so paranoid?” It’s not paranoia, its a recognition of their situation’

Atwood

‘in order to preserve freedom we have to demolish freedom’

Atwood

‘Her clothes are symbolic of her powerlessness as an individual and helplessness if she goes against the norms laid out for her’

Roland

‘the similarity between science and religion pointed out by Nietzsche, who felt that both of these systems thrive on imposing an unequivocal truth on its followers’

Desmet

‘language serve as an instrument not only of control but also of rebellion’

Desmet

‘these “pompous, sniggering academics” do not hesitate to make the best of their chance to ridicule Offred’s situation’

Desmet

[female authors can only overcome their literary inferior position] "by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards"

Gilbert and Gubar

‘it told us something uncomfortable about ourselves and the tragedies contained in our futures’

Oates

‘feminist novels show that power is gendered, that gender distinctions are pervasive and extensive, and that the personal and political interweave’

Stillman and Johnson

‘squealing on your fellows is rewarded, and trust is dangerous’

Stillman and Johnson

‘the academics’ humour is at the expense of the weaker; and both Offred and the academics defer to authority figures’

Stillman and Johnson

‘the handmaid’s time is void, just as Offred herself is nothing more than an empty vessel’

Finigan

‘private conceptions of love and loyalty have become obsolete in Gilead’

Finigan

‘The professor abuses her as Gilead abused her, removing her authority over her own life story and renaming it in a gesture which paralleled Gilead’s patriarchal suppression of a woman’s identity’

Howell