1984 & HMT critical quotes

George Packer 2019

"[1984 is] a master key to understanding the modern world"

Orwell

claimed 1984 was] not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals

Orwell

"The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen."

York Notes

Orwell always put faith in the objective truth

Beatrix Campbell

"Despite his wish to invest his revolutionary optimism in the people, what [Orwell] feels for the common people edges on contempt. Actually, he thinks they're dead common"

Kristoffer Rissanen

"The Party isolates every individual, destroying all social bonds"

Jem Berkes

"Language becomes a method of mind control with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination"

Douglas Kellner

"The primary function of the media here is to terrorize its citizens"

Deidre Beddoe

"She is totally incapable of understanding the motives which drive Winston to revolt"

Daniel Bell

"A human society stripped of the last shreds of community"

Carol Beran

Offred's power is in language

Atwood

"Offred is an ordinary, more or less cowardly woman (rather than a heroine)"

J. Brooks Bouson

describes Offred as "the victim of circumstances, not an active agent capable of directing the plot of her own life"

Alanna Callaway

"as well as 'traditional misogyny' the Handmaid's tale examines a more sinister form of misogyny: womens' hatred of women".

Coral Ann Howells

"her choice of a female narrator turns the traditionally masculine dystopian genre upside down"

Robert Potts

"The ending of The Handmaid's Tale, when the entire narrative is called into question seems a final insult to the victims"

K. Reshmi

"Gilead's values defines women by their bodies and reproductive capacity."

Dunja Mohr

argues that Offred's behaviour should not be "so easily and self-righteously dismissed as cowardliness from the safe distance of being snuggled into an armchair"

P. Stillman

"As the corrupted United States was gradually transformed into Gilead, she committed the ultimate collusion of doing nothing"