Studied by 2 people
Atwood - "My intention was just to document
what I was doing and had done"
Atwood - "I didn't make it up. This is the proof -
everything in these boxes"
Catherine R. Stimpson - “The Aunts [...] represent Atwood's most disdainful
depiction of the petty female boss”
Carol L. Beran - “Offred's power is
in language.”
Catherine R. Stimpson - "In one of her most original manoeuvres, Atwood links the morality
of the Aunts to that of radical feminists.”
Catherine R. Stimpson - "In the active syllogism of power, the premises of repression
lead to conclusions of oppression"
.
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Ehrenreich. - “As in 1984, the only subversive force
appears to be love.”
Feuer. - “Gilead constructs women as seen objects
instead of seeing subjects.”
Coral Ann Howells - “Its shift from Gilead to the historical conference at Nunavit
two hundred years later is relatively optimistic.”
Anne Enright - “As a novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is held together by
the sexual tensions between the characters.”
Julie Myerson - “Surely one of the reasons Gilead managed to be so spookily
convincing was that Atwood cunningly chose to leave so many of its edges blurry.”
Barbara Ehrenreich - “Still, it does remind us that, century after century,
women have been complicit in their own undoing”
Amin Malak - “Dystopias essentially deal with power:
power as the prohibition or perversion of human potential”
Amin Malak - “dystopias dramarise the eternal conflict
between individual choice and social necessity.”
Amin Malak - “If such positive characters do exist, they usually prove miserably
ineffectual when contending with ruthless and overwhelming powers”
Stokwisz - “Language is the main instrument
of ideological and social control”
Wisker (Comparable to 1984) - “Reduced people to their functions:
control, reproduction, service and those who regulate those functions.”
Howells - “Gilead is a totalitarian regime run on
Patriarchal lines from the old testament”
Wisker - “There is no sisterhood only
division and disempowerment”
Wisker - “In Atwood's novel, language is coded,
thoughts policed and all sexual freedom has been lost”
Heidi Macpherson - "Fear of betrayal and inculcated self surveillance
keep the Handmaids from speaking out"
Lee Briscoe - "Moira is Offred's
rebel alter ego"
Coral Howell - "Atwood's feminist concerns are plain here
but so too are her concern for basic human rights."
Patricia Goldblatt - "The work women conspire to maintain
the subjection of their own kind."
Alanna Callaway - “The evolution of a new form of misogyny, not as we usually think of it ,
as men's hatred of women, but as women's hatred of women.”
