The Handmaid’s Tale critics

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.”