context

The American New Right

• This 1980s American movement had conservative ideas about moral behaviour and the role of women in society, which are mirrored in Gilead.

• Gilead’s ideas on religion are reminders of the fundamentalist views of the American New Right movement.

• Some critics say that Serena Joy may be modelled on Phyllis Schlafly, an extreme right activist who travelled America urging support for her conservative views on women.

• Atwood uses the dystopian genre to satirise the extreme views of American 1980s conservatism.

Puritan roots

• Atwood’s own ancestry lies in Puritanism: her relative, Mary Webster, was hanged as a witch in 1683.

• Puritanism’s ideal is a Utopian society, with traditional values. But in practice this means oppression, theocracy and patriarchy — features of dystopian Gilead.

• The strict rules of dress and behaviour forced upon Offred are symbolic of the Puritan view of women as inferior.

• In Puritan New England, the first buildings were a prison and gallows — symbols of oppression like the Wall, and the University where Salvagings take place.

Masculine dystopia

• The roots of Gilead lie in Atwood’s reading of masculine dystopian fiction, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

• ‘Newspeak’, Orwell’s fictional language in Nineteen Eighty-Four, can be compared to Atwood’s use of biblical language in Gilead, through which the state exerts control.

• Atwood also read John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), which depicts a similarly bleak future with nuclear holocaust and ecological disaster.

• Atwood subverts the genre of masculine dystopia by handing the story to a female; the novel can be interpreted as critiquing women’s marginalisation in a patriarchy.

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

• ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, an influential essay written by the French critic Hélène Cixous (1976), foregrounded ideas of feminine writing, using the body.

• Following Cixous, many critics, such as Michael Greene and Karen Stein, analysed the feminine qualities in Offred’s narrative voice.

• The poetic imagery of flowers and ideas of fertility and growth are markers of a feminised language, expressing Offred’s desire and longing.

• Cixous’ writing contributes to the idea that the use of creative metaphor in Offred’s narrative can be interpreted as a feminine response which resists male domination.

The North American feminist movement

• Offred’s mother was a supporter of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which campaigned for women’s sexual freedom in America in the late 1960s.

• Early feminists burnt pornographic books and organised pro-abortion rallies; both of these are echoed in the remembered story of Offred’s mother.

• A significant feature of the movement was the fight to legalise abortion. In Gilead, doctors who previously engaged in this practice are hunted down and hanged.

• Other women’s voices also offer a range of views from this time, such as those of Aunt Lydia and the Commander’s wife.