AO5 - Paper 2

‘The monthly rap3 ‘Ceremony’… synthesises the institutionalised humiliation, objectification, and ownership of women in Gilead’ - Cavalcanti
‘Power and conflict are central to the society of Gilead [although] its political and economic structure are never clearly demarcated’ - Grotsch-Thompson
‘The fragmented narrative… represents the mental processes of someone in Offred’s isolated situation’ - Howells
‘Despite - or perhaps because of - the destruction of the environment, Gilead adapts the rhetoric of the natural to authenticate its reign’ - Rule
‘Offred’s power is in language… the power to feel, and to express that feeling in words that evoke feeling’ - Beran
Arendt’s banality of evil and Atwood’s presentation of the Commander

‘Williams’ sympathy is on the side of the delicately built person whose soul is revolted by crass life’ - Von Szeliski
‘Blanche is the wild card in the seven card stud game that is the sex/ gender system’ - Clum
‘Blanche is like all women, dependent on a man, looking for one to hang on to: only more so!"‘ - Kazan, director of 1950 movie
‘a fascination with the image of a helpless creature under the physical domination of another, accepting his favours with tears of gratitude’ - Magid
‘[Blanche’s] first impulse is to turn to another man as saviour’ - Londre
‘Characters are defined… by their ability or lack of ability to accept or adapt to the historical process’ - Gazolla
‘Stanley, on the other hand, is faithful and loyal'; his cruelty defends his world’ - Cohn
‘The radicalized discourse spoken by Stella and Blanche serves to define Stanley as the Other, a sexual, cultural, and by implication, racial alien’ - Crandell

‘Myths that don’t exist but should’ - Mendelsohn
‘as in traditional fairytales, there is sometimes a sense of darkness as well as joy’ - O’Reilly
‘Transformation and transmutation are at the heart of these poems’ - Draycott
[Duffy’s] work has a kind of muscular, lyrical intensity, yet is always rooted in the much and mulch of real experience’ - Newey
‘[Duffy exposes] the trash of our aspirations and the crumbling urban landscape around us’ - Feinstein
‘The problem [with the poems at the start of the collection] is predictability, the use of transformation has become a habit, leaving the poems running on the topic’ - O’Brien
‘the [more personal and more hopeful] poems placed at the end of the book… signal a movement or development’ - Feinstein

[BEAUTIFUL] - ‘The poet can only read the fearsome beauty of classical heroines/ villainesses as a loaded construction, a reflection of male power’ - O’Brien

[LAUGHTER] - ‘an allegory for the rise of feminism, sweeping away dowdy post-war austerity and buttoned-up emotional sterility’ - Forbes
[DUFFY] - ‘closes with poems that are more prayer than gospel and more obviously personal.. move[s] from the larger ‘public’ statement of the gospel to the smaller, more intimate address of the poem as prayer’
‘Many of the poems have a dark fairy tale, or myth-like quality’
‘Tall stories… circling female experience, and told as gospel truth’