anchorites/ch5/brave new world

• anchorite rooms

  • young female Christians could decide to devote their lives to God n Christ

  • trapped inside the walls of a Church, with a small space where food, candles etc could be passed through

  • religious basis

  • self-imposed

chapter 5:

• “doubled, I walk the street” (pg29)

  • freud’s unheimlich

• “freedom to and freedom from” (pg 30)

  • rousseau: “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”

  • hobbes: ““life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

  • freedom from » the beveridge report:

    • liberal politician william beveridge, in 1941, surveyed what kind of Britain ppl wanted to see after the war

    • declared 5 giants on the road to reconstruction:

      1. want - an adequate income for all

      2. disease - access to health care

      3. ignorance - a good education

      4. squalor - adequate housing

      5. idleness - gainful employment

  • brave new world:

    • written in 1941

    • chapter 17

• feminism is a thing that is trying to operate within a patriarchy, and so, for the most part, fails to work

freud (1919):

• directly translates to “unhomely”

• an unsettling development of the unfamiliar

• “this uncanny is, in reality, nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it, only through the process of repression”

uncanny valley:

• a phenomenon in which a human being experiences a negative emotional response to a non-human figure, object, or entity that possesses a human likeness

  • polar express

  • clowns

  • dolls

  • mannequins

  • humanoids

  • waxworks

  • ghosts - formerly people

  • dead people

doubling/doppelganger:

• unsettling to suddenly meet yourself

• …and to visit a space/place that feels similar to somewhere you’ve been before

in the handmaid’s tale:

• something unrecognisable refigured in a disturbing way

• “think of yourselves as seeds” (pg24)

• “…with short little steps like a trained pig’s on its hind legs” (pg25)

• “some people call them habits, a good word for them” (pg30)

• “they wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone” (pg31)

  • offred has adopted the male gaze, seeing women as baby-making machines and holding potential only sexually

• “they wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before” (pg34)

• “the smell of nail polish has made me hungry” (pg35)

• “it makes them look like dolls…like scarecrows” (pg38)

• “the tulips are not tulips of blood” (pg39)