The Handmaid's Tale

HOREAU Adèle- Sorbonne Université

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Atwood's

The Handmaid's Tale

From Captitivy to emancipation

TD Littérature Américaine L1

index

From Whitman to atwood

works

Why?

Atwood

the Handmaid's tale

Genre

structure

characters

incipit

Introduction: From wHITMAN TO ATWOOD, Atwood's "Marrying the hangmAn"

"Margaret Atwood reading "Marrying the hangman"

Poetry Center Archive Goes Live!May 3rd 2022

Notes on the poem:

common themes

a) Comment on the structure of the poem. What strikes your attention? b) What can you say about Atwood’s style and tone? c) What parallels can you draw between the poem and The Handmaid’s Tale?

• A woman's only hope is men

• Fiction Vs Reality

• Female servitude

• Community / couple

Why Study the Handmaid's tale ?

The book mirrored the United States’ embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, as well as the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition – not to mention the rise of televangelism.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today

Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale series

"trump's the handmaid's tale" - TW- PARODY

Funny or Die, June 3rd 2017

But the series felt all the more chilling because of the massive shift in US politics with the election of Donald Trump, who was inaugurated just three months before the series premiered. Suddenly, the book and series’ major flashpoints felt more possible than ever: a government declaring martial law after an attack by Islamic extremists, a regime that systematically eliminates gay people, a society that prioritises procreation (and subjugation of women) above all else.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today

Margaret atwood

Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, teacher & activist

Key Facts about Her life

writing

1939

Born November 18, 1939Ottawa

Dozens of books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

education

Awards

University of Toronto and Radcliffe College (Harvard)

2 Booker Prizes, Franz Kafka Prize, National Book Critic...

fun fact!

Teaching career

She's also the inventor of the LongPen device,

Taught writing and English in Canada and the US,

Margaret Atwood has been awarded the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference 2024 Writer in the World Prize.

Margaret Atwood’s lifelong work as a writer and activist marks her as one of the most relevant and influential artists in our culture today. Her literary imagination and intellectual courage have brought the dangers of authoritarianism and the importance of environmentalism to indelible life for millions of readers everywhere, helping to urgently shape our understanding not only of where we have been, but of where we must go.

John Burnham Schwartz

Literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

Feminism

female voices in a mAn's world

[Atwood ] "is acutely aware of the problem of alienation, the need for real human communication and the establishment of genuine human community—real as opposed to mechanical or manipulative; genuine as opposed to the counterfeit community of the body politic." (...) [her poems]“modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.”

Gloria Onleythe West Coast RevieW

“My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered.”

Atwood to Judy Klemesrud in the New York Times

Her major works

60 years of writing

Poetry

Over 20 collections published

dearly

Double PersephonE

morning in the burned house

1961

2020

1995

Non fiction & critical texts

Over a dozen essays published

burning questions

Writing with Intent:

Survival

Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005

Essays & Occasional Pieces 2004-2021

A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

2022

2005

1972

Short stories

Over a dozen collections published

dancing girls & Other stories

Old Babes in the Wood

BLUEBEARD'S EGG

2023

1983

1977

Novels

AROUND 20 Novels published

Hag-Seed

the Edible woman

the blind assassin

2000

2020

1969

A Handmaid's tale

her most famous novel

The handmaid's tale universe

the handmaid's tale

the testaments

2019

1985

• 17th Century American Puritanism & Theocracy

• Rise of the Christian right in America the 70's-80's

Historical context behind the handmaid's Tale

• Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979

1980's : Conservatism vs Feminism

• Feminist Backlash in the 80's

• Environmental crisis (pollution, birth rate decline etc....)

"Margaret Atwood: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale is being read very differently now’"

Vintage Books, 14th May 2018

Plot

The Handmaid's tale

In the near-future totalitarian and theocratic state of Gilead, fertility is dangerousely low. The ruling class is given handmaids, fertile women forced to bear their children. Offred, the narrator, is one of them.

Settings

Gilead, (Cambridge, Massachussets )

Not-so-distant-future (Around 2005)

Main Themes

politics & male domination

Religion

Women's condition

Environment

totalitarianism

social inequalities

Genre

Dystopia, speculative fiction, feminist science-fiction?

a feminist DYstopia ?

dystopia (noun) [dis-ˈtō-pē-ə ]1 - An imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. 2- : Anti-utopia

“Dystopia.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary,

what's utopia?

Utopias are a topological representation of another space-time, and utopian works are a discourse describing the codification and standardisation of a social ideal. These utopias, urban antitheses of pastoral edenic spaces, are characterized by spatial and logical closure

DVORAK, Marta. "Subverting utopia: ambiguity in The Handmaid’s Tale" In : Lire Margaret Atwood : The Handmaid's Tale

Literary Inspirations : Distopian Fictions

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, 1939

George Orwell's 1984 , 1949

I would say that it’s not strictlyspeaking a feminist dystopia because there are all kinds ofother elements of arrangement, and in a strictly speakingfeminist dystopia, all of the men would have to beadvantaged, and this is far from being the case in TheHandmaid’s Tale.

margaret atwood "Round Table with Margaret Atwood", The Handmaid’s Tale, roman protéen

"Speculative fiction"

Robert A. Heinlein, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” 1947

Subgenre of science-fiction, focusing on the human aspect of possible futures rather than on technological outcomes and issues.

Science fiction, she claims, includes stories about events that cannot possibly happen, such as the Martian invasion and similar scenarios in the tradition of H. G. Wells. Speculative fiction, instead, refers to narratives about things that can potentially take place, even though they have not yet happened at the time of the writing. .

Marek Oziewicz about atwood"Speculative Fiction." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.

Atwood's historical inspirations

from history to speculative fiction

• Forced pregnancy (Cambodia, Nazi Germany, 1940s)

• Child abduction (Indian adoption project, US, 1950's)

• Death Penalty

• Forced humility through clothing (Iran, 70s/now)

• Criminalizing homosexuality

• Abortion restrictions (Poland, US...)

Structure & style

narrative voice and distance in the handmaid's tale.

multiple timelines

Main Action & Offred's dayly life ex : Shopping

"Present day "

flashbacks

flashbacks

flashbacks

the birth of gilead

Offred's life

the red center

How democracy was overthrown.

Signficance of the center as a traumatic event => brainwashing

• Luke and Hannah
• Moira
• Offred's mother

an aesthetics of gasps

We walk, sedately. The sun is out, in the sky there are white fluffy clouds, the kind that look like headless sheep. Given our wings, our blinkers, it's hard to look yo, hard to get a full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.

THT, p 36

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

THT, p 62-63

Atwood's characters :

the complexity behind stereotypes

Main characters

Offred

Serena Joy

Fred

The Commander

The Wife

The Handmaid

Serena Joy used to be a TV evangelist who preached for a return to traditional values. She is considered barren, unable to bear children.

Offred's Commander was instrumental in the rise of Gilead. He is a leader, though not a devoted follower to the regime's rules.

Narrator of the story, she was married to a divorced man named Luke. They have a daughter, Hanna. It's her third post as a handmaid, her last chance.

characters or types?

Aunt Lydia

Nick

The Commander's driver

The manipulative aunt

He's a low-level officer of Gilead assigned to the Commander’s home... He's also a member of the resistance.

Her words haunt Offred : she voices the ideology of the new society and how women are being brainwashed.

Cora & Rita

Moira

The Marthas

Offred's best friend

Infertile women who do not qualify for the high status of Wives and are tasked with domestic chores.

Moira represents the opposition to Gilead : she's a lesbian and she successfully escapes the Red Center. Yet her ending is uncertain.

characters & uniforms

Incipit

"We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"

A palimpsestic world, between past and present

Main themes/motifs

I ) Setting the story through oppositionsA) A sense of Disorientation B) From teenage joys to prison II) From "we" to "I" : a fragmented narrative voice A) Past and Present B) Body and Mind III) "We learned to whisper" : resisting oppression A) Surviving through memory B) Surviving through community

• Confusion

• Longing for the past

• Female servitude

FIRST SCENE : "My name is offred"

Offred Season 1, Episode 1

HOREAU Adèle- Sorbonne Université

THANK YOU!

TD Littérature Américaine L2

Got an idea?

Use this space to add awesome interactivity. Include text, images, videos, tables, PDFs... even interactive questions! Premium tip: Get information on how your audience interacts with your creation:

• Visit the Analytics settings;
• Activate user tracking;
• Let the communication flow!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palimpsest