The Handmaid's Tale - Context

The Handmaid's Tale - Context

1. Cultural Context

   • Atwood = a Canadian writer - studying the unique relationship between the USA and Canada both in real life and as represented in The Handmaid's Tale - outsider to the united states - iunsettling vision of the American guture
   • Biblical
     • - 'stem of an apple' - apple reference connotes Eve's original sin and cross both redemption and crucifixion - woman's fate is a consequence of their own desires  - 'we were falling women'  - ' all we've done is return things to Nature's norm'

2. Literary context

   • - George Orwell describes the political, military and institutional horros of his dystopian societies in 1984 + Animal Farm - MA - describes mundane things - w/ female narrator - interesting spin on a traditionally masculine literary form -Atwood's dystopian vision is still closely linked with Orwell's Animal Farm - the pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and apples, the elite of The Handmaid's Tale get the ferile women.  
   • Chaucer
     • Title  - Piexioto - 'appended...in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer'
   • The Red Shoes
     • Chose between marriage and work - a woman cannot have both 
   • T.S Elliot
     • 'objective correlative' - objects, situations or events can be used in literature to represent characters or emotions  - costumes in HMT
   • Dystopian fiction
     • - Subverting traditional narrative forms and patterns  - Offred's narrative is glossed - by a male academic - ironic 

3. Social and historical contexts

   • 'If a woman's place is in the home, then what? If you actuslly decide to enforce that, what follows?' - perceived commentary anti-feminist backlash against the progressive social change that had taken place in previous decades' - Atwood's fears about women's rights, religious fundamentalism and a major nuclear environmental meltdown - Yet - HMT = particlly prophetic - relates to current issues such as: - the potition of owmen under the Taliban - The use of unethical reproductive technologies + surrogacy arragements - government surveillance of their own citizens - the persecution og gay men in some parts of Africa - Impact of pollution and climate change
   • Not Science Fiction
     • Atwood has stated that HMT is NOT science fiction - 'a slight twist on the society we have now' - American right-wing fundamentalism - 'Afghanistan and Iran 'where women are treated in the same light as they are in Gilead's society - some ways better, some ways worse' - Afghan life bearing a strong resemblance to Gilead - women are no longer allowed to work and female education was withdrawn - Mullah Qallamuddin - 'women must be completely segregated from men'
   • Victorian women
     • - middle class women were confined to the home as wives and mothers - sheltered from the corrupting knowledge of the outside world - Britain women had to give up many professions on marriage - this law applied to teachers until 1945 - regarded as their husband's possessions -'Angel in the House' - their role wa to be gentle, expressive homemakers - Offred has lost her true identity and become a man's possession
     • Winged women
       • - Satirical humour to expose the hypocrisies and absurdities of Victorian society 
   • Second wave feminism
     • - Women worked in greater numbers during both wars - Government campaigns to persuade them that it was harmful to be away from their children for long periods - many women began to resent being confined to a domestic and passive role - women were becoming more politically active
     • - The men too were forced intop narrow role - Nick
     • Radical feminism  - equality of right and opportunities  - Gender differences are socially and therefore, patriarchally, constructed
     • Cultural feminism  - celebration and acknowledgement of gender difference
     • Teddi Holt
       • Holt  - founded MOM (mothers on the march) - 'woman's rights' were a threat to her own rights as a 'free citizen of the US' and crucially as a 'homemaker and a christian mother' - Opening quotation 
   • Handmaids
     • Costumes  - Nun's costumes, school girls' hemlines, faceless woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser box - 'Dutch milk maids on a wallpaper frieze - German prisoners of war in Canadian P.O.W camps in 2nd world war - Handmaid's = prisoners 
     • Nun's like the Prioress? A woman of vast sexual experience like the Wife of Bath? A prostitute? A concubine? Little Red Riding Hood?

4. Political and environmental context

   • - Atwood supports the Green Party of Canada - HMT is set in a society that has brought environmental disaster upon itself by poisoning the planet to the point of rendering many of its inhabitants sterile - Humankind has defied and defied Mother Nature through its arrogant overuse of advanced technologies - Offred - 'Women took medicines, pills, men sprayed trees'
   • - The Blights th\t led to Gilead's fertility issues relate both to environmental issues and issues relating to sexual liberation of the 1960s
   • Rise of religious right-wing fundamentalism
     • - Rise of these groups in the USA in the 1980s, with strong backing from President Reagan - concern over abortion, divorce, growth of the gay rights movement. They looked back to America's Puritan inheritance. - Gilead's tyrannical practices are based on international historical modles as well as contemporary political atrocities in Latin America, Iran and the Philippines - 'Denay, Nunavit' - recognition of our world and our shared moral responsibility for it - warning about Gilead's attempts to redefine female identity in reductively biological terms