Margaret Atwood:
The Author
• born in Ottawa in 1939
• brilliant student at the University of Toronto
• won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to
Harvard in 1961
• her poetry first drew her to public attention
Margaret Atwood:
The Author
• published The Edible Woman in 1969
• Most books are set in Toronto.
• initially, Atwood was seem as a radical
feminist: “but as Atwood continued to
produce novels and short stories, a much
more complicated pattern emerged. Her
men continued to be weak and petulant,
but the true villains of her fiction turned out
to be female” (Toronto Star, Nov. 8 2000).
Throughout her forty years of writing,
Margaret Atwood has received numerous
awards and several honorary degrees. She is
the author of more than twenty-five volumes
of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Her newest novel, The Blind Assassin, which
won the prestigious Booker Prize, was
published in the fall of 2000. Negotiating With
the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002),
published by Cambridge University Press in
March 2002, is her latest book and her new
novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in April,
2003. She has an uncanny knack for writing
books that anticipate the popular
preoccupations of her public.
Atwood's fiction is often symbolic. She has moved
easily between satire and fantasy, and enlarged the
boundaries of traditional realism.
About The Handmaid’s Tale:
“What inspired The Handmaid’s Tale?” I’ve often been asked.
General observation, I might have said. Poking my nose into
books. Reading the newspapers. World history. One of my
rules was that I couldn’t put anything into the novel that
human beings hadn’t actually done.
I began the actual writing in West Berlin,
in the spring of 1984. In five years the
Wall would topple and the Soviet Union
would disintegrate, but I had no way of
knowing that. I visited East Berlin at the
time, as well as Poland and
Czechoslovakia. I’d followed events in
Romania—where women were forced
by the ruling regime to have babies—
and also in China, where they were
forced not to. I’d been to Iran, and
traced the advent of the repression of
women under the Ayatollahs.
Just as importantly, I was born in 1939, at
the outbreak of the Second World War, so
I’ve always taken an interest in the Nazis,
and in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. I read
Churchill’s memoirs when they came out,
and Orwell’s 1984 and Koestler’s Darkness
At Noon soon after they were published.
As a college student, I was a volunteer
worker with immigrants wishing to improve
their English, and my charge was a woman
doctor who’d escaped from
Czechoslovakia. She was a wreck. I got an
earful. On the other hand, I lived through
the McCarthy years. They were
no human-rights picnic either.
At Harvard Graduate School in the '60s. I
studied American Literature and
Civilization, as part of English Literature. I
found Puritan New England fascinating,
especially since these folks were my
ancestors.
Far from being the seekers after freedom
often depicted, the Puritans were a
repressive lot: their preoccupation with the
state of their souls did not save them from
expelling dissenters and hanging Quakers.
I took a particular interest in the Salem
witchcraft trials.
What sorts of conditions produce a
group mentality that so blatantly
violates justice and defies common
sense, in the name of God and
righteousness?
What sorts of people benefit from
egging such things on?
I’ve always remembered the words of one New England divine, who preached a sermon of
repentance after they’d all realized how badly they’d been bamboozled: “The Devil was indeed
among us, but not in the form we thought.”
It’s no accident that The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Massachusetts
After 9/11, after the coming of right-wing religious
ideology to the White House, and, most importantly,
after the erosion of Constitutional rights of many kind,
this piece seems eerily prescient. In The Handmaid’s
Tale, the eye from the American dollar bill is used as
their logo by the Gilead secret police, who control
people through credit card information. It’s the same
eye just adopted by the Homeland Security folks, who
can now—yes—control people through credit card
information. That’s what biologist would call
“convergence.”
The following is an excerpt from The Toronto Star
following Atwood’s receiving The Booker Prize:
The Booker Prize plants Atwood firmly on the throne of
English literature, although she is already a respected
literary figure here, and her work is part of the standard
curriculum in the universities of half a dozen countries.
Her writing has been translated into more than 30
languages.
And, she says, she owes some of her success to her previous nominations for the Booker
award. “When I was first shortlisted in 1986 (for The Handmaid’s Tale), the book had sold
3,000 copies,” she joked, adding that now “thousands of students are tortured by it.”
Dystopian literature presents fictional worlds or societies that are depicted as
utopias, but under closer scrutiny illustrate terrifying and restrictive regimes in
which individual freedoms are often suppressed for the greater “good”.
Atwood’s dystopia , Gilead, depicts a society in which religious extremists have
taken over and reversed the progress of the sexual revolution.
The Handmaid’s Tale as Dystopian Literature:
In the 1980s, the defeat of the Equal
Rights Amendment, the rise of the
religious right, the election of Ronald
Reagan, and many sorts of backlash
(mostly hugely misinformed) against
the women's movement led writers like
Atwood to fear that the antifeminist
tide could not only prevent further
gains for women, but turn back the
clock.
Dystopias are a kind of thought experiment which
isolates certain social trends and exaggerates them to
make clear their most negative qualities. They are
rarely intended as realistic predictions of a probable
future, and it is pointless to criticize them on the
grounds of implausibility. Atwood here examines some
of the traditional attitudes that are embedded in the
thinking of the religious right and which she finds
particularly threatening.
• The Handmaid’s Tale is reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – it conjures
the immediate image of a medieval world full of knights and their ladies.
• It is written in first person, as an interior monologue, narrated by one of the
“handmaids”. Her thoughts are the story, as she is forbidden to express her
thoughts out loud. Her strength lies in insight, not action.
• Note the double entendre on the word, “tale” – the dual meaning establishes the
conflict: the protagonist versus a world that sees her as a sexual object void of
sexual autonomy.
The Handmaid’s Tale is both a satire and
a parody
• Satire: a novel, play or film that
ridicules people’s foolishness or
hypocrisy – often by parody.
In the novel, Atwood's strong point is her
satire, often hilarious, often very pointed.
Humor is in short supply in this novel,
but it is a satire nonetheless. Atwood's
love for language play (apparent in the
anagram of her name she uses for her
private business "O. W. Toad") is a major
feature of the protagonist of The
Handmaid’s Tale. Her jokes are dark and
bitter, but they are pervasive.
• Parody: a grotesque or absurd
imitation
•Atwood calls the novel a “speculative fiction” – ie. What
could occur if society closes its eyes to what is going on in
the world. If people are not paying attention, they may
experience loss of freedoms; in the worst case scenario,
they become slaves
Do you see some
irony in the naming
of this new society
“Gilead”?
• The fictional Republic of Gilead represents an “atavistic Puritanism”.
• Atavism refers to the reversion to the appearance, behavior of our ancestors.
• As for Puritanism, think of The Crucible, and the repressive lives of the citizens of
New England.
•Atwood illustrates how fear guarantees collusion – the individual is afraid to
speak up or rebel; therefore, the individual shares responsibility for every aspect
of the society, including its atrocities
•Through fear, a totalitarian regime is able to police itself. Its members--even the
extremely oppressed--police each other as agents of the state. Friendship
becomes obsolete as no one can be trusted—Who is a spy? The “Eyes” are
always watching you.
•Totalitarianism: a from of government in which no rival parties are permitted.
Total submission to the state is required.
The Heroine:
She is guilty of moral cowardice—Atwood believes that
often victimization is a matter of choice. The narrator’s
physical safety is so important to her that she sacrifices
her moral integrity.
She attempts a withdrawal from circumstances for
which she does not accept responsibility.
Her voice is “a voice crying in the desert”—the reader feels her isolation. For the
most part, she learns that she must make decisions from moment to moment
on her own.
She has many similarities in situation and character to Hamlet:
a)
They both are living in an evil, corrupt world which is masquerading as “good”
and
b)
They both lack the strength to confront the evil in their worlds.
BANNED IN THE UNITED STATES
Excerpt: “‘I was coming to find you,’ he says,
breathes, almost into my ear. I want to reach
up, taste his skin, he makes me hungry. His
fingers move, feeling my arm under the
nightgown sleeve, as if his hand won’t listen
to reason. It’s to good to be touched by
someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so
greedy.”
The controversy: A Judson, Tex., school
superintendent banned the novel from an
advanced placement English curriculum
after a parent complained that it was
sexually explicit and offensive to Christians.
In doing so, the superintendent overruled the
recommendation by a committee of
teachers, students, and parents. The
committee appealed the decision to the
school board, which overruled the
superintendent in 2006.