Notes

Atwoods book always explore th ehuman psych. Atwood writes about art and its creation, the dangers of ideology and sexual politics; she deconstructs myths, fairytales and the classics for a new audience.
for Atwood, an ideal reader "is somebody who reads the book on the first read-through to see what happens".
in the essay ‘Aliens have taken the place of angels’ has written that it can "explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human" and "explore proposed changes in social organisation" (The Guardian, 17 June 2005).

But what lingers most about this novel is its ending: did Offred escape? We shall never know, and find that her ‘tale’ has been transcribed by scholars in a subsequent future. It may even be fictional, in Atwood’s fictional world itself. The postmodern conclusion leaves us with a moving sense of uncertainty, as the author breaks generic boundaries.
More recently her work has been positioned as postmodernist given its fascination with the fragmentation of identity and multiple versions of reality. In addition to this, she has never lost her position as being a kind of national figure who has presented Canada, Canadians and the Canadian viewpoint to the world. Given what appears to be a wide range of reactions and appraisals of her work, is there room — or need — for yet another critical stance?

To do this I draw upon key notions and concepts for my interpretation; and while ideas such as the 'oedipal complex', 'the unconscious', 'the ego', 'the symbolic' are undoubtedly intrinsic concepts, they remain open to idiosyncratic use on the part of critic and theorist alike.
Margaret Atwood is a novelist whose writing shows a concern with the inner workings of the mind. She creates psychologically complex protagonists and very interesting peripheral characters. The relationships between the characters are complicated, and sometimes difficult to understand. The fact that both psychoanalysis and phenomenology are theoretical disciplines that explore the formation of identity and construction of the self make them the perfect framework for analysing Atwood's novels. Together these philosophies can provide the key to understanding recurrent motifs, events and relationships in the fictional world and shed light on the subtleties of Atwood's fiction which are often overlooked.

Atwood made the artist’s pick: she chose the story. She once wrote a vivid narrative poem in the voice of Half-Hanged Mary—in Atwood’s telling, a sardonic, independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors “for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin . . . a weedy farm in my own name, / and a surefire cure for warts.” Webster’s grim endurance at the end of the rope (“Most will have only one death. / I will have two.”) grants her a perverse kind of freedom. She can now say anything: “The words boil out of me, / coil after coil of sinuous possibility. / The cosmos unravels from my mouth, / all fullness, all vacancy.” In 1985, Atwood made Webster one of two dedicatees of her best-known novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing. The other dedicatee of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was Perry Miller, the scholar of American intellectual history; Atwood studied under him at Harvard, in the early sixties, extending her knowledge of Puritanism well beyond fireside tales.

shes not bound by genres shes verstalile writer a sign of soemone intrested in understanding humans and exploring humanity
started writing “The Handmaid’s Tale” on a clunky rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin, in 1984. (Orwell was on her mind.)

Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s. The novel, published in 1986, quickly became a best-seller. The Handmaid’s Tale falls squarely within the twentieth-century tradition of anti-utopian, or “dystopian” novels, exemplified by classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Novels in this genre present imagined worlds and societies that are not ideals, but instead are terrifying or restrictive. Atwood’s novel offers a strongly feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the excesses of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. The growing power of this “religious right” heightened feminist fears that the gains women had made in previous decades would be reversed.

“Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already.”
Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already; thus China replaced a state bureaucracy with a similar state bureaucracy under a different name, the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.

Like the original theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New. Since ruling classes always make sure they get the best and rarest of desirable goods and services, and as it is one of the axioms of the novel that fertility in the industrialized West has come under threat, the rare and desirable would include fertile women—always on the human wish list, one way or another—and reproductive control. Who shall have babies, who shall claim and raise those babies, who shall be blamed if anything goes wrong with those babies? These are questions with which human beings have busied themselves for a long time.

There would be resistance to such a regime, and an underground, and even an underground railroad. In retrospect, and in view of 21st-century technologies available for spywork and social control, these seem a little too easy. Surely the Gilead command would have moved to eliminate the Quakers, as their 17th-century Puritan forebears had done.
I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)

The Handmaid’s Tale has often been called a “feminist dystopia,” but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.

The Handmaids themselves are a pariah caste within the pyramid: treasured for what they may be able to provide—their fertility—but untouchables otherwise. To possess one is, however, a mark of high status, just as many slaves or a large retinue of servants always has been.

Since the regime operates under the guise of a strict Puritanism, these women are not considered a harem, intended to provide delight as well as children. They are functional rather than decorative.

*

Three things that had long been of interest to me came together during the writing of the book. The first was my interest in dystopian literature, an interest that began with the adolescent reading of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and continued through my period of graduate work at Harvard in the early 1960s. Once you’ve been intrigued by a literary form, you always have a secret yen to write an example of it yourself. The second was my study of 17th- and 18th-century America, again at Harvard, which was of particular interest to me since many of my own ancestors had lived in those times and in that place. The third was my fascination with dictatorships and how they function, not unusual in a person who’d been born in 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II.

Like the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the three major dictatorships of the 20th century—I say “major” because there have been more, Cambodia and Romania among them—and like the New England Puritan regime before it, Gilead has utopian idealism flowing through its veins, coupled with a high-minded principle, its ever-present shadow, sublegal opportunism, and the propensity of the powerful to indulge in behind-the-scenes sensual delights forbidden to everyone else. But such locked-door escapades must remain hidden, for the regime floats as its raison d’être the notion that it is improving the conditions of life, both physical and moral; and like all such regimes, it depends upon its true believers.

I was perhaps too optimistic to end the Handmaid’s story with an outright failure. Even 1984, that darkest of literary visions, does not end with a boot grinding into the human face forever, or with a broken Winston Smith feeling a drunken love for Big Brother, but with an essay about the regime written in the past tense and in standard English. Similarly, I allowed my Handmaid a possible escape, via Maine and Canada; and I also permitted an epilogue, from the perspective of which both the Handmaid and the world she lived in have receded into history. When asked whether The Handmaid’s Tale is about to “come true,” I remind myself that there are two futures in the book, and that if the first one comes true, the second one may do so also.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a very visual book. Those who lack power always see more than they say. It’s fitting that the illustrations in this Folio edition echo both the feel and the color palette of the 1930s and 40s, the age of the rise of the major dictatorships—and the signage and branding, as it were, of the future Gilead, which has an equal interest in propaganda and presentation coupled with its North American knack for catchy slogans. It’s this aspect that seems the most possible to me at those uneasy moments when I find I’m convincing even myself of the plausibility of my own dire creation.

MA: The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1984, sorry to have been so corny. The 1980s was a decade of pushback against the uprising of the many kinds of feminism in the 1970s. People were saying that they would like women to be back in the home in their rightful sphere, and that all of the gains that people thought they had made ought to be reversed.
And so The Handmaid’s Tale was partly an answer to the question, ‘If you were going to shove women back into the home and deprive them of all of these gains that they thought they had made, how would you do it?’ The answer: you would simply reverse the steps that had led to them being out and active in the world, with jobs and control of their own property and everything else that they had by that time. There was already a quick and easy method for doing that, in the form of the credit card. If all money is controlled electronically (or digitally, as it is now), it can be switched off instantaneously. I’m just saying.
I also wanted to answer the question, ‘If the United States were to become a totalitarianism, what kind of totalitarianism would it be?’ In other words, what would be the slogans? what would be the excuse? It was clear to me that it would not be communism and it would not be anything resembling liberal democracy. It was much more likely, in that country, to have its base in seventeenth century puritanism.
So, I was answering those questions and the conditions of 1984 in which I was answering them meant you could see it coming

In bodily harm, Atwood develops her thematic concerns in even more global dimensions, in both figurative and geographical senses. This piece of work at times tends to be a very political feminist novel, immediately concerned with such issues as body image, female sexuality, male-female relationships, and male brutality in a patriarchal society. Through her writing of this novel, Atwood seems to project her anger towards a patriarchal establishment and value system that continues to enforce it with excessive privileges and powers, both personal and political. The life of the main character, Rennie Wilcox, is illustrated in the book to demonstrate the victimization of woman. One