The Handmaids Tale Day 1 Historical Context for

The Handmaid’s Tale Day 1

Historical Context for The Handmaid’s Tale • Events/concerns contemporary with Atwood’s writing of this novel: – The Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. Atwood began composing this novel while visiting a divided Berlin. – The AIDS epidemic. HIV had just been identified as the cause of the mysterious disease that had already killed many people when Atwood started writing. • Totalitarian Regimes Atwood echoes in The Handmaid’s Tale – The Republic of Gilead shares many of the oppressive features of Nazi regime, but it also echoes events that occurred during the Cultural Revolution in China and in societies controlled by fundamentalist Islamic regimes.

A Note on the Novel’s Non-Linear Structure • This novel jumps back and forth in time with very little warning. The events that occur while Offred is living in the Commander’s house are occurring in the “present” of the novel. • At various points in the novel, Offred remembers events from the past. – Her preparation to be a handmaid at the “Red Center” (the old school). – Conversations with her mother at various points before things changed. – Her relationship with her husband their attempts to adapt to, and then escape, the Republic of Gilead. • In short, any time Offred is with her mom, her husband, her daughter, or at the “Red Center, ” she’s remembering events from the past.

How Handmaid deals with the “big issues. ” • How does The Republic of Gilead deal with the following issues: – Sexuality – Freedom / free will / self determination – Knowledge / books / learning – Religion • What are some of the “trade offs” this society has made? (For instance, in Brave New World, they traded emotion and passion for stability. )

The Character of Offred • Unlike Brave New World, which had a distant, 3 rd person omniscient narrator, The Handmaid’s Tale has a 1 st person narrator, and so our knowledge about Gilead is limited to what Offred knows, but because we spend so much time with her, we are able to know her as an individual in a way that it is impossible to know John the Savage, Bernard, or Lenina.

Offred • How does Offred think about her current life? Her former life? • How does Offred think about her body? • What other insights into Offred as a character can you come up with based on the reading so far?

The World Before and World Outside • Unlike Brave New World, this book takes place in a world that remembers “how things used to be. ” How does that affect how “Offred” and the other characters deal with the oppressive society in which they find themselves? • How does the old “normal” world intrude into the “new” one? Do those bits of normalcy make the “new” world seem even more strange? • How does it affect your reading of the story to know that Gilead is only one country, and that there are other countries that are still “like us”?