Trinity School of English Evening Lecture Series: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale Dr Ailise Bulfin (bulfinam@tcd.ie)

Key themes: Power Gender Resistance

Margaret Atwood on power and politics: Politics, for me, is everything that involves who gets to do what to whom . . . [it] has to do with how people order their societies, to whom power is ascribed, who is considered to have power… People have power because we think they have power, and that's all politics is. (1992)

Gorman Beauchamp describes dystopian fiction as: a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some Utopian ideal. (2009)

The Handmaid’s Tale, 1st epigraph: And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. … And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. Genesis, 30:1-3

Atwood on religion and power in the novel: a group like this [the Sons of Jacob] would shut down religious freedom because they're not really interested in religion; they're interested in power. They're not interested in belief or in faith; they're interested in compliance and they're using religion as a way to get the compliance... (2017)

The Wall … there is the thing we’ve come to see: the Wall. The Wall is hundreds of years old … red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights … and barbed wire … and broken glass … along the top. (2010 Vintage edition, p. 41)

The Wall Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways… Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed… (pp. 41-2) Those men [hanging on the Wall], we’ve been told, are like war criminals. … They have committed atrocities, and must be made into examples, for the rest. (43)

Negative social trends: Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches … [but they] were like … bad dreams dreamt by others … they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives…. [W]e lived as usual. Whatever is going on is as usual … We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same thing as ignorance, you have to work at it. (66)

Women’s security: Women were not protected then [she muses]. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police… If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night. Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it. (34)

Offred’s complicity: Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. (105)

Offred’s resistance: I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along. (49)

Offred’s resistance: Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on. (pp. 279-80)

Assumptions: Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. (43)

Assumptions: 1872 cartoon ‘What are we coming to!’ satirising the absurd idea that women might ever become doctors

Atwood on The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump: Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances. ‘Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump’, New York Times, 10 Mar 2017; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html