Summary The Handmaid's Tale: Revision Notes

English Literature
Revision

Social and Political Protest
Paper

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
Margaret Atwood

, AO1 essentially requires informed and relevant responses which are accurately written and use appropriate
concepts and terminology.

 Key Aspects of Social Protest:
1. Dominance 19. Female empowerment
2. Rebellion 20. Subservient
3. Powerlessness/Power 21. Societal stigma
4. Subjugation 22. Promiscuity and prostitution
5. Conflict 23. Parody of femininity
6. Oppression 24. Devoid of expression
7. Resistance 25. Evokes/ Conjures/ Induces
8. Fundamentalism 26. Androcentric dystopian
9. Propaganda society
10. Censorship
27. Internalised subjugation
11. Environmental degradation
28. Sexual slavery
12. Tyrant
13. Futile 29. State sanctioned rape
14. Omnipotent (un-stoppable) 30. Cultural desensitisation
15. Omniscient 31. Stereotypical female
16. Disenfranchised behaviours
17. Antipathy (opposition) 32. Ownership of children
18. Political nuances (tones/shades) 33. Overarching political
problems


 Vocabulary/Phrases: Topic Starters:

 The novel contains emotional archaeology…
- Atwood’ choice of a female narrative turns
 Characters are presented at points of crisis…
the traditionally masculine dystopian genre
 In a world of jostling theocracies…
upside-down, which reverses the structural
 Diminished civil liberties in both east and west…
relations between public and private worlds
 Atwood gives us a dissident (rebellious) account…
of the dystopia.
 Public and private worlds of the dystopian…
- Atwood reclaims a feminine space of
 Rhetorical virtuosity… (linguistic ability)
personal emotions and individual identity,
 Moral indignation…
which is highlight by her first-person
 Amused detachment…
narrative.
 Institutional linguistic practices serving to promote ideology…
- Atwood presents Offred’s narrative
 Textually fixed, historical truth is questioned …
strategies to challenge the very notion of
 Textual reductionism…
textually fixed, historical truths.
 Future dystopia of Gilead is latent in the present…
- Atwood uses Gilead to represent perhaps the
 Combat existing proto-Gileadean practices…
most extreme example of textual
 Accepted orthodoxy…
reductionism.
 Deconstruction of gender…
- Atwood’s narrative of female resistance
 Incarceration and surveillance…
evade the bodily containments of the subject
 Women’s bodies become ‘disputed territories’…
and break free from a culture where women
 Intrusion of reproductive technologies…
are trained in exercising surveillance over
other women.
 Essay Sentence Starter Examples:
Question 1: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale questions history and the ways in which society constructs them’.
- Paragraph One: Atwood expresses her condemnation of religion being used as a religious tool to maintain totalitarian power
over women in Gilead.
- Paragraph Two: Atwood expresses her moral indignation of oppressive systems through Gilead representing perhaps the
most extreme example of textual reductionism.
- Paragraph Three: Atwood’s inclusion of the Historical notes signifies how religion can maintain and justify patriarchy for
generations, despite society knowing of its degrading impact on women.
- Paragraph Four: In wider contextual history, Atwood was influenced by radical groups exerting their patriarchal control in
brutal ways.

Question 2: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale is about the use and abuse of religious texts for political means.
- Paragraph One: Atwood’s use of The Red Centre signifies the importance of intertextuality as the Bible is shown as
reinterpreted by men to create the totalitarian society of Gilead.