GENDER STUDIES / ADVANCED AMERICAN LITERARURE

THE HANDMAID’S TALE BLOG

Directions:      Choose any two (2) of the following 12 quotations from Margaret Atwood’s The

Handmaid’s Tale and:

§         Devote one (1) paragraph to a response to each.  You may focus on any aspect of the course you wish – any of the “evil-ations”, the motif of betrayal, the emerging of the female voice, etc. 

§         In particular, comment on the degree to which each shows the strength of Offred’s survivor’s spirit.

§         Then, read the commentary of your fellow-Gender Studies and respond to any two (2) comments posted by your fellow pioneers regarding quotes other than the two you have selected, thus engaging in virtual conversation. 

§         Enjoy the magic of watching the blog grow before your eyes!

1.   “Fraternize means to behave like a brother.  Luke told me that.  He said there was no corresponding word that means to behave like a sister.  Sororize, it would have to be. He said.  From the Latin.  He liked knowing about such details.  The derivations of words, curious usages.  I used to tease him about being pedantic.”  (Chapter 2)

2.  “This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except on television.  Where the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the center, where nothing moves.  The Republic of Gilead, aid Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds.  Gilead is within “  (Chapter 5)

3.  “It’s not the husbands you have to watch out for, said Aunt Lydia, it’s the Wives.  You must always try to imagine what they must be feeling.  Of course they will resent you.  It is only natural.  Try to feel for them . . . Try to pity them.  Forgive them for they know not what they do . . . You must realize that they are defeated women.  They have been unable – Here her voice broke off.”  (Chapter 8)

4.  “I am like a child here, there are some things I must not be told.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was all she (Rita) would say.”  (Chapter 9)

5.  “I cannot avoid seeing, now, the small tattoo on my ankle.  Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse.  It’s supposed to guarantee that I will never be able to fade, finally, into another landscape.  I am too important, too scarce, for that.  I am a national resource.”  (Chapter 12)

 

6.  “My name isn’t Offred.  I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden.  I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.  I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come up to dig up, one day.  I think of this name as buried.  This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant past.”  (Chapter 14)

7.  “A thing is valued, she (Aunt Lydia) says, only if it is rare and hard to get.  We want you to be valued, girls, She is rich in pauses, which she savors, in her mouth.  Think of yourselves as pearls.  We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally.  We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives . . . I think about pearls.  Pearls are congealed oyster spit.”  (Chapter 19)

8.  “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point to say:  Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”  (Chapter 25)

9.  “What the Commander aid is true.  One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four.  Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together.  They cannot be exchanged, one for the other.  They cannot replace each other.  Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick.  Should does not apply.”  Chapter 30)

10.  “The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment that you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed:  that some other human being has wished you that much evil . . . It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top.  Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.  (Chapter 30)

11.  “There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power.  There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling.  It’s like a spell of sorts.  It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with . . . It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion.”  (Chapter34)

12.  “You’ll have to forgive me.  I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees, I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.  Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself.  Weep.  Weeping is what it is, not crying.  I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.”  (Chapter 35)