Puritanism

• Puritanism was a religious reform movement within the Church of England.
• They were Protestants who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices (what they called ‘Popery’).
• It began in the late 16th century in England but soon spread to the Northern English colonies in the New World.
• Atwood studied at Harvard under Professor Perry Miller, the great scholar of the Puritan mind.
• The Puritans in America laid the foundation for the religious, social, and political order of New England colonial life.
• With its passion for traditional values, Atwood’s Republic of Gilead borrows selectively from the historical model of the Puritan forefathers of America
• Atwood: Mindset of gilead

  “The mindset of Gilead is really close to that of the seventeenth-century Puritans.”
• Anne K. Kaler - Puritan women's name

  “Silence, Fear, Patience, Prudence, Mindwell, Comfort, Hopestill and Be Fruitful”

  to be “reminded … of their feminine destiny,”
• Atwood has been very clear in her interviews and writing that the Puritans aspired to a utopian society, yet created a system which was oppressive, theocratic and patriarchal.
• Atwood has several times quoted the New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), who said that the first thing built in puritan New England was a prison and the second a gallows to hang dissenters.
• Atwood sees it as the tragedy of American history that the nation is based on a failed aspiration to build utopia in the New World. When she reads contemporary American literature, she sees a country haunted by the ghost of that failed inheritance:
• “Most twentieth century American literature is about the gap between the promise and the actuality"
• The handmaid's red robes and other elements of THT recall Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter which was set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1642 - 1649
• THT is set in New England and so the reader is asked to make that direct connection to puritanism and the theocratic regime of GIlead
• While Atwood is Canadian, THT is set in the USA due to the heritage of extreme political thought that she doesn't detect in Canada
• However, Canada is mentioned in the historical notes, where it is said they were happy to send back refugees from GIlead
• This mention of Canada shows how liberal tolerance, appeasement can easily become cowardice
• To Atwood, America was founded...

  on religious extremism and those currents haven't gone away
• Puritan Women - not allowed

  to use combs or mirrors or wear anything but plain and functional clothing.
• Women were classed as the inferior sex and forced into a passive and domestic life to remind them of the preordained role God chose for them.
•  Women could hope for nothing more than to bear children and be a good, dutiful wife.