HMT and TCOM context

• HMT

  - When did Atwood write it?

  - Where is it set?

  - How did Gilead come to power?


  - 1985

  - Set in New England (USA) in the near future where a Christian fundamentalist theocratic regime rules, following a fertility crisis

  - Through violent means, with an environmental disaster causing huge political unrest and the fertility issue that allowed for such an oppressive regime
• Setting in context

  - Set in America not Canada = A saw America as the birthplace of extreme political radicalism, although Canada is also blamed when in the HN they comment that Canada was "perfectly happy" to send refugees back from Gilead.
• HMT

  - 1980s movement in Berlin

  COM

  - Ban on abortion laws


  "The New Right"

  -> traditional values advocated, such as bombing abortion clinics and babies being born to the "wrong women"

  2019 = 25 male senators banned abortion in Alabama

  -> "Why you want to control our bodies I will never know"
• Pen Is Envy - chapter and context point

  - CH29, Reductive view on female psychology

  .--> Atwood subverts it into 'Pen is envy'.
• Pen Is Envy - link to text

  The commander, after explaining that women can't add, hands Offred his pen.

  -Offred states that she can 'feel the power of the words it contains'. - 'I envy the Commander his pen, it is one more thing I would like to steal'.

  -Atwood's subversion of this quote underscores how people who can freely use and control the pen are envied by others who are controlled themselves and restricted in the types of communication available to them
• What were the rights of women at the time of writing HMT?

  - 1980s gave rise to what evangelical right-wing Christian group?

  - link to our own modern society (occurrences just recently in America?)


  - 'Moral Majority'

  - mostly concerned with promoting traditional, heterosexual family structures and Christian morality, while opposing access to abortion and bans on prayer in schools.

  - Overturning of Roe vs Wade, 2022 Wyoming first state to ban abortion pills
• HMT

  - What did Atwood mainly draw on in terms of religious inspirations for Gilead?- Who was president of America during this time? why is this significant?

  - Mainly drew on 17th century Puritan Theocracy in America

  - Ronald Reagan 1980s - in 1981 he followed policy that aimed to restore organised prayers in schools.
• COM

  - When did PD james write the children of men? When and where is it set?

  - 1992, set in 2021, Oxford
• COM

  - What wider political context is associated with this time?

  1990s

  - Reunification of Germany- Dissolution of USSR
• COM- Background to PD James' life

  - Worked in many parts of public service (British council, magistrate in London, governor of the BBC)

  - Sat as a conservative peer in the House of Lords, rather than taking a Thatcherite stance wherein it was argued society did not exist

  - James clearly believed that we had a duty to one another
• COM

  - What was James devout to?

  - What underpinned her faith?

  - How does this contrast other writers of the time, such as Orwell and Wells?

  - What type of novel is the children of men undoubtedly?


  - Christianity

  - Her belief in good and evil- Orwell and Wells were both atheist

  -> God usually absent in dystopian worlds

  - A christian novel
• COM

  - Who did James famously apologise too and why?

  - Why did the film change the title of the novel? significance of what James noted about the film? Who is the director?

  - Faber and Faber, as it sold for much worse than her crime books did, which everyone wanted more of

  - COM - placed a huge focus on the violence, darkness of the novel = James admitted the film was "not to her taste"
• COM- In reference to the novel, what does it say about humanity that a lot of people wanted more crime novels?

  - What's the significance of the film's focus on violence?

  - Novels such as TCOM, that were far more reflective and presented greater challenges to the reader personally, more unpopular because of the way in which TCOM abruptly places the reader in a position to judge themselves and their own society (ignorance is bliss?)

  - The film's focus on violence also speaks volumes about what humans are really driven by, with the poor success of publication being made up by the films success

  - innate desire and fascination with violence, more attractive if its visual and can be pictured in a setting apart from our own?
• What is the contrast between Huxley's Brave New World and The Children of Men?

  - In Brave New World, humans are born out of artificial wombs and segregated into particular classes or 'castes'.

  - This directly mirrors both TCOM and HMT ideas on strict social hierarchy and infertility
• James' own statements

  - How did she see criminal law 'fragile bridges of ..."

  - How did she describe men?

  - What did she say restores the world?

  - "fragile bridges of safety, of order, over the chasm of psychological disorder"

  - "Men, of course, can be as troublesome as they like"

  - "What restores the world is love, commitment to another human being"
• Both

  - What was Bentham's panoptic theory?

  - Idea that even the fear of surveillance is enough to maintain order

  - From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched

  - It was a manifestation of his belief that power should be visible and unverifiable
• In what way does Bentham's panoptic theory link to a HMT?

  - Whilst control within Gilead's society is imposed through a number of systems, the most potent and insidious form is surveillance.

  - Similar to the watch-house guards, the rulers within Gilead are invisible; with the ambiguity surrounding who they are, where they are, and what they do.

  - In terms of the Commander and Offred, it is stated multiple times that she is unaware of 'who he is, or what he does' (p.282).

  - This ambiguity paves way for the subjection of civilians within Gilead as they live within the structured 'disciplinary mechanisms' whilst being unfamiliar with the rulers who order for such, a similar uneasiness that the prisoners feel towards their distant and hidden guards.
• Context

  - What does Offred say in ch24?

  - What did Offred say about her time writing the book?

  - "Context is everything"

  - I knew that established orders could banish overnight, the german airforce made sonic booms to remind us they were there.

  - Anything can happen anywhere given the circumstances.
• What does Atwood encourage us as readers?

  - What do I recognise about this fictional construct?
• HMT title

  - Partly in homage to the great Geoffery Chaucer, to perhaps give it some credentials it would otherwise lack -> suggests a type of fable, not quite something to believe

  - Also HN suggests it carries "connotations" = certain sexualisation of Offred embedded in the title (american idiom for bottom)
• HMT - What can you say about the epigraphs?

  - This structural arrangement shows Offred's narrative is suppressed between two competing male narratives, in the same manner her voice has been found in the first place
• HMT - How do the cassette tapes work?

  Song, Offred's voice, Back to pop song-> Metaphor for imprisonment
• HMT - Day and Night Sections

  - Offred is visible in the Day but not at Night = this is were most of her narrative occurs because she has the time and space to reflect

  -> connects to the diary of Anne Frank as both are taking place behind a totalitarian backdrop.
• Aim of dystopian literature

  deliver a moral message
• HMT - Dependency on giving birth to babies

  Atwood seems to draw on Nazi Eugenics in Gilead's requirement that babies meet a certain criteria to be worthy of life, disturbing the reader that a return to this inhumane Aryan Breeding could be possible
• Julian - "We take the ones we want, then chuck them back when they're no longer wanted


  - uncomfortably reflective of issues in 2023 of selective immigration, making the reader feel that our world is not as free of disasters of this sort we might like to think.