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Summary The Handmaid's Tale - genres
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Notes on the genres that influenced/are a part of the novel
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GenresFeminist dystopia
- Challenged by Atwood
- Feminist dystopia – inequality of society/oppression of women exaggerated/intensified to highlight
the need for change in contemporary society
- Feminist science fiction – more often seen as concerned with societal roles and power dynamics
- Makes parodic use of main dystopian features
Selected community isolated within the walls of Gilead – can be subjected to the extreme
consequences of the central hypothesis
Has to be distanced and isolated in time – generally some more or less distant future
- Concentrated vision on women as victims of the misogynistic hypothesis
Focus made sharper as everyone is perceived through the consciousness of Offred – most
characters are types reduced to their social functions by their different unforms
Swiftian satire
- Writings (like swift’s) that are satiric and ironic – use parody and exaggeration
- Swift – took middle ground between extreme of religions practiced by puritans and Catholics and
extremes of rationalism practiced by enlightenment scholars and early imperialists
- Harsh and unforgiving tone
- Satire – used as a technique to criticize people, government or society through literary tools
Verbal irony, sarcasm and use of mocking
- Uses Juvenalian satire – bitter and ironic criticism of contemporary persons and institutions that is
filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation and pessimism
Swift raged at shallowness and arrogance observed in intellectual and moral life
- A modest proposal – dauntless criticisms and satire on the political and social problems of Ireland
(which was completely dominated by England)
- Uses humanitarian projector as narrator – represents to critic
Used to convince his readers that his proposal is the best option to solve social and economic
problems
Speculative fiction
- HMT – tends to denounce the potential dangers lurking in the institutions in the land of liberty and
western democracies
- Imagines an alternate word not far removed form our own
- Atwood satirizing various trends she observed in the 80’s – poor treatment of women, disease and
infertility and the corruption of religion
HMT exploring consequences of existing trends
- Suggests that rise of religious right with a declining birth rate could produce a totalitarian regime in
the US
Political warning
- Atwood wants reader to be left with uncertainty – wrote HMT to serve as a warning to American
society
History repeats itself is change does not take place
- Execution of defiant ones – parallel to lynching that African Americans had to endure during times of
inequality
Legal to execute anyone who rebels in the novel
- Republic of Gilead’s government – com bination of past real policies from governments around the
world
- Goal was to prove how sudden dramatic shifts in laws and cultural mores can be
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