Historical Context - the Cold War. Used to get 100% in OCR English Literature A-Level. With links to Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell (1984).
The Cold War and its influence on
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Cold War
1947-1989
• The Cold War was an open yet
restricted rivalry that developed
after World War II between the
United States and the Soviet Union
and their respective allies.
• It was waged on political, economic,
and propaganda fronts and was
characterised by a perpetual threat
of nuclear war.
Margaret Atwood Links to The Handmaid’s Tale
• When Atwood began writing The • Atwood was surrounded by
Handmaid’s Tale in 1984 she was repurposed buildings from the Cold
living in West Berlin, which was still War (link to converted Harvard)
encircled by the Berlin Wall. • Across the globe, there was a
• The Soviet empire was still strongly political atmosphere that embraced
in place, and was not to crumble for communism and monetary
another five years. constraint. (The Gileadean party is
• She visited countries behind the communist and puritan.)
“Iron Curtain” (Czechoslovakia, East • During the Cold War, United States
Germany, etc.) was afraid of Communists taking
• “I experienced the wariness, the over and restricting capitalism.
feeling of being spied on, the • “Nations never build apparently
silences, the changes of subject, the radical forms of government on
oblique ways in which people might foundations that aren’t there already;
convey information, and these had the USSR replaced the dreaded
an influence on what I was writing.” imperial secret police with an even
more dreaded secret police.”
George Orwell
• The term “Cold War” was first used
by George Orwell in an article
published in 1945.
• Orwell used the term to refer to
what he predicted would be a
nuclear stalemate between “two or
three monstrous super-states, each
possessed of a weapon by which
millions of people can be wiped out
in a few seconds.”
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