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The Handmaid's Tale Atwood Extensive Notes
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Extensive notes on Handmaid's Tale including summaries, quotes, technique analyses, critical readings, etc.
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06.04 Narratives that Shape our World1. What do you think are the implications of the title of the module? What do we expect to
learn?
- The way context and lit. influences each other and in turn influence the world around us
- Challenge societal roles and perceptions
- Help understand previous contexts (not our own)
- Conveys different messages
- Discourse → a conversation/idea that is being unpacked in various spaces (the wider
idea of the “narrative”)
2. What skills/knowledge from previous courses will you need to draw on in your approach to
this module?
- Influence of context from the unit with TKAM and Persepolis
- The comparative text unit with two texts with similar context/values/themes/ideas
3. Why do we tell stories? How does storytelling work?
- To pass on, convey message (teach → didactic), entertain, bonding and connection,
inform, to detail and record, pass cultural values and practices
- Scientifically: activates chemicals in the brain that triggers empathy and memory →
relatability to characters and hamartia
- Helps broaden understanding of the world/of things in the world/of others’ experiences
- Develop/understand/figure out our own perspective of the world
- Aesthetic quality/just for fun
- Connecting people within and across cultures, communities and historical ears
- Inspiring change or consolidating stability
- Revealing, affirming or questioning cultural practices
- Sharing collective or individual experiences
- Celebrating aesthetic achievement
- Storytelling: adapting to context and audience, embellishing
Students analyse and evaluate texts using context and author values, and how narratives work
and why we use it to tell stories.
Narrative Conventions and Narratology
- Plots and masterplots, conflict, character/archetypes, setting, sequence of
events/framing and time, POV and narrative voice, language, style, tropes, themes
Narrative = The oral or written discourse that tells of an event or a series of events.
Story = The succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the content of the narrative
discourse.
Narrating = The act of narrating itself.
- Narratology is the study of narratives at the level of metalanguage
- Treats narratives as explicit, intentionally constructed systems, rather than as simple or
natural vehicles for representation of life
, - The analysis of a narrative’s structural components/processes of selection and
organisation and how they interrelate
- How a story transforms into a plot by analysing the rules that generate plot
- Close attention to elements i.e. POV, relations amongst the story, narrator/author and
audience, level and types of discourse, character types
- Main sources are structuralism and Russian Formalism
- Key concepts for the term: metanarratives, context, story archetypes/masterplots/seven
basic plots, macro narratives, micro narratives
Metanarrative
- Aka grand narrative. An overarching storyline that gives context/meaning/purpose
- The big picture/large worldviews
- E.g. systems of beliefs and religions that provide metanarratives as to how to live
- Brought into prominence by Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A
Report, 1979.
- E.g. marxism, free market capitalism.
- Speaks of absolute, universal truths. Individual narratives are “truths for myself” instead
- External to the text. Values and beliefs in the context of the text
Narrative and Context
- Historical, political (societal organisation in that context), social (behaviour, collective
ideals), personal (author experiences)
- Handmaid’s Tale takes a lot of historical events that happened to women and combines
it (forces us to think about feminism IG)
Story Archetypes or Masterplots
- Skeletal and adaptable, essentially like common masterplots
- (1) Overcoming the monster, (2) rags to riches, (3) the quest, (4) voyage and return, (5)
comedy, (6) tragedy, (7) rebirth
Macro Narratives
- Cultural stories → wider customs, practices, importance in defining communal identity
- National stories → nation building and statehood, struggles
- Ethnicity stories → stories of origin, heritage, family, shared experiences
- Religious stories → belief structures and influences on collective thinking
Micro Narratives
- Stories of the self → personalised stories, everyday occurrences, personal observations,
responses or reactions
While reading Handmaid’s Tale, keep a journal reflecting on the four M’s, i.e. metanarrative,
masterplots, macro and micro narratives. Like tab micro events that say something big about
the character or the macro narratives present in the plot.
,27.04 Speculative Narratives
- Explores possibilities & “what if”s
- Can contain sci-fi, children’s books, utopia, dystopia,
- Have the potential to shape our perceptions and challenge existing structures and
practices
- Did a Yarning Circle to discuss these questions: Do you think storytelling can actually
change our world? Do you think representations of women/non-binary people in art and
literature change the way they are treated?
28.04 Thematic Concerns of Handmaid’s Tale
Human Femininity and feminism Female sexuality & desire Patriarchy,
relationships gender
and connection Motherhood roles, power
structures
(‘) Identity and individualism Language as power
Communication Storytelling and the truth
Oppressive (“) Politics and control
governance
Hypocrisy
Results of complacency Survival
The nature of power
(“) Individual vs state conflict (‘) Personal freedom, nature of freedom,
freedom and conflict
Religion and (“) Conservatism versus
fundamentalism progressivism, liberalism
, 28.04 HMT Analysis: Ch.1
1. Analyse the local effects of Chapter 1. Revisit what you’ve learnt in Term 1.
Technique Example Explanation
Tone of the past “We slept in what had once been Creates a sense of loneliness,
and resentment the gymnasium.” loss (and nostalgia), and
confinement by showing contrast
Past tense (+ 1st There was old sex in the room and between Gilead and US.
POV) = flashbacks loneliness, and expectation, of
something without a shape or
name.
Recollection of the A balcony ran around the room, for Memory/the past becomes a way
past, endearing the spectators, and I thought I of escape/rebellion against the
and nostalgic tone could smell, faintly like an current oppressive society.
afterimage, the pungent scent of
Descriptive sweat, shot through with the sweet Builds a more vivid memory;
language taint of chewing gum and accentuates the nostalgic mood
perfume…
Diction: palimpsest “The music lingered, a palimpsest Suggests that sounds are being
of unheard sounds.” overlain on top of one another,
like Gilead and the US, but that
“Dances would have been held some traces (such as this
there; the music lingered, a memory) still remain. The
palimpsest of unheard sound, style ‘Unheard’ suggests that although
upon style, an undercurrent of she is no longer directly familiar
drums, a forlorn wail, garlands with these ‘sounds’ the palimpsest
made of tissue-paper flowers, (the old use of the gymnasium)
cardboard devils, a revolving ball of still remains a foundation for this
mirrors, powdering the dancers memory in the present world.
with a snow of light.”
Accumulation of Accumulation adds detailed
commas when insights but accentuates the
reflecting on the nostalgia and makes it more
past of setting intense
Symbolism of the High school imagery: gum. Represents a loss of youth and
setting Basketball, gymnasium, balcony, innocence as time has
spectators, games, circles, progressed. Symbolises the
varnished wood development of Gilead
superimposed upon the
foundations of the US as
something that cannot be
retrieved (i.e. the overarching
“freedom from but not freedom
to”).
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