CHAPTER FIVE the Handmaid's Tale: Offred's Political Journey
CHAPTER FIVE The Handmaid's Tale: Offred's Political Journey "Nothing happens unless first a dream.' Carl Sandburg I. The Exploited Female: Isolation, Alienation and Fragmentation of Body and Self landscape, mirrors, fragmented consciousness, curtains, body fragments, names, gardens and flowers II. Dystopias and Utopias: Sterility versus Fertility and the Tension Between Nature and Civilisation nature, gardens, ceremonies and rituals, colours, death III. The Pyramid Structure: Gender Roles, Sexuality and Power Struggles clothing, domestic chores, dolls, birds, language, and machines IV. Discovering the Female Space: A Room of One's Own Rooms, insides-outsides, games, blood, wall, maze, sponge and enclosures V. A Politics of Survival: Restructuring and Restoring Human Relationships for Personal Identity Windows and doors, roads, inner cycles and rhythms, fire, seasons, babies, trees, moon, sunlight, water, human relationships 275 Margaret Atwood's sixth novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1986) is the most political of her novels, and as has been pointed out by several critics, it follows the tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The novel is told in a framed perspective: a woman forced to stay in the "Republic of Gilead'" was keeping a taped journal from which a transcript has been made and published in a time after the Republic of Gilead has passed away. The afterword sets up the framework of a historical society discussing this manuscript and commenting on the Gileadean period in history. The protagonist is an ordinary woman—raised by a single mother (a feminist activist who saw warning signs of anti-woman trends in society), married to a divorced man, and mother of one child, a daughter.
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