Margaret White

SE2421 Contemporary Women’s Writing Week 5: 1 November 2011 Dr Becky Munford (munfordr@cardiff.ac.uk) Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Language, bodies, desire [pic] Word games (1) ‘I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in….Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended.’ (chapter 9, p. 62) (2) ‘So that’s what’s in the forbidden room! Scrabble

If we go back in history, when Margaret Sanger did the “unspeakable” in 1916 and opened the first U.S. birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York and that moment became chaos. Despite her courage, she was arrested ten days later and her clinic was shut down. However, Margaret Sanger did not give up on what she believed was her rights and reopened the clinic in 1923 in New York City. This was the first time a woman set out to find “justice” in women’s health. Margaret Sanger took this further and

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a criticism and embroidery of modern issues regarding patriarchal, hierarchal, religious fundamentalist developments in history and the present. The Handmaid's Tale has been likened to renowned dystopian novels such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Analyzing the dystopian novel through the feminist lense, the reader can observe the portrayal of the relationships between the sexes, the roles they are expected to play, and the bounds

Margaret Sanger was not only a birth control activist, she was also an author, a nurse and a sex educator and many of her influences for being an activist come from her family. Born on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, she was the sixth of eleven children born into a poor Roman Catholic family (Sanger 14). Her mother had various miscarriages, which Sanger believed affected her mother’s health, and was a devoted Roman Catholic who believed one should conform to the rules while her father was

traditional Christian values. Television commercials promoting family values followed by endorsements from specific denominations are on the rise. As the public has become more aware of a shift in the cultural and political climate through the mass media, Margaret Atwood, in writing The Handmaid's Tale, could have been similarly affected by this growing awareness of the public consciousness. This may have led Atwood to write of a bleak future for the country where a new regime is established and one religion

In “The Page” and “Bread” and how does Margaret Atwood use everyday objects to make readers question their own innocence and experience? What is the significance of this? Margaret Atwood’s’ The Page and Bread are two short stories that are both based around everyday objects. Constantly questioning the reader, the stories do not have a set idea, leading to different interpretations. Yet innocence is one thing that is present throughout both. The development of the stories begins with something being

The Handmaid’s Tale has explored the disempowerment of individual power that is implemented by the society. Margaret Atwood demonstrates this through the main ‘protagonist’ of the story, Offred, with her minimal amount of visible power in society. Individual power can catalyse minor change but lacks the strength to impact upon large scale power regimes. While confined behind the “white wings of the Handmaids”, Offred and Ofglen “learned to whisper almost without a sound” to share information they

Throughout the third section (chapter 25-35) of the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood uses descriptive language, which express Offred's feelings about and attitudes to her environment and experiences. For example, as Offred walks into the kitchen to see that Rita is cutting radishes, they remind Offred of “Little Aztec hearts” (Atwood 259). Provided that, this description of the radishes illustrates Offred’s sinister side because Aztecs cut out the hearts of their sacrificial

In the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood wrote the novel based on the backlash of the feminist movement where women were entitled lower class than men (caste system). To illustrate, the women, in the story, were taken possession of by the republican group called Gilead. This group consisted of upper class men categorized as commanders, the eyes, the angles and the guardians. The commander was married to Serena Joy, labeled as one of the “wives”. Serena Joy was once a gospel singer, but

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 showed us a world in which people found it acceptable, even preferable, to remain ignorant about the state of their world and face the darker aspects of their own humanity. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale envisioned a theocratic government named Gilead that induced women into the servitude of military commanders for the purpose of procreation. In both of these bleak contemplations of the future, people are discouraged from and harshly punished for expressing any