. “You can’t be thrown out, you’re not making a disturbance, and you’re not saying anything, but you’re very visible.” She added, “Everybody knows what you mean.
”recently, I was struck by how odd it is for Atwood’s creation to become a symbol of women’s protest—Offred, or June as the television adaptation named her, of the novel is remarkably passive, less interested in joining the Mayday resistance than in clinging to whatever small pleasures she can grab onto in her meager, narrowed existence, only escaping Gilead’s clutches at the end through the intervention of Nick, the driver of the family she serves and her lover.
Pre-Gilead, Aunt Lydia was a judge, and, to escape certain death, she agrees to become a collaborator with the Sons of Jacob and the nascent Gilead regime. We learn how she carved out a separate space ruled by women in the early months and years, and how she accumulated her own form of power in that space, through the gathering of secrets and a ruthless deployment of the power afforded her. And we learn of her regrets. “If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view.
to her husband’s loudest detractors, in need of the intervention from the so-called resistance, was short-lived.stemmed in large part from a desire to explore how totalitarian regimes end, as well as her sense, as sheto an audience in London, that, “instead of moving away from Gilead, we started moving towards it, especially in the United States.” She began writing the novel around the time of Trump’s election. “Totalitarian systems don’t last, it is my fervent belief,” she.
Far from a prophetic warning of a possible, plausible future, I find myself more inclined to consider Atwood’s novels of Gilead as the ultimate in wish-fulfillment—that totalitarian regimes can crumble so easily; that collaborators are secretly part of the resistance, chafing under the yoke.
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