Angela Carter

Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber

'delicious ecstasy of excitement'

'her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates'

'Shot a man eating tiger with her own hand'

'a legacy of tears that never quite dried'

'a starburst of lights splatter the drawn blinds'

'syncopated roar of the train'

'he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet'

'experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach'

'sometimes he seemed to me like a lily'

'Her face is common property'

'deathly passion'

'a choker of rubies (..) like an extraordinarily precious slit throat'

'the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood'

'I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away'

'into marriage, into exile'

'part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball'

'this ring, the bloody bandage of rubies'

'like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread'

'hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival'

'I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean'

bare November trees, chauffeur by sleek black motor... her: b+w fur coat

'a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting'

'contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned'

'his face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over'

'he stripped me (...) as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke'

'the lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you'

spooning, lace, clutching breast, necklance, holding tummy

'the rags on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the hearts dearest blood'

'the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks'

'he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth'

'In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall'

'I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it'

'he had cognac in the library with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather arm chair beside the flickering log fire'

'little Poiret shift of white muslin, he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open'

'not let me take off my ruby choker (...) nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us'

'do not hand the bloody sheets out of the window (..) such a flag'

'my innocence that captivated him'

'opal on my finger spurted green flame'

'heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us'

'Every man must have one secret'

'promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you'

'I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me'

'Who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl who's fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios'

'The tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms'

'I understood at once that one of my principle functions as catelaine was to provide work for the staff'

'hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me'

'a tank of goldfish who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was'

'I grew calmer under the cold eye of her dissapproval'

'I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one'

'I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him'

'The wall of this stark torture chamber were the naked rocks; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright'

'Stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity'

Catafalque - 

• naked opera singer under thin sheet of linen, imprint of blue stranglers hands, 'the dead lips smiled'
• 'skull hung by a system of unseen chords', crowned with a 'wreath of white roses' and a veil of lace
• opened lid of coffin, dropped keys into blood, pierced by 100 spikes

'my first thought when i saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was how to escape it'

'I ran to the telephone, and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives'

'Time was his servant, too , it would trap me, here, in a night that would cast until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning'

'If my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him?'

'fear gave me strength'

'Any bride brought tho this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her'

'The twin head-lamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist'

'The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret'

'The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room , so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore'

'I held my life in my hands'

'The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little'

'That tell-tale stain had resolved itself to make the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card'

'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for the martyrdom'

'The weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look , a gloomy day on which to die'

'for do not fear that in death you shall be divided'

'My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone'

'My husband stood stock. Still as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head. 

She raised my fathers gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husbands head'

This story fully freaked me out. It was soooo horrible reading and left my brain in a whirl afterwards. I really don't think I could study this further in depth.

Themes:

• colours (darkness, white, red, opal/turqouise)
• fate, destiny, choice, consequences
• fragility, corruption, youth
• nature (sea)
• mystical/magic (mermaids, playing music)
• secrets, terror

Author:

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Quotes

Handmaid’s Tale

‘we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk’

‘we learned to whisper almost without sound’

‘they’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to’

‘like other things now, thought must be rationed’

‘time here is measured by bells’

‘in her usual Martha’s dress’

‘dull green, like a surgeons’ gown of the time before’

‘long and concealing’

‘bib apron over it’ (without white wings and the veil’)

‘sleeves rolled to the elbow, showing her brown arms’

making bread

‘gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor-key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs’

blonde hair and blue eyes

‘her eyebrows were plucked into thin arched lines, which gave her a permanent look of surprise’

“Blessed be the fruit”

“May the Lord be open”

‘The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers’

‘They touched with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little’

‘it’s like thumping your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach’

‘In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from’

‘We were a society dying (…) of too much choice’

‘Now that she’s the carrier of life, she is closer to death’

‘Modesty is invisibility’

‘Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipping sideways onto their shoulders’

‘It makes the men look like dolls on which faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare’

(white coats- doctors)

(hooks in brickwork)

‘This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all’

(Kindergarten painted mouths)

‘It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive’

‘Under the plaster eye in the ceiling’

“Under His Eye”

(EYE reoccurring theme-watched)

‘If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending’

‘tulips among the border are redder than ever (tulips-motif)

‘You must realize that they are defeated women. They have been unable…’

‘Though at the time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit’

‘these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head’

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”

‘There’s no point trying to work, Moira won’t allow it, she’s like a cat that crawls onto the page when you’re trying to read’

‘Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it’

‘We were people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print’

‘At neck level there’s another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so that the doctor will never see my face’

‘There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law’

‘Cora has run the bath. It steams like a bowl of soup’

‘I wish to be totally clean, germless without bacteria, like the surface of the moon’

‘You must be a worthy vessel’

‘What I must present is a made thing, not something born’

‘The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to supress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church’

p104 description of ceremony

‘he is like a boot, hard on the outside, giving hope to a pulp of tender foot’

‘reading glasses – gold rims. Now he looks like a shoemaker in an old fairytale book’

‘They looked like drowned feet, swollen and boneless, except for the colour. They looked like lungs’

‘This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is in control of the process and thus of the product’

‘He is pre-occupied, like a man humming to himself in the shower without knowing he is humming’

p97 description of the commander

‘for our purposes your feet and hands are not essential – they used to steal cables, frayed at the ends’

‘Arousal and orgasm are no longer thought necessary; they could be a symptom of frivolity merely, like jazz garters or beauty spots: superfluous distractions’

‘seems odd that women once spent such time (…) worrying about them’

‘If he were better looking would I enjoy this more?’

‘kissing is forbidden between us. This makes it bearable. One detatches oneself.’

‘as if the touch of my flesh sickens and contaminates her’

‘the juice of the Commander runs down my legs’

‘we are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important’

‘Buttered, I lay on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast’

‘figure in night gown, down hall, glowing pink’

‘I freeze: white was a mistake. I’m snow in moonlight, even in the dark’

‘I feel like the word “shatter”’

‘Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money’

‘All of us here will lick you into shape’

‘Once we had to watch a woman being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out’

‘A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women’

‘Pain makes you, but too deep to see’

‘She glows like a moon in cloud’

‘She will be allowed to nurse the baby, for a few months, they believe in mothers milk’

‘She will never be declared Unwoman’

‘Janine was like a puppy that’s been kicked too often, by too many people, at random’

‘It takes a while to get wrinkles out, of anything new’

‘(Moira) She was lava beneath the crust of daily life’

‘We are two-legged wombs. Sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices’

‘It’s an oasis of the forbidden’

‘What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of the shapes on a flat surface’

‘Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere’

‘Men are sex machines’

‘Laughter boiling like lava in my throat’

Commander and her playing scrabble

‘He should continue to act, in public, as if I were a large vase or a window: part of the background, inanimate or transparent’

‘This would have once been sundress and sandals weather’

‘A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it is stays inside the maze’

‘Death is a beautiful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare’

‘There’s a commotion, a flurry among the shoals of cars’

‘It was after the catastrophe when they shot the President, and machine gunned the Congress’

‘We are not eachothers anymore. Instead, I am his.’

Motifs:

This represents the distopian society in the Handmaids Tale. The circle symbolises how trapped the people in the society are and how it is a very controlled and religious society. The black of the page shows the unknown but also the control and political repression. I chose to solid colour paper to show hold solid and restricted it is and that there are different layers. 

This is portraying that everything in the distopian society is watched, controlled, restricted. I wanted this be sewn because it shows that there is no escape and goes through the paper. I drew the eye in continuous line so that it shows how trapped the people live. The motifs within the eye are showing their everyday life, the consequences, horrors and daily routines.
Characters:

I wanted to portray the characters in an interesting way, that sums up more than just their appearances. In this the bottom layer portrays the wild personality that she used to have and the fashion that used to be allowed. It is black and white like a distant memory other than her having life and soul. 

The top layer is portraying the appearances that the characters should and are required to uphold. It is not one of choice, and there is still the past and their identity shining through. The layers are bound by the stitching which penetrates through the paper (like Atwood appreciated the relationship between the landscape and characters)

This is an image of a Martha. She is blending into the paper because she is supposed to be invisible, not important and a servant. I thought this was a different way of showing, through texture and indents, of how there is a mask but inside there is a human being, an individual.

Locations:

This is an illustration of Toronto. It was a huge step for Atwood when she moved to the big city and I wanted to show how daunting that is. She also wrote about this in Cats Eye, from the child's perspective. 

This is portraying the theme of isolation. This is prevalent in her books and her childhood.

This is a 2 point perspective drawing. It shows that to every story there is 2 sides? 2 perspectives? the author is separate/detached? 

Author: BBC One Summer 2017. Imagine... Margaret Atwood: You Have Been Warned! 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b093tw95/imagine-summer-2017-2-margaret-atwood-you-have-been-warned

'When you're in the middle of a story. It isn't a story at all. But only a confusion. A dark roaring. A blindness. A wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood' MA

Doesnt reveal a lot of things about herself to the public.
Frightens people.

Her writing life spans more than 7 decades. Deep impact crossing continents and generations.

Handmaids tale remains a terrifying warning against the misuse of power. 

Grew up in Coming of Age post war Canada. Born in Canada 1939. Country wasn't known for literature then. What could there be to say about a vast expanse of nothingness?

'The Canada that I grew up in thought of itself as a cultural back water'
'If you wanted to be serious about writing it was taken for granted that you had to leave the country' MA

Her father studied insects so they spent most of the summer in the woods
Older brother Harold. 
Called Peggy Nature.
'You don't wear frilly skirts in the woods' MA

As well as being well drilled in woodland survival, the Atwood children were schooled at home.
Torronto library holds hundreds of their early works...eg) Annie the Ant

Moved to the city of Torronto in 1945. Began to have more to do with cities and other children. Leaside high school. School routine came as something of a shock. Military phases of schools; marching in, sitting in rows, separated doors. Elements of this fed into her novel 'Cats Eye' 'So I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But Im not used to girls or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them. I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen clamdess blunder'.
About a girl who has come from a new environment- the country and goes to school and can read no codes of girlhood. Not really been put on the page how wicked little girls can be and how they can destroy each other. A brutal book in lots of ways.

'People make the naiive connection between what they read in the books and who they think you are. I often feel cheated' MA

Hand-guide for future careers in the 40s...period of baby boom, women back in the homes. Options for women 1)Nurse 2)Public School Teacher 3)Airline Stewardess 4)Secretary 5)Home Economist. Period of going steady. She was 15 when Elvis came out. Abortions illegal and pregnant girls dissapeared.
Decided after she wrote a poem walking past a football game. 
If she ended up as a female journalist she would end up writing the habituates and that it.
So she went to university...age 17, 1957.
Boys headed for jobs, girls as their wives. There were "the others' who wore black turtle necks often brilliant and considered pretentious... were referred to as the "artsy fartsies". First terrified her then she terrified others.
Used initials instead of her name to hide being a female.

Late 1960s published her first novel 'The Edible Woman'. About a bright woman pressured into an ill engagement. gradually became unable to eat. Tackled issues but with a light and comic touch. She hasn't had that experience but wrote about it. The Canadian setting of Torronto was interesting. 
Canadian flag 1965. What is the Canadian self identity? 'Expo 1967'. Started writing the early  'Idiots Guide'-The VD of Canadian Literature 'Survival'.
'She embodies that relationship between a person and the landscape...Canadian concern...connection very crucial to her thinking and writing.' Lenna Goodings
'Every country or culture has a single informing and unifying symbol at its core. The central symbol for Candida is undoubtably survival. Our stories are likely to be tales from awful experience. The North, the snow storm, the sinking ship that killed everyone else. The surviver has not triumph or victory but the fact of his survival. he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before except gratitude for having escaped with his life' MA
30,000 copies 1981

1981 also published 'Surfacing' which has been made into a film. Disocvery set against the landscape she knows so well. Women in a landscape...lakes and woods. Pre-feminism. "A country needs its own voice' MA

Expectation of coming of age in the 1960s was courtship, love and marriage. 2 broken engagements and one broken marriage before she met writer Graham Gibson, her life long partner. He is totally in awe with her; intensity, drive and ambition but he is there for her at every turn.
1973 they moved to a farm and 3 years later had a daughter Jess. Not a doubting Mum, treated her as a little adult.
'You couldn't be a wife, a mother and also an artist because each one of these things required total dedication' MA

She is often described as a feminist writer but she maintains that her popularity amongst the feminist community was unsought. Began as an A-Political writer. Women suffer in her novels because most women she talks to suffer. Describing the world around her.

1984 Went to Berlin for several months (city divided) and began the book that made her an international name. 
Speculative fiction where women have been reduced soley to their reproductive function.
USSR and Nazi Germany came in as Utopian plans... But if there are no plans to make things better they get worse... Caught between... Does better involve a big whole with dead people in it which has been the case?
'Now the box has been open with all of the butterflies flying out, how do you cram them all back in , by what method?' MA
Handmaids Tale: Their method is to force women to reproduce for the good of the state.
Red came from.
1) frightened as a child by the old dutch cleanser packet that you cleaned sinks with.
2) Canada during war, prisoner of war camps their outfits were red... could see people running away across the snow
3) christian colour iconography- european painting. virgin Mary wears blue (purity), Mary Magdeline wears red (corruption, sexualised colour)
Resonates with people attempting to control women's lives throughout history. The Salem Witch Trials (http://www.history.com/topics/salem-witch-trials/videos/salem-witch-trials) -Nazi Germany where they tried to breed an Aryan Race-Romania where birth control and abortions were banned.
Rules: Nothing into it that hadn't already been done, a precedent for every single thing. Dystopian but had happened and could happen
Put them all into Cambridge Massachusetts which was supposedly the home of liberal democracy.
3 decades after published. Once again struck a nerve. Women's marches after inauguration of Trump they were carrying slogans and mantras from the Handmaids tale.

Fascination with science fiction goes back to childhood 'I was an inventor of other worlds' MA
Early thoughts have ways of coming back in other forms..
5 Novels which could be described as science fiction but firmly routed on planet earth...nearish future with technology.
Sort of a warning...if you don't take care of the world this could happen. The landscape can be dangerous. Started of writing that the natural world could kill us but she is now very much saying that we could kill the natural environment. 
'Backdrop Address Cowboy' 
'I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso. I am also what surrounds you. My brain scattered with your tin cans, bones, empty shells-the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through' MA

Love of birds, grew up with it. 
Cat-bird problem.
The collaboration for her Graphic Novel.
Angel Catbird was inspired by her drawings of a flying cat as a child. She lived in the woods and wasn't allowed a cat but wanted on.
Her collaboration was with Graphic Artist Johnnie Christmas who said she was a reasonable lady and let the best idea win.


Double life led by all comic book super heros is something the same with Margaret. Peggy. She was endowed at birth with a double identity due to the romanticism of her father naming after her mother. Margaret Atwood to everyone... inner circle she is Peggy. Clever with that, has to protect herself, to retreat to.

When you write a book you know where the weak points are. Cant tell what response it will get. People will have different responses.
1st Booker Prize of the 20th century won. 4th go 'The Blind Assassin' 'Why is it that we so badly want to memorialise ourselves, even when we are still alive?' 

She has been a muse for her friend for years- Charles Pachter 
he describes 'eyes to be a mirror for the soul'. Says she has gorgeous eyes. 'Sometimes see the blue, sometimes you cant'

In her Owl and Pussycat poetry 'I like bifocals. They make you look even more like an owl than you are'

 A literary pioneer that blazed a trail that others would follow.

'Our world is large in extent but small in population which accounts for our fear of empty spaces and also our need for them. Much of it is covered in water which accounts for our interest in reflections, sudden vanishings, the dissolution of one thing into another. Much of it however is rock which accounts for our belief in fate.' MA

Cat's Eye

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimension of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also

spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it

You dont look back along time but down through it, like water

We think we are friends

There is never only one, of anyone

the grotesqueries of the body were always of interest to her

It evening, one of those grey watercolour washes, like liquid dust, the city comes up with in fall

Im supposed to be a person of substance

unreality of the landscape there encourages me: greeting-card mountains

p15 landscape descrption

Respectable people do not become painters: only overblown, pretentious, theatrical people. The word artist embarrasses me

I wont spill a drop

Alias Grace

'Its knowledge to me you care doctor, forbidden knowledge. Knowledge with alure to it. Knowledge gained through a decent into the pit'

'You want to open up my body and peer inside'

'In your head you want to hold my beating female heart'

'men such as yourself do not have to clean up the messes you make (..) in that way you are like children'

'It made a pain in my heart, when you cant tell if you're happy or sad'

'I reflected that the very birds were strangers to me for I did not even know their names'

bonnet-cant see whilst wearing-refining-blinkers Events that inspired her dystopian writing
http://www.stylist.co.uk/books/handmaids-tale-channel-4-tv-show-spoilers-books-real-life-true-events-margaret-atwood-elisabeth-moss

1. In Australia as recently as the seventies, indigenous children were lawfully stolen from their homes and placed in religious institutions or fostered out to white families. From the end of World War II up until the late seventies, similar programs were carried out in the USA and Canada: this systematic stealing of Native American children is referred to as the Adoption era and residential school system, depending upon which country’s dark past you’re speaking about.
2. And, of course, let’s not forget the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, which saw young girls punished for their “immorality” by being forced into slave-like conditions. The babies they bore were taken away from them and placed with adoptive families all over the world – with 2,000 alone being shipped across to the USA.
3. “the generals in Argentina were dumping people out of airplanes. But if it was a pregnant woman, they would wait until she had the baby and then they gave the baby to somebody in their command system. And then they dumped the woman out of the airplane.
4. Hitler stole his children, blonde ones, hoping that he could turn them into blonde Germans. 
5. Tragically, the concept of female genital mutilation is not confined to the pages of Atwood’s book: 140 million women and young girls all over the world are believed to have undergone the procedure, which sees their outer labia, inner labia, and clitoris removed, often without anaesthesia or pain relief.
6. And it is estimated that some 23,000 girls living in the UK are at risk of FGM, too, despite the fact that the act was criminalised in the UK in 1985.
7. the women of Gilead are forced to wear outfits which identify their roles and rights (or lack thereof) in society. The Marthas (household domestics) don identical green ensembles, the wives of the Commanders always wear blue. Handmaids, meanwhile, wear heavy red dresses and white wings on the sides of their heads. It is a staunch reminder of the horrors of Nazi Germany, in which the Jews would have to wear a yellow band around their arm, which sported a star of David. This was used to separate the Jewish from those who were not Jewish. It also served as a reminder to the Jews that they had no rights under German law.
8. The women of The Handmaid’s Tale are not allowed to own property, run businesses, or hold jobs. It is a law which is implemented without warning: soldiers march into offices all over the country, the women are ordered to leave, and their bank accounts are frozen. It quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t just an act of discrimination: it’s a form of control, and it renders the women vulnerable to the new regime.Again, this is very similar to how the Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. On the night of 9 November 1938 (Kristalnacht), over 250 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted, and dozens of Jewish people were killed – all while police and fire brigades stood by.
9. There are so many parallels that can be drawn between The Handmaid’s Tale and the Holocaust. Large groups of people are sent to work in concentration camps where they will almost certainly die, for example, and neighbours are encouraged to inform upon their friends. Just as the Jews were reduced to numbers, handmaids lose their names and are known only as the property of their Commanders. Literacy is forbidden, property rights are terminated, and soldiers uphold totalitarian laws. And, of course, the Commanders of the Faithful order the executions of LGBTQ people, intellectuals, and others deemed ‘subversive’. The Handmaid’s Tale also sees women rounded up and subjected to invasive tests and scans to determine whether or not they are fertile – much as the Jews were sorted into two groups: those who could work and those who could not.
10. Atwood has made no secret of the fact that the events of The Handmaid’s Tale are, in part, inspired by the 17th century Salem witch trials, in which women were systematically demonised, informed on, and violently punished for being ‘different’ to puritanical norms.
11. The red robes of the handmaids take inspiration from a number of places, including the 17th century garb of puritanical women and the habits of Catholic nuns. They also call to mind the traditional Islamic dress, which may be adopted by women as a matter of choice in some free societies. More pertinent, however, is the fact that this religious clothing can be forced upon women by authorities in other, more conservative, communities.
12. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we quickly learn that fertility rates have plummeted – and, in an act of desperation, the government has rendered abortion and birth control illegal. Every fertile woman has a duty to bear children, and those who don’t… well, they’re either sent to work (and die) in the Colonies, or they’re hanged as an example to all other handmaids. The idea of a birth control ban may be frightening, but it is not a new one: in 1966, President Ceausescu, in a desperate attempt to increase the population of Romania, banned birth control and abortion, and ordered Romanian women of child-bearing age to have five children each.
13. While the original novel was penned as a response to Ronald Reagan, one can’t help but think of the Women’s March in January 2017, millions of women all around the world rose up together to defend women’s rights and the sisterhood. Armed with signs protesting President Trump, mocking both Trump’s past treatment of women and controversial statements he made on the campaign trail, it was a spectacular show of force on the first full day of his presidency: the Washington rally alone attracted over 500,000 people according to city officials, making it easily one of the biggest demonstrations in the city's history.  

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