Literati,
I hope you have been spending plenty of time reading The Handmaid’s Tale this weekend. I will be covering a lot of the book in class on Monday. The more you know about it, the more you’ll get out of it. The ending of the novel (before the fictional historical notes) is dramatic and yet ambiguous. I might leave the discussion of the end of the book till Wednesday, but otherwise I will cover it all—because we have to get at least a start on Toni Morrison’s Beloved on Wednesday.
Like White Noise, one of the things The Handmaid’s Tale addresses is environmental degradation. An interesting trait of the narrative is the shifting in time from pre-Gilead days to Offred’s brutal training to be a handmaid to the more consistent time frame of Offred’s time in the Commander’s house. Pre-Gilead days are represented as both normal times and as times that are losing their familiarity. The final part of the book is set approximately 200 years in the future (if the ‘now’ is the time of handmaids and tyranny). What has and has not changed is significant.
These are just a couple of things you can keep your eyes open for as you read.
So bury yourself in the novel and come prepared with observations or questions.
Jane Archer
Department of English