Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

I first read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale about ten years ago and recently reread it, followed by the long-awaited sequel The Testaments. Atwood's dystopian classic, first published in 1985, depicts the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian and patriarchal state created after the United States falls sometime in the twenty-first century. It is told through the eyes of Offred, a handmaid who is forced to bear children for Commander Waterford and his wife Serena Joy.

Because of the recent television series, which is a very faithful adaptation of the novel, 'The Handmaid's Tale' was fresher in my mind as a reread. I admire Atwood's ability to create detailed worlds in relatively sparse prose. Despite the fact that there isn't much description of Offred's surroundings or much explanation about the creation of Gilead at first, Atwood paints a vibrant and shocking portrait of this dystopian world, gradually building towards a dramatic conclusion.

XEM THÊM : 

Kinh nghiệm chơi Tài xỉu online ✔️ Từ các bậc cao thủ

The Booker Prize was shared in 2019 by 'The Testaments' and 'Girl, Woman, Other' by Bernardine Evaristo. While the later seasons of the TV adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' continue Offred's story, the book sequel wisely avoids comparisons with the TV adaptation by jumping ahead 15 years and introducing several new characters. Aunt Lydia, who trains women to be handmaids, is the only significant character who returns in 'The Testaments.'

She is one of three narrators along with Agnes, a young woman who lives in Gilead, and Daisy, who now lives in Canada and learns that she was born in Gilead. Aunt Lydia’s perspective is the most interesting of the three, as it adds so much more complexity to what we learned about her in the first book. Like the later seasons of the TV series, the horrors faced by the women no longer has the same shock factor, but ‘The Testaments’ broadens our understanding of Gilead and is just as pithy and pacy as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. The most effective dystopian fiction closely resembles real events, and the terrifying scenarios in both books have all been seen before in modern history.

Atwood's research for 'The Handmaid's Tale' included Ceauşescu's ban on contraception in Romania, while 'The Testaments' appears to have been inspired in part by the plight of refugees as well as the #MeToo movement. Both books, like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, end with a metafictional transcript from an academic seminar of Gileadean studies near the end of the twenty-first century. The section in 'The Testaments' is especially significant because it sows a few seeds of doubt about some of the book's revelations, reminding the reader that the new characters' possible connections with Offred are never definitively confirmed, and that certain "facts" may not be all they appear to be.











READ ARTICLES:







 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shirley Barrett's The Bus on Thursday

Image
‘The Bus on Thursday’ by Shirley Barrett will appeal to those with a certain sense of humour, most likely a dark one. It opens with Eleanor Mellett discovering that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of 31. After being dumped by her boyfriend, she gets a new job teaching at a tiny school in Talbingo in a particularly remote area of rural Australia .  Miss Barker, the previous teacher, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the outlier residents are puzzled by her sudden disappearance. Eleanor tells her story in a talkative tone over a series of short blog posts, being far more candid about the realities of cancer diagnosis and treatment, as well as the impact it has had on her mental health, than many of the most "honest" cancer blogs. After recovering from a serious illness, she struggles to find her place in the world, and it's unsurprising that arriving as an outsider in an isolated community doesn't help. She b
Read more

Sebastian Barry's Days Without End

Image
Sebastian Barry's 'Days Without End' tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a young Irishman who emigrated to Canada and later the United States in the mid-nineteenth century after his family died in the Great Famine. When they are teenagers, he befriends and falls in love with John Cole, and they work at a parlor where they dress as women and dance for miners. They later enlist in the US army and fight in two wars before adopting an abandoned Indian Sioux girl named Winona. Sebastian Barry is a new author to me, and I didn't realize until after I finished 'Days Without End' that his previous novels, two of which have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, also feature other McNulty family members from different generations. Despite the fact that the books are interconnected rather than a series, 'Days Without End' reads well as a separate novel. It is a lyrical western, as opposed to the more typically harsh works of the genre. The landscape is beautifull
Read more

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Image
I thought it was high time I read more of Margaret Atwood's work after reading and enjoying 'The Handmaid's Tale,' 'The Blind Assassin,' and 'Cat's Eye' before starting this blog. 'Oryx and Crake' is the first novel in Margaret Atwood's critically acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy, and it tells the story of Snowman, also known as Jimmy, who is thought to be the only human survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, along with genetically modified creatures known as Crakers. As Snowman returns to the site of the destruction that nearly wiped out the human population, we learn about how the world came to be nearly destroyed and what happened to his friend Crake and the mysterious Oryx through flashbacks. 'Oryx and Crake,' according to Atwood, is a work of fiction rather than science fiction: "Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake... contains no intergalactic space travel, teleportation, or Martians." It, like The Handmaid's
Read more