Submitted by Danielle (aka GaiaGrrl)
Bio: Danielle (aka GaiaGrrl) is a High School teacher in the city of Boston. She has taught English for 7 years, during which she has encouraged her students to read as many banned books as possible, and to think independently. She prides herself on having taught over 20 books on the banned book list. She is also a mom-to-be, and looks forward to similarly corrupting the future youth of our society.
The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in the not-very-distant future in Harvard Square, Massachusetts. Atwood paints a future where infertility plagues the majority of the world. A women’s role is determined by her class, race, and her ability to produce children. As religious wars rage throughout the country, fertile women are trained in camps (set up in defunct buildings of Harvard University). These women are stripped of their identities, dressed in red, and called “Handmaiden’s”. Rich government officials are given these handmaiden’s to bear children for them, and then they are moved on to the next family. The narrator of this novel is a Handmaiden renamed Offred (because she is given to a man named Fred.) We join Offred’s tale as she joins her first household, and the history leading up to this event is told in a series of flashbacks, spurred on my memories that are activated by the new world in which she finds herself. It’s a gripping narrative that provides more questions than answers.
Last summer I picked this novel up to re-read it. I was astounded by the similarities in the future it described, and the present in which we were living. Offred’s awareness of herself as a narrator of a tale made me feel as if she were writing this as a warning to all women, and I found myself with a deeper understanding of her pain and struggles. I decided to teach it to my junior class this year, and it made them think about issues they had never really considered before. As a class we created a timeline of the fictional events leading up to the creation of Handmaids, only to discover that our actual society had already progressed more than halfway through these events. The fictional shooting in the government that led to a suspension of the constitution paralleled 9/11 and the Patriot Act. From there, the steps to Atwood’s future are few and easy to imagine. (I knew that this book had broken through to my students when a group of boys and girls came to my room at lunch to talk about it with eachother.)
The best thing about Atwood’s tale is that there are no easy answers. Though we can see the harm that religious zealots to do women, we can also see the foibles of 70’s feminists who censored our sexual freedoms. What is a community of women? Can there be freedom without equality? These questions will run through your mind, and you will find yourself wishing everyone read this book so that they asked these questions as well. I look forward to making more students do just that!
Submitted by Iffygenia
Bio: Call me Iffygenia. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having few books left on my pile, and nothing particular to interest me at work, I thought I would surf about a little and dip my toe into the deep waters of the blogs.” - Moby-Dick
After the brainwashing, we knew our purpose; we were docile, compliant, content in our sphere. No messy choosing of mates, no fumbling to learn an occupation. We alone had been plucked from the darkness, perfected, molded in a form of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning’s choosing.
We took our soma, a pacifier, a crutch in our pursuit of cheerful perfection. Our fertility was strictly regulated; we were hatched from bottles, bokanovskified, each ovum replicated with meat-cleaver precision into 96 small monuments to progress. We were decanted in perfect proportion to society’s needs: one-ninth Alphas, eight-ninths a mixture of Betas, Gammas, and Deltas conditioned to despise books and nature, and enough khaki-garbed Epsilon Semi-Morons for factory work.
One day we became aware of Outsiders and Savages. Something stirred in us. We, a few of us, came to question whether brainwashing was the only way. We demanded choices, not knowing what we would choose.
Some returned to primitive ways, seeking answers in nature. (A few even, it was rumored, investigated arcane practices of sexuality and viviparous childbirth). Some rejected nature, seeking to reform the system from within. We hoped to retrain the Hatcheries and modernize conditioning; we tried to embarrass the Director with proof of his old-fashioned ways. We rejected the old, forgetting that Civilization loves stability. We tried to convince others through persuasion, then through example, then through spectacle.
Some of our small number began to question. Had we triumphed over brainwashing, only to succumb to a subtler but still forcible conditioning? Was it Civilization that accepted this conditioning on our behalf, or were we complicit in our own homogenization? Was so-called natural Savagery the answer? Or did the solution lie in the flight from nature, the grooming of our kind to emulate the plastic intelligences of the future?
More choices brought more conflict. Predestination had been easier. Some of us found the Savagery of the new naturalism terrifying. Some demanded to be returned to the Hatcheries, reconditioned, slotted back into their familiar roles and castes. Some reclaimed forcible conditioning as a choice, even a pleasure.
The dissonances of these demands strained our determination. We knew by now that we must all choose one path, that we must conform; for more choices had not led to more happiness. We persuaded, we led by example, we created spectacles. We worked on each other as we had worked against conditioning. We returned to the doctors we had discarded; we asked the state to subsidize our soma prescriptions.
We, the larger Civilization, set limits on art, science, religion, and philosophy. We sought stability and mindlessness as a remedy for choice. We exiled our greatest intellects to islands. Some went willingly; some, threatened with isolation, chose conformity. A few of our small group gave up on Civilization and chose the isolated life of the contemplative. Some of these contemplatives became items of curiosity, like animals at the zoo. We hope some of the few thrived; we know that one despaired.
Submitted by Naomi Libicki
When our copy arrived, I found the following stamp inside the front cover: Windham Public Library: WITHDRAWN.
“What huh?” I thought. And then, “Oh yeah . . . the penis.”
In the Night Kitchen opens and closes with its protagonist in bed, wearing his pajamas. At part of the transition from this mundane scene to the surreal world where the main action of the book takes place, Mickey falls out of his clothes. He later acquires a sort of flight suit made of cake batter, but for much of the action, he is naked. And rather than using concealing props and postures, Maurice Sendak simply draws him, little-boy penis and all.
The otherworld that Mickey journeys to when he is awoken by bumps in the night is the Night Kitchen, a city with jam jars and coffee canisters for buildings. He is menaced by three fat, good-humored giants in chef’s outfits, who mix him into a cake batter and put him in the oven. However, he escapes, and builds an airplane out of bread dough to harvest milk from the Milky Way. Once this ingredient is obtained, the bakers complete their cake, and Mickey returns to bed.
You know how sometimes you go back and read or watch something you loved as a child, and spend the entire time cringing? And then there are times when you go back, and it’s just . . . perfect.
This is one of those. The city of the Night Kitchen is charming – it’s even got elevated trains made out of bread loaves. The character designs are also spot-on; Mickey is wonderfully expressive, and the jolly, be-mustachio’ed appearance of the bakers – they look a little like the Mario Brothers actually – helps tip the tone of the book from scary to surreal. There are also bits of rhyme that have stayed with you for as long as I can remember. Mickey’s milk harvesting song, for instance : “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me!” Or the chant of the bakers as they mix up the cake batter: “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!”
At this point I should really list some negatives, but I can’t think of any. Well, maybe one. Maurice Sendak is Jewish, and Mickey seems to some extent to share his creator’s cultural background: He calls his parents Mama and Papa, the bakers use kosher salt decades before Alton Brown’s Good Eats, and there’s no lard or other non-kosher ingredients to be found in the Night Kitchen. So why is Mickey uncircumcised?
Submitted by Sarah
Instead, I got Liza Winthrop, student body president and classic over-achiever. Her dreams are to save her private school from closing down, and to study architecture at MIT. However, when she meets Annie Kenyon ( while Annie was singing to the knights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), she realizes that there’s more to life than following in her parent’s footsteps. It’s a typical “Girl meets Girl, Girls fall in love, Girls get caught doin’ it” love story. In the end, Liza and Annie’s relationship is an outward expression of their struggles to establish an identity within their family frameworks, while also dealing with a growing awareness of their sexualities.
As a shy girl with few friends, the idea that every person has a soul mate, the way Liza and Annie were soul mates, was deeply moving to me. Not one other character in the novel understood them, especially after they were forcibly outed. Although I am not gay, I could empathize with their feelings of alienation, and I drew strength from the fact that each girl ultimately followed her dream, despite the forces keeping them home and keeping them apart.
Since I identified so strongly with both Liza and Annie, it’s hard for me to understand why anyone would feel this book was inappropriate for students; although it does contain some adult themes, it almost perfectly captures the teenage struggle for self-identity and self-expression. There are no explicit scenes, but I suppose some parents object to the fact that it’s generally accepting of homosexuality.
Submitted by Carrie Lofty
Authors who survey the future landscape and find distopias--Orwell, Huxley, and even Jack London in The Iron Heel--are harshly judged by readers who have the scorecard of history available to them, ready to make comparisons and award points for accuracy.
So here I go: While we do not live in a society as extreme as Gilead, it is looking more familiar all the time. If I had been asked to read this novel in high school during Clinton’s first term, it would have seemed terribly out of date and pessimistic, merely seven years after its initial printing. Predictions of a severe feminist backlash, an exaggeration of the AIDS crises, the rise of a fundamentalist Christian right--none of these strains had risen to the forefront of everyday thinking in 1993. Fast forward fourteen years and these are pressing, immediate issues. I find this a very startling example of how a novel’s relevance can be so very altered by the context in which it is read.
What I found most compelling was Offred’s continuous mental battle. She kept reminding herself that, only three years before, she wore bathing suits in public. She had a job. She had a daughter. So thorough were the architects of this new society that even a college-educated woman with myriad freedoms and pleasures to lose found herself being seduced by her new reality. After a time, everything becomes ordinary. She had to fight the lassitude of her position, the waiting, the monotony, the degradation, the moments of gripping fear that kept everyone in check, the urge for something more, something past--all of this without going numb or insane.
But she is not a hero. She is not the Huxley protagonists who make their escape, nor is she left a brain-dead proponent of Big Brother. She knows there is an Underground, and the ambiguous ending suggests she may have even benefited from its protection, but she cannot compromise her safety or the little piece of happiness she has found in her objectionable life in order to help its progress. She is, frankly, a very real assessment of a normal person, held fast by fear and apathy, yet propelled forward by hope and the sheer momentum of living. This is Atwood’s most significant achievement, even as the present influences any assessment of the accuracy of her futuristic vision.
A website that reviews romance novels from a couple of smart bitches who will always give it to you straight. No bullshit. No gushing--unless the author really deserves it.
Subscribe to the 2007 Banned Book Week Reviews posts in RSS
we took the chq to [the other bank] by hand with the relevant paperwork, the service centre paperwork was sent to Glasgow SC by TNT that night with a note saying the chq was hand-delivered, I suggest you check with…
She turned her face into the wind and walked towards the upper garden, its wildness and chaos suiting her temper at the moment.
It’s about 1/3 of the way done, I think. One of my many fanfiction WIPs.…
“I am still spending upwards of $100 on textbooks each semester and it’s getting tiring.” (Trying to write a post for my blog about electronic textbooks.)
The last instruction had barely left Terran’s mouth when he went back to staring at Antonia with a longing that was uncomfortable to watch.
I know I’m not pretty but I’m secure enough in my unattractive state to be happy with myself.
