Word: handmaid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exactly flattering, it is not entirely unfair. Most of her previous two dozen volumes of poems and fiction were freighted with allegorical misery: The Edible Woman feels herself cannibalized by family and friends; the paleontologist of Life Before Man views the people around her as potential fossils; in The Handmaid's Tale, a future America goes to hell when it is taken over by religious fundamentalists. But in Cat's Eye, Atwood jettisons her old techniques in favor of recognizable landscapes and more plausible griefs...
Best known for The Handmaid's Tale--her best-selling "visionary" novel in the style of 1984 and Brave New World--Atwood always writes about women struggling against or attempting to survive the oppression of men. The titles of her novels, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, bear this...
ATWOOD'S WRITING was much vaunted 15 years ago when her novel Surfacing was hailed as one of the best books of the '70s. One of the deficiencies of The Handmaid's Tale--and maybe the Atwood genre in general--is that its prediction of a society where a woman's best function is to reproduce is quite unbelievable...
Atwood derives the notion of the "handmaid" from the passage in Genesis where Rachel--in order to compensate for her sterility--gives Jacob her handmaid to bear him children. Atwood's notions need updating. Biblical times have passed and so have the outraged...
...earlier novels. The protagonist of An Edible Woman, for example, feels so cannibalized by the people in her life that she serves her fiance a bride made of sponge cake and icing, then flees from the altar. Gone too is Atwood's allegorizing. In last year's The Handmaid's Tale she offered a vision of America transformed into a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy...