Word: handmaid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brief, defining moment in the middle of the summer, the politics of the nation seemed to have become the politics of gender. On the Republican side, there was a platform borrowed from The Handmaid's Tale and Marilyn Quayle to represent the vanishing female option of career wife. Quayle made it clear just how much was at stake when she dragged in the draft and the sexual | revolution. This was all-out culture war, baby boom-style: feminism vs. antifeminism, repression vs. permission, mixing things up vs. shoring up the walls. Armageddon with a female cast...
...served to highlight the most interesting aspect of the growing popular veneration: the theological tug-of-war taking place over Mary's image. Feminists, liberals and activists have stepped forward with new interpretations of the Virgin's life and works that challenge the notion of her as a passive handmaid of God's will and exemplar of some contested traditional family values. "Mary wants to get off the pedestal," says Kathy Denison, a former nun and current drug-and-alcohol counselor in San Francisco. "She wants to be a vital human being...
...HANDMAID'S TALE. Set in a political and sexual dictatorship of the near future, this anti-fundamentalist fable carries a heady pedigree: screenplay by Harold Pinter from the Margaret Atwood novel. But a fine cast is zombified under Volker Schlondorff's drab direction...
...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...
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...