Word: handmaid
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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...
...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...
...HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood. This chilling cautionary fable postulates a future U.S. ruled by Fundamentalist Christians and offers an oppressed heroine strong enough...
...Handmaid's Tale will be taken in some quarters as a feminist parable or rallying cry. What is Offred, after all, if not an embodiment of woman subjugated to the power of men? In truth, Atwood's vision is considerably more complex than that. For the Republic of Gilead has come about, in part, with the help of women. Offred's memories of childhood include the time that her mother, an ardent feminist, took her to a ceremonial burning of pornographic magazines...