Exactly! The Handmaid's Tale was set in the country least likely to implement her dystopian "vision". And worse, po-mo feminists like Atwood have been shamefully silent when women in certain Muslim societies like Saudia Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban are actually treated as breeder chattel.The Handmaid's Tale is a nasty, anti-American trifecta of bigotry: a cheap thrust at men, conservatives and religious Christians.
... merely a tale told by a feminist, and like so many other such heavy-handed ideological screeds, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
"One should doubtless keep an open mind...though open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake." -- Northrop Frye, 'The Great Code'
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Margaret Atwood's "fictional drivel"
Barbara Kay nails it! She concludes:
Having just sent our third child of to university I am sooooooooooo glad that we never ,never have to read,help,discuss or edit a high school paper on the hidden nuances of "The Handmaidens Tale".
ReplyDeleteNo you can't teach "Tom Sawyer" thats racists but Atwood ,well she's a women,a liberal , Canadian and political correct God save us.
David, don't rejoice too soon. Universities are loaded with radical post-modernist academics who are worse than Atwood. I hope your kids are headed for science, commerce or engineering rather than the humanities, so that their exposure to the drivel might be minimized.
ReplyDeleteC'mon people! Atwood's novel was a piece of 'speculative fiction'. it was no more and no less than the musing of Ayn Rand in her novels. I read it the year it was published and found it to be an interesting science fiction look at her view of a future world.
ReplyDeleteThis business of parsing every author's work is a time wasting excercise in futility. Look at the buzz stirred up by the Golden Compass. Or the fuss over the Da Vinci Code. Or better yet the rash of feverish exorcisms after Blatty's book was published and the movie came out.
Everyone who reads a book of fiction will interpret it in their own way. It's only those who have no lives that get all hot under the collar about it.
Powell, I disagree. While Atwood's novel was certainly "speculative fiction" it was more than that. It reflects her world-view and her feminist, activist politics. Barbara Kay's assessment as summarized in the quote posted here is accurate.
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