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The Handmaid’s Tale is clearly identifiable as dystopian fiction, with obvious links to other dystopian texts such as 1984 and Brave New World. It is perhaps worth comparing it to these and to more recent publications, such as The Hunger Games, in terms of political and social protest writing.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a futuristic world where an ultra-conservative Christian movement has seized control in what is now the USA and has imposed on the population a totalitarian regime based on its version of some aspects of the Old Testament. The use and abuse of religious texts for political ends is a key element of the genre.

Central to the regime is the adoption of the Old Testament’s representation of women, finding in it justification for the legitimising of handmaids in those marriages where women are unable to conceive.

Atwood sets her story in a world, so much like our own, where mismanagement of the planet, industrialisation, the over use of chemicals and birth control in Caucasian societies has affected the ability of many human beings to procreate.

The desperation of those with power to reproduce (thereby increasing their power and status) leads them to exploit ordinary women as national resources, to reduce them to no more than ‘walking wombs’ as a way to consolidate their power.

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'Freedom, like everything else, is relative'
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 at the height of third wave feminism (with it starting in the 1960s and 1970s). The 1980s was a prolific time for social and political movements and awareness.
- Gay rights movement started in the 60s and 70s however some historians posit that a new era of the gay rights movement began in the 1980s with the emergence of AIDS, which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many. Significant to the text as Moria was gay, it was one of the causes for the decrease in birth rates and it goes against traditional religious values

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'Shewing the two contrary states of the Human Soul'
Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793.
William Blake was an author and painter, depending on which copy of Songs of innocence and of experience you have his poems will be accompanied by a painting with the poem in the centre. To the side is one displaying London.
Blake was suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. He wrote his poems about the hypocrisy of religion, more specifically the institution of the church.
Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution.
He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalised religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he was married himself).
Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. The boi was a maverick.

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Issues of power and ethnicity

The central event of the novel is the rape of Hassan, an atrocity that results from his loyalty to his Pashtun friend Amir (Assef calls Hassan a 'loyal dog').

As a child, Amir knows he is complicit in the obscene bullying of Hassan, his friend, but at first refuses to acknowledge his guilt, instead compounding Hassan's misery by heaping on him further cruelty.

As he moves into adulthood, carrying the burden of his sins, Amir realises he can only gain redemption by recognising
his abuse of power, atoning for his wrongdoing and by rescuing and loving Hassan's son Sohrab as a person in his
own right, distinct from his ethnicity.

Amir was able to escape Afghanistan due to his ethnicity where as Hassan couldn't afford to (being a Hazara) mean automatically having a lower status with no chance of escaping this status. Fate is determined by ethnicity

Gender politics

Soraya's discussion of double standards highlights the gender inequalities within Afghan society. While men who father children out of wedlock are 'just having fun', after her affair Soraya is viewed as damaged goods.

This negative reaction to female sexuality is seen more overtly in the depiction of Hassan's mother Sanaubar who had tempted 'countless men into sin' and is seemingly punished for her beauty when 'someone had taken a knife to her face' leaving her looking 'grotesque'.

Similarly, Soraya's mother is silenced by her marriage to General Taheri. Khala Jamila, Amir reports, had been famous in Kabul for her singing voice but 'that she never sing again in public had been one of the General's conditions when they married'.

Power of nations

Afghanistan is seen to be at the mercy of both the Soviets and the Americans at key points in Amir's story. Its people are abused and dispossessed.

The Soviet invasion is represented on a domestic level through the attempted rape of a young Afghan woman by a Russian soldier, as a 'price' for letting the lorry Amir is travelling in pass. Amir's and

Baba's hurried leaving of Afghanistan for America, to secure their safety and ideals, shows how the larger political world impacts on the personal and domestic.

Power of organised religion

At the opening of the novel, Baba derides religious power stating 'God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into' the hands of the mullahs. This is foreboding. Later there is evidence that religious power is corrupt when the cleric present at the Ghazi stadium execution, who justifies the woman's death, claims 'God says that every sinner must
be punished'.

Furthermore Assef's claim that God wants him to 'live for a reason' can be seen as signifying the arrogance of those with power who think that their actions are sanctioned by a God who is on their side.

The novel shows the horrors of religious extremism through the attitudes and behaviour of the Taliban. Although Hosseini acknowledges that the Taliban brought an end to the fighting of the tribes (who had made Kabul a 'proverbial hell on earth' after the Soviet withdrawal), he also shows that they were responsible for massacring Shiites and enacting fundamentalist supremacist laws – banning dance, music and kite flying and restricting women's rights.

They replaced the secular laws of Afghanistan with Islamic Shari'ah law (illustrated in the novel by the punishment of two adulterers) with the intention of keeping the people as far away as possible from the enlightened lifestyle that the west claims to hold.Ki

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Poems we've covered

Songs of Innocence
Introduction

The Shepherd

The Echoing Green

The Lamb

The Little Black Boy

The Blossom

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Boy Lost

The Little Boy Found

The Divine Image

Holy Thursday

Night

Spring

Nurse's song

Infant Joy

On Another's Sorrow

Songs of Experience
Introduction

The Clod & The Pebble

The Chimney Sweeper

Nurses Song

The Sick Rose

The Fly

The Tyger

The Garden of Love

The Little Vagabond

London

Infant Sorrow

The Human Abstract

A Poison Tree

The School Boy

A Divine Image

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https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/symbols/
Prayvaganza
Ofglen and Offred attend a “Prayvaganza” with the other women of their district, held in what used to be a university building. The Wives sit in one section with their daughters, the Marthas and Econowives sit in another, and the Handmaids kneel in a section cordoned off by ropes.
Women’s Prayvaganzas are weddings for the Wives’ daughters, mass ceremonies in which girls as young as fourteen get married.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The center of Gilead’s power, where Offred lives, is never explicitly identified, but a number of clues mark it as the town of Cambridge. Cambridge, its neighboring city of Boston, and Massachusetts as a whole were centers for America’s first religious and intolerant society—the Puritan New England of the seventeenth century.
Atwood reminds us of this history with the ancient Puritan church that Offred and Ofglen visit early in the novel, which Gilead has turned into a museum.
The choice of Cambridge as a setting symbolizes the direct link between the Puritans and their spiritual heirs in Gilead. Both groups dealt harshly with religious, sexual, or political deviation.
Harvard University
Gilead has transformed Harvard’s buildings into a detention center run by the Eyes, Gilead’s secret police. Bodies of executed dissidents hang from the Wall that runs around the college, and Salvagings (mass executions) take place in Harvard Yard, on the steps of the library. Harvard becomes a symbol of the inverted world that Gilead has created: a place that was founded to pursue knowledge and truth becomes a seat of oppression, torture, and the denial of every principle for which a university is supposed to stand.

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'In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was a Sunni and he was a Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.'

The political context of Hosseini's story of two brothers is of fundamental importance to the events which unfold and
those events which have happened in the backstory. Hosseini incorporates into his narrative the late 20th century and early 21st century politics of both Afghanistan and the western world.

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THE HANDMAIDS TALE - SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY AND ALLEGORY

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THE HANDMAIDS TALE - SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY AND ALLEGORY

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Eggs
The idea of eggs comes up frequently in the book. With each mention we're reminded that they're part of a human woman's reproductive cycle—even though usually what the narrator is doing is eating them. She usually has them for breakfast, eating eggs so she can make her own healthy eggs.
The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want?
Mirrors
In our culture (and many others) mirrors are associated with vanity. Some religions forbid owning mirrors in a house as it promotes the idea of vanity. With Gilead mirrors are ban, handmaids aren't allowed to look at themselves. This could be to restrict  the promotion of vanity but also for more practical reasons, they can't break the mirror to use as a weapon in any form. To support the point about vanity, mirrors aren't allowed for the Handmaids but they are allowed at Jezebels "Here they haven't removed the mirror...you need to know, here, what you look like". This commander telling her to look in the mirror could be him trying to indulge her in vanity which is associated with promiscuity.
This all relates to the madonna whore complex developed by Freud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna%E2%80%93whore_complex read about it here (really helps with the portrayal of women in handmaids tale knowing how this fits our society as well)

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Gaining general context
https://thetragicpolitical.com/2019/03/30/history-literary-movements-ideas-and-culture/
https://youtu.be/VcnSsEVsrf0 - British history in general
https://youtu.be/alJaltUmrGo - Imperialism
Questions to consider

1. What does the context statement say?

2. What form of text do you have? Poetry, prose, drama

3. What genre does that text take on? Satire, dystopia, sci-fi, historical fiction, realism, expressionism, sonnet, ballad, elegy etc.

4. Where and when is it set? Past, present, future, England, America, domestic, public, pastoral, urban etc. (Careful as a text may be in the past for you reading it now, but may have been reflecting a contemporary society when it was published)

5. In the case of poetry and prose, who is the narrative voice and what view of events do they give? Are they involved? Do they sympathise with certain figures? Do they remain objective and make the reader judge? Do they make clear value judgements on the events? Are they omniscient or limited?

6. What is the shape of the narrative? How does it start and end? Why might this be significant?

7. How are different figures characterised? Who is made most sympathetic? Who is the antagonist?

8. How are features like dialogue and imagery used to further characterisation and create a sense of setting?

9. Where are the conflicts presented? Are they internal or are they between different characters or groups?

10. What kind of positioning is used? Either on stage or in a more symbolic way e.g. characters separated from one another, positions of power in height etc.

11. What kind of historic context is potentially important to the text? What is happening or has happened recently at the point the text is written? What is being explored in relation to the psychology of those involved

12. Do we change perspectives at points? Do we move from an outside view to one internal to a character?

13. What is the writer’s overall purpose in the narrative? What messages do they seek to convey to the audience?

14. Whilst you will only have a short section of a text, does it suggest future events? An inevitable escalation in conflict or a growing sense of realisation etc.