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Doc de réception pour la partie 2 à venir.

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Joe McKendry

On October 21, 1949, a few months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell received a letter from Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World had been published 17 years earlier. Huxley concludes:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war-in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
- Adapted from Letters of Note, Volume 2

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Dystopia Is Better Than Yours

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On October 21, 1949, a few months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell received a letter from Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World had been published 17 years earlier.

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General public comments found under the Guardian critical review of The Handmaid's Tale.

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General public comments found under the Guardian critical review of The Handmaid's Tale.

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antonweb 26 Sep 2010 12:18

I've never really understood the appeal of this book. A classroom novel, I'd call it. So schematic and mechanical in style and subject matter that it must be easy to teach by dull female A level teachers, which explains its direful long term presence on the syllabus.

mickconley 26 Sep 2010 16:16

@antonweb
It's good that you admit that your problem with this book is down to your own lack of understanding. I'm going to interpret the casual misogyny in your third sentence as a beautifully-executed parody of the kind of intellectual laziness and misplaced sense of superiority that many of the male characters in Atwood's novel display. Thank you for proving Charlotte Newman's original point so conclusively.

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On The Handmaid's Tale

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his year sees the 25th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Atwood's dystopian classic, and to honour the occasion, the book has been reissued by Vintage. The Handmaid's Tale tells the story of Offred - not her real name, but the patronymic she has been given by the new regime in an oppressive parallel America of the future - and her role as a Handmaid. The Handmaids are forced to provide children by proxy for infertile women of a higher social status, the wives of Commanders. They undergo regular medical tests, and in many ways become invisible, the sum total of their biological parts.

Offred remembers her life before the inception of Gilead, when she had a husband, a daughter and a life. She had been a witness to the dissolution of the old America into the totalitarian theocracy that it now is, and she tries to reconcile the warning signs with reality: "We lived in the gaps between the stories."

Offred's tender remembrances of times past provide relief from the brutality of her new life, in which her body has become a cause of discomfort for her. Her former life is presented through glimpses of her university friends, her husband, her freedom. They are shadowy memories made all the more indistinct by Atwood's lyrical prose, in which facts appear to merge into one another, and history appears immaterial; Offred is kept alive by her inner life, and reality and history become a kind of symbiotic mirage.

Fiercely political and bleak, yet witty and wise, the novel won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, but Atwood has always maintained that the novel is not classifiable science fiction. Nothing practised in the Republic of Gilead is genuinely futuristic. She is right, and this novel seems ever more vital in the present day, where women in many parts of the world live similar lives, dictated by biological determinism and misogyny.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood | Books review

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his year sees the 25th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Atwood's dystopian classic, and to honour the occasion, the book has been reissued by Vintage. The Handmaid's Tale tells the story of Offred - not her real name, but the patronymic she has been given by the new regime in an oppressive parallel America of the future - and her role as a Handmaid.

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On The Handmaid's Tale

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In 2017, Margaret Atwood is ascendant. The New Yorker has dubbed her the " Prophet of Dystopia." The upcoming Hulu adaptation of her most well-known book, the feminist speculative novel The Handmaid's Tale, long in the works, has turned out to be almost ludicrously well-timed to the political moment. Atwood, who has also written chilling speculative fiction about other timely issues (such as climate change), seems prescient to rattled liberals in a post- Trump election world. Everyone wants her thoughts on what's happening and what's to come.

The media can be fickle, however. The Handmaid's Tale has become an oft-studied and -cited modern classic, but its initial reception didn't necessarily foretell its induction into the canon. The New Yorker, per a perusal of its archives from the time, didn't review it at all; The New York Times published a sniffy takedown by Mary McCarthy. At the time, the Christian Science Monitor described the book as mostly well-received by critics; meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that reviews had been poor enough as to make Atwood "defensive" during an interview with the publication.

We dug through the archives to remember what critics were saying about The Handmaid's Tale back in 1986, when it was published in the U.S., and we found everything from tepid reactions to outright pans to glowing odes. The concept of a dystopia premised on the theocratic oppression of women, perhaps unsurprisingly, has always been polarizing.

Below, check out a selection of the original reviews of The Handmaid's Tale:

The Ecstatic:

"Just as the world of Orwell's 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwood's handmaid. She has succeeded in finding a voice for her heroine that is direct, artless, utterly convincing. It is the voice of a woman we might know, of someone very close to us. In fact, it is Offred's poignant sense of time that gives this novel its peculiar power. The immense changes in her life have come so fast that she is still in a state of shock and disbelief as she relates to us what she sees around her."

"[A]mong other things, it is a political tract deploring nuclear energy, environmental waste, and antifeminist attitudes.

"But it so much more than that ― a taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words. It has a sense of humor about itself, as well as an ambivalence toward even its worst villains, who aren't revealed as such until the very end. Best of all, it holds out the possibility of redemption. After all, the Handmaid is also a writer. She has written this book. She may have survived."

"Margaret Atwood's cautionary tale of postfeminist future shock pictures a nation formed by a backlash against feminism, but also by nuclear accidents, chemical pollution, radiation poisoning, a host of our present problems run amok. Ms. Atwood draws as well on New England Puritan history for her repressive 22[n]d-century society. Her deft sardonic humor makes much of the action and dialogue in the novel funny and ominous at the same time."

"Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization ― this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest ― and long on cynicism ― it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse."

"Some details of Atwood's bizarre anti-Utopia are at least as repellent as those in such forerunners as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1932 and George Orwell's 1984 16 years later. Those two novels have come to be seen as fiercely moral tracts that jarred their readers to awaken them. Will Atwood, as different from Huxley and Orwell as they were from each other, join them in the accepted ranks of those disguised idealists who image the future as a nightmare in order that it may remain just that ― a fantasy? Certainly the early reviews of her book have been mainly positive."

"Margaret Atwood's new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia [...] As a dystopia, this is a thinly textured one. [...] But if Offred is a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith, and Gilead seems at times to be only a coloring book version of Oceania, it may be because Atwood means to do more than scare us about the obvious consequences of a Falwellian coup d'état."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, The New Republic
"[Atwood's] regime is a hodgepodge: a theocracy that's not recognizably Christian, that most Christians don't accept; a repressive measure borrowed from South Africa; an atrocity adopted by the Romanians. With no unifying vision, the center doesn't hold."
-Alix Madrigal, The San Francisco Chronicle
"As a cautionary tale, Atwood's novel lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. It warns against too much: heedless sex, excessive morality, chemical and nuclear pollution. All of these may be worthwhile targets, but such a future seems more complicated than dramatic. But Offred's narrative is fascinating in a way that transcends tense and time: the record of an observant soul struggling against a harsh, mysterious world."

" The Handmaid's Tale is watchable, but it's also paranoid poppycock - just like the book. The actors are imprisoned in Atwood's grimly inhuman design. [...]

"What finally takes the cake for absurdity is a subplot featuring Aidan Quinn as Richardson's handsome savior. It's as if Atwood, after all that didactic scrubbing, couldn't quite wash the princess fantasy out of her story. The Handmaid's Tale is a tract that strives for sensitivity ― it lacks even the courage of its own misanthropy."

"The writing of The Handmaid's Tale is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood's normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare."

"This cri de coeur is certainly impassioned, and Atwood's adept style renders the grim atmosphere of the future quite palpably. But the didacticism of the novel wears thin; the book is simply too obvious to support its fictional context. Still, Atwood is quite an esteemed fiction writer, the author of such well-received novels as Surfacing (1973) and Life before Man (1980). Demand for her latest effort, therefore, is bound to be high; unfortunately, the number of disappointed readers may be equally high."

"Offred's monotonous manner of expression just drones and drones."
-Robert Linkous, San Francisco Review of Books

BEFORE YOU GO

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What Critics Said About 'The Handmaid's Tale' Back In The 1980s

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In 2017, Margaret Atwood is ascendant. The New Yorker has dubbed her the " Prophet of Dystopia." The upcoming Hulu adaptation of her most well-known book, the feminist speculative novel The Handmaid's Tale , long in the works, has turned out to be almost ludicrously well-timed to the political moment.

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Focus on The Handmaid's Tale > Extrait + échange.
first dystopian novel focusing on Women instead of men. Reprend les éléments mentionnés : le nom, le fanatisme religieux et la fonction de la femme dans cette société imaginée par Margaret Atwood.

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BBC Two - Novels That Shaped Our World, Series 1, A Woman's Place, 'I was so used to any depiction of dystopia being men fighting each other'

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How The Handmaid's Tale uniquely placed women at the centre of events.

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Novels That Shaped Our World Series  A Woman's Place

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Novels That Shaped Our World Series  A Woman's Place

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A must-See. Documentaire essentiel à la notion et en particulier en rapport avec The Handmaid's Tale. Parfait por la culture littéraire.

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Novels That Shaped Our World   Series 1  1  A Woman's Place BBC Documentary 2019

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niveau plus accessible que les podcasts de In Our Time. Infos sur le contexte, influences...

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Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell's dystopian classic

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Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell's dystopian classic

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Actor Christopher Eccleston talks about the central human message of the novel, caracteristics and why it is still so popular. Fonctionne très bien en général mais précisément pour la thématique Imaginary Worlds.

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Christopher Eccleston says the central message of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is "the strength of humanity".

Christopher plays Winston Smith in Radio 4's dramatisation of Orwell's dystopian novel which was originally published in 1949.

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BBC Radio 4 - The Real George Orwell, Christopher Eccleston on the central human message of Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Christopher Eccleston says the central message of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is "the strength of humanity". Christopher plays Winston Smith in Radio 4's dramatisation of Orwell's dystopian novel which was originally published in 1949.

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Critical review of 1984 + plein d'infos sur le contexte d'écriture, parfait pour Writers in Their Time!

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BBC Radio 4 - The Real George Orwell, The Road to Nineteen Eighty-Four

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What led avowed socialist George Orwell to write a novel that is beloved of the Right?

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Brave New World + The Animal Farm.
Attention, le niveau de langue est très soutenu.

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BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time - Topics - Dystopian novels

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A list of In Our Time episodes and clips related to "Dystopian novels".