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Listen to Margaret Atwood on Bookclub (27.25) BBC sign in

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Listen to Margaret Atwood on Bookclub (27.25) BBC sign in

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Bookclub - Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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In Genesis 30, Jacob has two wives, Rachel and Leah. When Rachel cannot bear a child, she orders Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah. The relevant passage - "And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her" - is recited as part of the 'ceremony' in The Handmaid's Tale, in which the man ritually rapes the handmaid in his wife's presence.

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Dystopian fantasy? The Handmaid's Tale is based entirely on real history - BBC Three

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In Genesis 30, Jacob has two wives, Rachel and Leah. When Rachel cannot bear a child, she orders Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah.

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Margaret Atwood: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale is being read very differently now’

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Why Margaret Atwood saw this as the moment for 'The Handmaid's Tale' sequel

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The background to the novel - open in new window

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The background to the novel - open in new window

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What the book means in the 'Age of Trump'.

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Essay

Credit... Eleni Kalorkoti

In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called "The Handmaid's Tale." I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I'd rented.

The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain - Czechoslovakia, East Germany - I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. "It can't happen here" could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

By 1984, I'd been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I'd read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I'd never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the "nightmare" of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.

Back in 1984, the main premise seemed - even to me - fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.

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The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)

In the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today's real world, studies are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Under totalitarianisms - or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society - the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, 12 sons - but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.

And so the tale unfolds.

When I first began "The Handmaid's Tale" it was called "Offred," the name of its central character. This name is composed of a man's first name, "Fred," and a prefix denoting "belonging to," so it is like "de" in French or "von" in German, or like the suffix "son" in English last names like Williamson. Within this name is concealed another possibility: "offered," denoting a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.

Why do we never learn the real name of the central character, I have often been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history have had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some have deduced that Offred's real name is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, "June" is the only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought but it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish.

At some time during the writing, the novel's name changed to "The Handmaid's Tale," partly in honor of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," but partly also in reference to fairy tales and folk tales: The story told by the central character partakes - for later or remote listeners - of the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.

Natasha Richardson and Robert Duvall in "The Handmaid's Tale" (1990). Credit... Cinecom

Over the years, "The Handmaid's Tale" has taken many forms. It has been translated into 40 or more languages. It was made into a film in 1990. It has been an opera, and it has also been a ballet. It is being turned into a graphic novel. And in April 2017 it will become an MGM/Hulu television series.

In this series I have a small cameo. The scene is the one in which the newly conscripted Handmaids are being brainwashed in a sort of Red Guard re-education facility known as the Red Center. They must learn to renounce their previous identities, to know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.

The Handmaids sit in a circle, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them to join in what is now called (but was not, in 1984) the "slut-shaming" of one of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she was gang-raped as a teenager. Her fault, she led them on - that is the chant of the other Handmaids.

Although it was "only a television show" and these were actresses who would be giggling at coffee break, and I myself was "just pretending," I found this scene horribly upsetting. It was way too much like way too much history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even - and, possibly, especially - in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven't been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won't get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism - like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault - and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life.

Which brings me to three questions I am often asked.

First, is "The Handmaid's Tale" a "feminist" novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings - with all the variety of character and behavior that implies - and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are "feminist."

Margaret Atwood has a cameo in the new television production of "The Handmaid's Tale." Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times (2009)

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations would die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their babies with yours, as cats do; make women have babies they can't afford to raise, or babies you will then remove from them for your own purposes, steal babies - it's been a widespread, age-old motif. The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet. Napoleon and his "cannon fodder," slavery and its ever-renewed human merchandise - they both fit in here. Of those promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits by it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.

The second question that comes up frequently: Is "The Handmaid's Tale" antireligion? Again, it depends what you may mean by that. True, a group of authoritarian men seize control and attempt to restore an extreme version of the patriarchy, in which women (like 19th-century American slaves) are forbidden to read. Further, they can't control money or have jobs outside the home, unlike some women in the Bible. The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would: They wouldn't be Communists or Muslims.

The modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography - the Wives wear the blue of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of parturition, but also from Mary Magdalene. Also, red is easier to see if you happen to be fleeing. The wives of men lower in the social scale are called Econowives, and wear stripes. I must confess that the face-hiding bonnets came not only from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, but from the Old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s, which showed a woman with her face hidden, and which frightened me as a child. Many totalitarianisms have used clothing, both forbidden and enforced, to identify and control people - think of yellow stars and Roman purple - and many have ruled behind a religious front. It makes the creation of heretics that much easier.

In the book, the dominant "religion" is moving to seize doctrinal control, and religious denominations familiar to us are being annihilated. Just as the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mensheviks in order to eliminate political competition and Red Guard factions fought to the death against one another, the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and eliminated. The Quakers have gone underground, and are running an escape route to Canada, as - I suspect - they would. Offred herself has a private version of the Lord's Prayer and refuses to believe that this regime has been mandated by a just and merciful God. In the real world today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of vulnerable groups, including women.

So the book is not "antireligion." It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.

Is "The Handmaid's Tale" a prediction? That is the third question I'm asked - increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even back in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, it isn't a prediction, because predicting the future isn't really possible: There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let's say it's an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won't happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.

Elisabeth Moss in "The Handmaid's Tale" (2017). Credit... Hulu

So many different strands fed into "The Handmaid's Tale" - group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the list is long.

But there's a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: Every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world's indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex.

There are two reading audiences for Offred's account: the one at the end of the book, at an academic conference in the future, who are free to read but who are not always as empathetic as one might wish; and the individual reader of the book at any given time. That is the "real" reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere - many, I would guess - are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.

Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?

Let us hope it doesn't come to that. I trust it will not.

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Margaret Atwood on What 'The Handmaid's Tale' Means in the Age of Trump (Published 2017)

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Essay In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called "The Handmaid's Tale." I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I'd rented.

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The Prophet of Dystopia

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Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real.

When Margaret Atwood was in her twenties, an aunt shared with her a family legend about a possible seventeenth-century forebear: Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. "The townspeople didn't like her, so they strung her up," Atwood said recently. "But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn't die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive." Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary. The maiden name of Atwood's grandmother was Webster, and the family tree can be traced back to John Webster, the fifth governor of Connecticut. "On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn't," Atwood said. "So take your pick."

Atwood made the artist's pick: she chose the story. She once wrote a vivid narrative poem in the voice of Half-Hanged Mary-in Atwood's telling, a sardonic, independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors "for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin . . . a weedy farm in my own name, / and a surefire cure for warts." Webster's grim endurance at the end of the rope ("Most will have only one death. / I will have two.") grants her a perverse kind of freedom. She can now say anything: "The words boil out of me, / coil after coil of sinuous possibility. / The cosmos unravels from my mouth, / all fullness, all vacancy." In 1985, Atwood made Webster one of two dedicatees of her best-known novel, "The Handmaid's Tale," a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing. The other dedicatee of "The Handmaid's Tale" was Perry Miller, the scholar of American intellectual history; Atwood studied under him at Harvard, in the early sixties, extending her knowledge of Puritanism well beyond fireside tales.

Having embraced the heritage of Half-Hanged Mary-and having, at seventy-seven, reached an age at which sardonic independent-mindedness is permissible, and even expected-Atwood is winningly game to play the role of the wise elder who might have a spell up her sleeve. In January, I visited her in her home town of Toronto, and within a few hours of our meeting, while having coffee at a crowded café, she performed what friends know as a familiar party trick. After explaining that she had picked up the precepts of medieval palmistry decades ago, from an art-historian neighbor whose specialty was Hieronymus Bosch, Atwood spent several disconcerting minutes poring over my hands. First, she noted my heart line and the line of my intellect, and what their relative positions revealed about my capacity for getting things done. She wiggled my thumbs, a test for stubbornness. She examined my life line-"You're looking quite healthy at the moment," she said, to my relief-then told me to shake my hands out and let them fall into a resting position, facing upward. She regarded them thoughtfully. "Well, the Virgin Mary you're not," she said, dryly. "But you knew that."

Atwood has long been Canada's most famous writer, and current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation. With the election of an American President whose campaign trafficked openly in the deprecation of women-and who, on his first working day in office, signed an executive order withdrawing federal funds from overseas women's-health organizations that offer abortion services-the novel that Atwood dedicated to Mary Webster has reappeared on best-seller lists. "The Handmaid's Tale" is also about to be serialized on television, in an adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, that will stream on Hulu. The timing could not be more fortuitous, though many people may wish that it were less so. In a photograph taken the day after the Inauguration, at the Women's March on Washington, a protester held a sign bearing a slogan that spoke to the moment: " make margaret atwood fiction again."

If the election of Donald Trump were fiction, Atwood maintains, it would be too implausible to satisfy readers. "There are too many wild cards-you want me to believe that the F.B.I. stood up and said this, and that the guy over at WikiLeaks did that?" she said. "Fiction has to be something that people would actually believe. If you had published it last June, everybody would have said, 'That is never going to happen.' " Atwood is a buoyant doomsayer. Like a skilled doctor, she takes evident satisfaction in providing an accurate diagnosis, even when the cultural prognosis is bleak. She attended the Toronto iteration of the Women's March, wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat the color of Pepto-Bismol: not so much a pussy hat as the chapeau of a lioness. Among the signs she saw that day, her favorite was one held by a woman close to her own age; it said, " i can't believe i'm still holding this fucking sign." Atwood remarked, "After sixty years, why are we doing this again? But, as you know, in any area of life, it's push and pushback. We have had the pushback, and now we are going to have the push again."

Unlike many writers, Atwood does not require a particular desk, arranged in a particular way, before she can work. "There's a good and a bad side to that," she told me. "If I did have those things, then I would be able to put myself in that fetishistic situation, and the writing would flow into me, because of the magical objects. But I don't have those, so that doesn't happen." The good side is that she can write anywhere, and does so, prolifically. She is equally uninhibited about genre. Atwood's bibliography runs to about sixty books-novels, poetry, short-story collections, works of criticism, children's books, and, most recently, a comic-book series about a part-feline, part-avian, part-human superhero called Angel Catbird. She is offhanded about her versatility. "I always wrote more than one type of thing," she said. "Nobody told me not to." On one occasion, over tea, she showed me her left hand: it had writing on it. "When all else fails, you do have a surface you can write on," she said.

Atwood travels frequently, and has often spent months at a time living in foreign countries, sometimes under conditions that a less flexible artist might find impossibly distracting. She started writing "The Handmaid's Tale" on a clunky rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin, in 1984. (Orwell was on her mind.) She spent a winter in the remote English village of Blakeney, in Norfolk, where her only means of calling North America was a telephone kiosk that was usually used for storing potatoes, and where the stone-floored cottage in which she wrote was so cold that she developed chilblains on her toes. When her daughter, Jess, who was born in 1976, was eighteen months old, Atwood and her partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, made a round-the-world trip. After winding through Europe, they visited Afghanistan-a keen student of military history, Atwood wanted to see the terrain where the British had been defeated-as well as India and Singapore. They proceeded to Australia, for the Adelaide Literary Festival, then returned to Canada, via Fiji and Hawaii. They made do with carry-on luggage the whole way. ^^

Home is a mansion in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto, near the university. She and Gibson have lived there for more than thirty years, and a basement office serves as the headquarters of Atwood's company, O. W. Toad, Ltd. (The whimsical name is an anagram of "Atwood," but sometimes there are postal inquiries as to the existence of a Mr. Toad.) Atwood does not drive, and, for exercise as well as for efficiency, she likes to walk around her neighborhood; she often encounters en route some friend of a half-century's standing, and they will stop and discuss the past and future surgeries of loved ones-the inevitable discourse of the septuagenarian. Sometimes she drags a heavy shopping cart, loaded with books, for donation to the local library.

Atwood is enormously well read, and is an evangelist for books she admires, especially by young writers. When I was visiting, she pressed into my hands "Stay with Me," a novel by the twenty-nine-year-old Nigerian writer Ayobami Adebayo. Sarah Polley, the Canadian film director and writer, who is a friend of Atwood's, told me, "Usually, after seeing her, I come home with a full notebook, half in her handwriting and half in mine, of every movie and book I had heard of while talking to her-a full course load." Polley recently wrote the script for a six-part Netflix adaptation of Atwood's 1996 novel, "Alias Grace," which is based on a true-life murder mystery in nineteenth-century rural Canada. The book earned Atwood her third of five Booker Prize nominations.

Atwood is warmly recognized in Toronto, whether she is on the street, in a restaurant, or in the subway. (She once slipped me one of her senior-citizen tickets, with a sly arch of the eyebrow.) Traffic cops nod to her in crosswalks, and every encounter I had with her was interrupted by a supplicant autograph hunter or selfie seeker. She never declined. "In the age of social media, you cannot say no, because you'll get 'Mean Margaret Atwood was rude to me in a restaurant,' " she told me one lunchtime, after graciously signing yet another young woman's notebook. (Atwood speaks in a low, ironical monotone but adopts a querulous squeak when impersonating imagined detractors.) She would look striking even if she were not familiar. She owns an array of brightly colored winter coats-jewel red, imperial purple-with faux-fur-trimmed hoods that frame her face, as do her abundant curls of silver hair. She has high cheekbones and an aquiline nose, the kind of features that age has a hard time withering. Her skin is clear and translucent, of the sort that writers of popular Victorian fiction associated with good moral character.

One morning, I accompanied her to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, at the University of Toronto, where she has donated her archive: four hundred and seventy-four boxes' worth of papers, so far. She had requested in advance to see materials related to "The Handmaid's Tale," and a small study room had been reserved for our use. Boxes had been rolled in on a cart, and one of them contained Atwood's handwritten draft. On an early page, she describes the plain contours of the room in which Offred, the novel's narrator, lives-"A chair, a table, a lamp"-though Atwood had not yet refined the detail that, in the published version, gives the opening paragraph of the second chapter a menacing power: "There must have been a chandelier, once. They've removed anything you could tie a rope to." Another box was labelled "Handmaid's Tale: Background," and Atwood pried the box open to reveal files containing sheaves of newspaper clippings from the mid-eighties.

"Clip-clippety-clip, out of the newspaper I clipped things," she said, as we looked through the cuttings. There were stories of abortion and contraception being outlawed in Romania, and reports from Canada lamenting its falling birth rate, and articles from the U.S. about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions, in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called "handmaidens"-a word that Atwood had underlined.

In writing "The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood was scrupulous about including nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of comparison. (She prefers that her future-fantasy books be labelled "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction." "Not because I don't like Martians . . . they just don't fall within my skill set," she wrote in the introduction to "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination," an essay collection that she published in 2011.) The ritualized procreation in the novel-effectively, state-sanctioned rape-is extrapolated from the Bible. " 'Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her,' " Atwood recited. "Obviously, they stuck the two together and out came the baby, and it was given to Rachel. No kidding. It is right there in the text." In Atwood's book, the Handmaids are cultivated, like livestock. "I'm taken to the doctor's once a month, for tests: urine, hormones, cancer smear, blood test," Offred recounts. "The same as before, except that now it's obligatory." Only after completing several chapters does the reader queasily realize that Offred's innocuous-sounding name is a designation of ownership: the Commander in whose household the narrator serves is named Fred. A decade ago, the book was banned from high schools in San Antonio, Texas, on the ground that it was anti-Christian and excessively explicit about sex. In an open letter to the school district, Atwood pointed out that the Bible has a good deal more to say about sex than her book does, and defended her fiction's essential truthfulness, speculative or not. "If you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?" she wrote.

With the novel, she intended not just to pose the essential question of dystopian fiction-"Could it happen here?"-but also to suggest ways that it had already happened, here or elsewhere. While living in West Berlin, Atwood visited Poland, where martial law had only recently been lifted; many dissidents were still in jail. She already knew members of the Polish resistance from the Second World War, who had gone into exile in Canada. "I remember one person saying a very telling thing: 'Pray you will never have occasion to be a hero,' " she said. Atwood's longtime literary agent, Phoebe Larmore, told me of seeing Atwood during the writing of "The Handmaid's Tale." "I had been quite ill that year, and Margaret came and sat on my sofa, and I think she looked worse than I did," Larmore recalled. "I asked her what was happening. She said, 'It's the new novel. It scares me. But I have to write it.' "

"The Handmaid's Tale" became a best-seller, despite some sniffy reviews, like one in the Times, by Mary McCarthy, who wrote, "Even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues." It has since sold so many millions of copies that Atwood considers them uncountable. Her friend the novelist Valerie Martin was the first to read the finished manuscript; they were both teaching in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. "There is kind of a disagreement about what I said," Martin told me. " She says that I said, 'There is something in it.' But what I think I said is: 'You are going to be rich.' " The book quickly became canonical. Atwood's daughter was nine when it was published; by the time she was in high school, it was required reading for graduation.

Despite the novel's current air of timeliness, the contours of the dystopian future that Atwood imagined in the eighties do not map closely onto the present moment-although recent news images of asylum seekers fleeing across the U.S. border into Canada have a chilling resonance with the opening moments of the television series, which shows Moss, not yet enlisted as a Handmaid, attempting to escape from the U.S. to its northern neighbor, where democracy prevails. Still, the U.S. in 2017 does not show immediate signs of becoming Gilead, Atwood's imagined theocratic American republic. President Trump is not an adherent of traditional family values; he is a serial divorcer. He is not known to be a man of religious faith; his Sundays are spent on the golf course.

What does feel familiar in "The Handmaid's Tale" is the blunt misogyny of the society that Atwood portrays, and which Trump's vocal repudiation of "political correctness" has loosed into common parlance today. Trump's vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch-hunts. "You can find Web sites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers," she said. "It is so seventeenth-century that you can hardly believe it. It's right out of the subconscious-just lying there, waiting to be applied to people." The legacy of witch-hunting, and the sense of shame that it engendered, Atwood suggests, is an enduring American blight. "Only one of the judges ever apologized for the witch trials, and only one of the accusers ever apologized," she said. Whenever tyranny is exercised, Atwood warns, it is wise to ask, " Cui bono?" Who profits by it? Even when those who survived the accusations levelled against them were later exonerated, only meagre reparations were made. "One of the keys to America is that your neighbor may be a Communist, a serial killer, or in league with satanic forces," Atwood said. "You really don't trust your fellow-citizens very much."

Now, Atwood argues, women have been put on notice that hard-won rights may be only provisional. "It's the return to patriarchy," she said, as she paged through the clippings. "Look at his Cabinet!" she said of Trump. "Look at the kind of laws that people have put through in the states. Absolutely they want to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they will have to deal with the consequences if they do. You're going to have a lot more orphanages, aren't you? A lot more dead women, a lot more illegal abortions, a lot more families with children in them left without a mother. They want it 'back to the way it was.' Well, that is part of the way it was."

Atwood was born in Ottawa, but she spent formative stretches of her early years in the wilderness-first in northern Quebec, and then north of Lake Superior. Her father, Carl Atwood, was an entomologist, and, until Atwood was almost out of elementary school, the family passed all but the coldest months in virtually complete isolation at insect-research stations; at one point, they lived in a log cabin that her father had helped construct.

Her mother, also named Margaret-among her intimates, the novelist goes by Peggy-was a dietitian. In the months in the woods, she secured workbooks from school for Atwood and her brother, Harold, who is three years her senior. "The faster you could do them, the sooner you could go out and play, so I became very rapid and superficial in my execution of those sorts of things," Atwood said. In inclement weather, the children amused themselves by making comic books and by reading. A favorite book was "Grimms' Fairy Tales," which Atwood's parents bought, by mail order, in 1945. "I don't remember finding any of them frightening," she wrote later. "By and large, bad things happened only to bad people, which was reassuring; though children have a bloodthirsty sense of justice, they don't learn mercy until later."

Her father had grown up poor, in rural Nova Scotia. Her mother, whose family was also from Nova Scotia, grew up in slightly better circumstances: Atwood's maternal grandfather was a country doctor, and an aunt had been the first woman to get a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto. Atwood's parents were resilient and curious and devoted to the outdoors, and the Atwood children were encouraged to be the same. They sledded across a still frozen lake at the start of the season, and canoed across it during the summer months. In Atwood's second novel, "Surfacing," a psychological thriller threaded with twisted family relations that was published in 1972, she depicted the landscape of her youth with unsentimental, sensual precision: "The water was covered with lily pads, the globular yellow lilies with their thick center snouts pushing up from among them. . . . When the paddles hit bottom on the way across, gas bubbles from decomposing vegetation rose and burst with a stench of rotten eggs or farts." When Atwood was about ten, her father built a vacation cabin on an unoccupied island in the lake. The family still retreats there in the summer.

In 1948, Margaret's father received an appointment at the University of Toronto. (Three years later, another daughter, Ruth, was born.) Margaret, having been raised as her brother's peer by an unshrinking mother, was unschooled in the conventions of little-girl society. "In the woods, you wore pants not because it was butch but because if you didn't wear pants and tuck the tops into your socks you would get blackflies up your legs," she said. "They make little holes in you, into which they inject an anticoagulant. You don't feel them when they are doing it, and then you take your clothes off and find out you are covered with blood." In "Cat's Eye" (1988), Atwood drew on the experience of being transferred from a navigable wilderness to the more treacherous civilization of prepubescent girls. The book's narrator, Elaine, explains that she has a classmate who "tells me her hair is honey-blond, that her haircut is called a pageboy, that she has to go to the hairdresser's every two months to get it done. I haven't known there are such things as pageboys and hairdressers."

Atwood started writing in earnest in high school. Her parents, who lived through the Depression, were encouraging but practical. She told me, "My mother said, caustically, 'If you are going to be a writer, you had better learn to spell.' I said, airily, 'Others will do that for me.' And they do." She followed her brother to the University of Toronto. (A neurophysiologist, Harold Atwood is a professor emeritus in the department of physiology.) Atwood enrolled in the philosophy department, but after discovering that logical positivism was its mainstay, rather than ethics and aesthetics, she switched to literature.

The university's literature curriculum was unapologetically British: she started with "Beowulf" and took it from there. Canadian literature had yet to be considered worthy of study. A decade later, in 1972, Atwood made a contribution to its establishment as a proper field, with her lucid survey "Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature." In that book, which made her a household name in Canada, she persuasively posited that, whereas the controlling idea of English literature is the island, and the pervasive symbol of American literature is the frontier, the dominant theme in Canadian literature is survival: "Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back from the awful experience-the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship-that killed everyone else."

As an undergraduate, she audited Northrop Frye's celebrated course on the Bible and literature. Frye helped her secure a fellowship at Harvard, where, in the sixties, she began to write a doctoral thesis on what she called the "English Metaphysical Romance"-the gothic fantasy novels of the nineteenth century. She never finished it. Atwood had embarked on an academic career not for the love of teaching or scholarship but because making a living as a writer seemed an implausible aspiration. "It was thought presumptuous-this is way before the age of creative-writing programs, and writers, to be serious, ought to be dead," she recalled.

Atwood started her career as a poet. Her first professionally published collection, "The Circle Game," won the Governor General's Award in 1966, and has never been out of print. The poems, which take the ring-around-the-rosy children's game as a starting point for an exploration of male-female relationships, show Atwood's early aptitude for the unflinching, visceral metaphor. A lover examines the speaker's face "indifferently / yet with the same taut curiosity / with which you might regard / a suddenly discovered part / of your own body: / a wart perhaps." Atwood's first novel, "The Edible Woman," which was written in 1964 and published five years later, is a contemporary satire in which a young woman, having just become engaged-her husband-to-be is clearly the wrong guy-finds herself unable to eat.

Some reviewers hailed Atwood's work as a voice of the burgeoning feminist movement. (A reviewer in Time said that the novel had "the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail.") She resisted the identification. "I was not in New York, where all of that kicked off, in 1969," she said. "I was in Edmonton, Alberta, where there was no feminist movement, and would not be for quite some time." Atwood was then married to Jim Polk, who had been a classmate at Harvard, and whose teaching job had taken them to the Canadian Northwest. (They divorced in 1973.) "I had people interviewing me who would say, 'How do you get the housework done?' I would say, 'Look under the sofa, then we can talk.' "

In the sometimes divisive years of second-wave feminism, Atwood reserved the right to remain nonaligned. "I didn't want to become a megaphone for any one particular set of beliefs," she said. "Having gone through that initial phase of feminism when you weren't supposed to wear frocks and lipstick-I never had any use for that. You should be able to wear them without people saying you are a traitor to your sex." In a 1976 essay, "On Being a 'Woman Writer': Paradoxes and Dilemmas," Atwood described the mixed feelings experienced by women writers old enough to have forged a writing life before representatives of the women's movement came along to claim them. "It's not finally all that comforting to have a phalanx of women . . . come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along," she wrote. "It's like being judged innocent after you've been hanged: the satisfaction, if any, is grim."

Given that her works are a mainstay of women's-studies curricula, and that she is clearly committed to women's rights, Atwood's resistance to a straightforward association with feminism can come as a surprise. But this wariness reflects her bent toward precision, and a scientific sensibility that was ingrained from childhood: Atwood wants the terms defined before she will state her position. Her feminism assumes women's rights to be human rights, and is born of having been raised with a presumption of absolute equality between the sexes. "My problem was not that people wanted me to wear frilly pink dresses-it was that I wanted to wear frilly pink dresses, and my mother, being as she was, didn't see any reason for that," she said. Atwood's early years in the forest endowed her with a sense of self-determination, and with a critical distance on codes of femininity-an ability to see those codes as cultural practices worthy of investigation, not as necessary conditions to be accepted unthinkingly. This capacity for quizzical scrutiny underlies much of her fiction: not accepting the world as it is permits Atwood to imagine the world as it might be.

Atwood and Gibson, who met in Toronto publishing circles, spent the seventies living on a farm outside the city. The countryside was cheap, and it provided a congenial environment for Gibson's two teen-age sons; it also provides the setting for what Atwood acknowledges as some of her most autobiographical writing, in the short-story collection "Moral Disorder" (2006). The title story details the less picturesque aspects of country life. "Susan the cow went away in a truck one day and came back frozen and dismembered," Atwood writes. "It was like a magic trick-a woman sawed in half on the stage in plain view of all, to reappear fully restored to wholeness, walking down the aisle; except that Susan's transformation had gone the other way."

Atwood resists critics' attempts to find parallels between her life story and her fiction, and has no desire to write a memoir. "I am interested in reading other people's, if they have had fascinating or gruesome lives, but I don't think my life has been that fascinating or gruesome," she said. "The parts of writers' lives that are interesting are usually the part before they become a well-known writer." In the mid-eighties, shortly before she started to write "The Handmaid's Tale" but was already Canada's most celebrated novelist, a documentary filmmaker named Michael Rubbo spent several days with Atwood and her family at their island retreat in northern Quebec. Rubbo sought to locate the source of Atwood's inspiration and to uncover the origins of her often gloomy themes, but most of his film is devoted to showing the ways that Atwood politely declined to conform to her inquisitor's thesis. "I use settings, but that is not to be confused with using real people, and things that have actually happened to those real people," she tells the filmmaker, while his camera lingers on her hands: she is slicing through the blood-red stalks of rhubarb plants with a chef's knife and casually discarding the poisonous leaves.

At one point, the Atwoods are given control of the camera, and conduct a strange pantomime in which Atwood sits with a brown paper bag over her head while other family members offer sentence-long characterizations of her. "That woman is my daughter, and she's incognito," Atwood's mother says, in the most illuminating of the remarks. Atwood, after removing the bag, says, "Michael Rubbo's whole problem is that he thinks of me as mysterious and a problem to be solved. . . . He's trying to find out why some of my work is sombre in tone, shall we say, and he's trying for some simple explanation of that in me or in my life, rather than in the society that I am portraying." At another moment, she suggests that her novels should be thought of as being in the tradition of the Victorian realist or social novel, and should be read in the light of objective facts, rather than subjective experience.

Some of her most perceptive readers have taken this approach. The novelist Francine Prose, reviewing "Alias Grace," noted that "Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas." At its best, Atwood's fiction summons an intricate social world, whether it be a disquieting vision of the future, as in "The Handmaid's Tale," or a vividly rendered past, as in "Alias Grace" or "The Blind Assassin"-a genre-bending tour de force set partly in small-town Canada in the nineteen-twenties, for which Atwood won the Booker Prize, in 2000.

Like her Victorian forebears, Atwood does not shy away from the idea that the novel is a place to explore questions of morality. In an e-mail, she wrote to me, "You can't use language and avoid moral dimensions, since words are so weighted (lilies that fester vs. weeds, etc.) and all characters have to live somewhere, even if they are rabbits, as in 'Watership Down,' and they have to live at some time . . . and they have to make choices." The challenge, she noted, is avoiding moralism: "How do you 'engage' without preaching too much and reducing the characters to mere allegories? A perennial problem. But when the large social issues are very large indeed ('Doctor Zhivago'), the characters will act within-and be acted upon by-everything that surrounds them."

At the same time, Atwood's best fiction is sustained by a specificity of detail-a capacity for noticing-that might be expected from one whose scientist father introduced her to a microscope at a young age. One morning, while we were walking in her neighborhood, Atwood bumped into an old friend, Adrienne Clarkson, a college contemporary who went on to have a distinguished career as a broadcaster, and, for six years, as the governor general of Canada. "We are going to crawl into our eighties together," Clarkson said, inviting us to her home for tea. The women reminisced about studying with Northrop Frye. "He is the person who talked me into going to grad school instead of moving to Paris, and living in a garret and drinking absinthe," Atwood said. "But, Adrienne, you did move to Paris."

"You came to visit," Clarkson said.

"And you were painting your fingernails a beautiful shade of red," Atwood continued.

"How frivolous of you to remember that," Clarkson said, fondly.

"How novelistic of me to remember it," Atwood said.

Not long ago, a history society at the University of Toronto, which was compiling a video archive of notable alumni, asked to interview Atwood about her college days. On a chilly afternoon in January, she found her way to an upper room in the university's Gothic Revival student center. Four eager undergraduates, all women, were there to film and quiz her. Atwood sat by a leaded-glass window against a gray sky, and amiably answered questions about what it was like being a young woman on campus in the fifties. "Whatever things are like when you are young, they seem normal, because you have nothing to compare them to," she said. "For instance, I would not ever have worn jeans to high school. It would not have been permitted except on football days. They wanted us to wear jeans on football day, so we could sit on the hill and not have anyone looking up our skirts. It takes a while to figure this out, but now I realize that must have been the reason."

In those days, Atwood said, there was no fear of rape on campus, as there seemed to be today. "I am not saying that it didn't happen, but you would never hear of it," she said. "And I would suspect that the chances of that happening were quite low, because what everybody was afraid of then was getting pregnant. The boys were afraid of getting pregnant, too, because you could end up married at an early age that way, and people didn't particularly want that. But there was no Pill."

One young interviewer, wide-eyed, said, "It is very interesting to consider the importance of the Pill, not just for women but in changing society. I hadn't really considered it."

Atwood continued talking about changing mores-the supplanting of the panty girdle by nylon tights, and the consequent innovation of the miniskirt. But when one of the students fumbled with the camera, in an effort to renew its memory card, Atwood took the opportunity to turn the tables.

"I was astonished to see that the Polaroid camera has come back- why? What do you do with a Polaroid picture?" she asked.

The students, delighted, offered a chorus of explanations: such images combined the instant gratification of the selfie with the pleasure of a physical object that could be pinned on a wall. Atwood went on to seek their views on other surprisingly resurgent technologies-vinyl records, even cassette players-and then shifted to something more up-to-date. "Do you know an exercise app called Zombies, Run?" she asked.

"Is that, like, where you go for a run and zombies chase you?" one student asked. Yes, Atwood said: the app, a kind of interactive podcast, plays an apocalyptic story line in a listener's ears as she jogs, thus making a workout more entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. "I'm in one of the episodes," Atwood announced. She has a cameo as herself: her voice is supposedly being transmitted over a crackling phone line from Toronto.

Finally, the students' camera was working. Atwood faced it again, and said, brightly, "So, let's see. What else do you want to know?"

Her openness to younger people is, in part, a consequence of the passage of time: there are many more younger people around than older ones, so she'd better be open to them, if she's going to be open to anybody. But it is also temperamental. Zombies, Run! was co-created by Naomi Alderman, a British novelist in her early forties, who is also a video-game designer. She and Atwood became friends after Atwood chose to be her mentor, through a program sponsored by Rolex. "She was intrigued that I might know about something she doesn't know about yet, and I might be able to tell her about it," Alderman said. "I don't think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest." Alderman has accompanied Atwood and Gibson on several bird-watching vacations, including one earlier this year in the rain forests of Panama. "We stayed in tents," Alderman told me. "And the first night I was going back to my tent and my headlamp caught these blue shining glints on the jungle floor, and every single one of these glints was a pair of spider's eyes staring at me. When I told Margaret, she was very disappointed-she really wanted to see the spiders."

Atwood's embrace of technological innovation is sometimes more theoretical than practical: she has yet to master streaming video, so she still watches DVDs. Occasionally, her fascination with technological processes, combined with an incomprehension of them, can have productive results. A dozen or so years ago, when videoconferencing technology was still a novelty, Atwood wondered whether it might be possible to develop a means of conducting book signings remotely. "I thought of the writing flying through the air, and materializing somewhere else," she said. Her flight of fancy, combined with some technical and marketing know-how assembled by Matthew Gibson, her stepson, resulted in the LongPen, a robotic device that enables a writer-or anyone-to sign a paper remotely in a manner that replicates the speed and pressure of the original autograph, and is indistinguishable from it. (Gibson has since created an e-signature company, Syngrafii, and it sells the LongPen, which is marketed less to weary authors than to financial and legal companies.)

Atwood was an early adopter of Twitter, signing up in 2009; she now has about a million and a half followers, though she is aware that some of that number must be bots. "I do sometimes get 'I miss your dick'-they don't read the fine print," she said. She appreciates followers who have a specialized interest in the sciences; they help her keep abreast of recent developments that might be of interest for a future writing project, or resonate with a past one. She engages, often cheerily, with her followers and others, sometimes on topics that another writer might avoid. "Only 'race' is the human race, sez me. (And says science.)," she wrote in response to one user's speculation that she was Jewish. "But no, I wouldn't have ended up in a Hitler death camp for that reason."

For years, Atwood has argued that Twitter in particular and the Internet in general have been good for literacy. "People have to actually be able to read and write to use the Internet, so it's a great literacy driver, if kids are given the tools and the incentive to learn the skills that allow them to access it," she said, while being interviewed at a digital-media conference in 2011. She has been a champion of Wattpad, a story-sharing site founded in Toronto a decade ago. In her view, it not only provides a place for North American teen-agers to publish their own zombie tales; it also offers cell-phone-equipped readers in the developing world with an entry point into fiction, even if they have no access to libraries, schools, or books. Her 2015 novel, "The Heart Goes Last," which takes the premise of for-profit prisons to monstrous, comic ends, was excerpted on Wattpad. Atwood has also published a collection of poems, "Thriller Suite," serially, on Wattpad; the book has been viewed more than three hundred and eighty thousand times since then, presumably reaching many readers who had never bought a volume of poetry.

She believes that early fears, among some observers, that the advent of the Web would mean the end of books were misplaced. "I think we know now that, neurologically, there are reasons why that isn't going to happen," Atwood said. "Installments on a phone-those, the brain can handle. 'War and Peace,' maybe not. Though 'War and Peace' was first published in installments, by the way." She is fond of saying that, with all technology, there is a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side that you weren't expecting. "Look at an axe-you can cut a tree down with it, and you can murder your neighbor with it," she said. "And the stupid side you hadn't considered is that you can accidentally cut your foot off with it."

A few years ago, Atwood became the first author to participate in a conceptual art project, the Future Library, which was conceived by a Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. In the course of a hundred years, a hundred writers will contribute a manuscript to the project. The manuscripts will remain unread except for their titles-Atwood's is "Scribbler Moon"-until 2114, when they will be printed on paper made from a thousand pine trees that have been planted in the Nordmarka, a forest not far from where the library will be maintained, in Oslo, Norway.

"Being the kind of child who buried things in the back yard in jars, hoping that someone else would dig them up sometime, I of course liked this project," she told me. Atwood has a keen interest in conservation: she uses her Twitter feed to highlight ecological issues ranging from the decimation of the bee population to ocean pollution. The optimism inherent in the Future Library-the belief that there will be readers, and a world for them to inhabit-seems at odds with some of the darker scenarios in Atwood's fiction, and I suggested as much to her.

"This is not a question of expect," she said. "It is a question of hope. It is a question of faith rather than knowledge. You wouldn't do it unless you thought there was a chance." Humans, she said, "have hope built in," adding, "If our ancestors had not had that component, they would not have bothered getting up in the morning. You are always going to have hope that today there will be a giraffe, where yesterday there wasn't one." At the same time, Atwood loves to entertain notions of how degraded our future might become, and what effect that might have on the human race. She speculates that, if our atmosphere becomes too carbon-heavy, with a dwindling in the oxygen supply, one of the first things that will happen is that we will become a lot less intelligent.

But a novelist necessarily imagines the fate of individuals; the human condition is what the novel was made for exploring. "We just actually can't bear the idea of nothing," Atwood said. "I think that is partly to do with grammar. You say, 'I will be dead,' but there is still an 'I.' There is still a subject." Her novels, she went on, are not without hope, either. "The Handmaid's Tale" has a coda, in the form of an address given, in 2195, by a keynote speaker at an academic conference, the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies. Civilization has survived, even to the point of sustaining groaningly bad academic puns. (Women fleeing Gilead, a professor notes, cross the border via "The Underground Frailroad.") "I have never done everybody in," Atwood said. "I have never polished them all off so that there's nobody left alive, now, have I? No. "

In the early aughts, she began an ambitious cycle of novels exploring a different kind of dystopian future. The Maddaddam Trilogy-"Oryx and Crake," "The Year of the Flood," and "Maddaddam"-was published between 2003 and 2013. The books depict a North American landscape that is ravaged by ecological disaster and inhabited by a genetically modified race of quasi-humans, the Crakers. As usual, Atwood researched her subject voraciously, and this time she was further enabled by the Internet. The trilogy crackles with a gleeful inventiveness that is sometimes tonally at odds with its apocalyptic content: the Crakers' skin cells have been modified to repel ultraviolet rays and mosquitoes, for example, and the capacity for sexual jealousy has been edited out of their genome.

One evening in Toronto, Atwood invited me to her home, where we sat in its spacious kitchen on tall stools at a counter, overlooking her wintry, barren-looking garden. Graeme Gibson poured three glasses of whiskey while Atwood sorted through Christmas cards, dispensing with the chore as efficiently as if she were slicing rhubarb. I remarked on an aspect of "Oryx and Crake" that had moved me. The protagonist, Snowman, apparently left alone in the world, strives to remember unusual words he once knew. Atwood writes, " Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they've gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been." Reading this passage in recent months led me to think about the catastrophic devaluation of intellection that seems to have occurred in American society: the willful repudiation of rigorous thinking, and objective facts, that helped propel Trump to victory. I remarked to Atwood that it felt like a prescient metaphor.

"It feels like real life," Atwood replied, quickly. "I am sure every generation feels that way, as they see younger people coming up who don't know what they are talking about." She asked if I knew Edith Wharton's short story "After Holbein": "This old gentleman in New York society goes off to visit this hostess of his youth, and they sit at this enormous table, and everything is as wonderful as he remembers it, and there are bouquets of flowers, and this delicious food, and they have this wonderful conversation and she looks as beautiful as ever. And you see it all from the point of view of the servants, and it's two old people sitting at a table eating gruel, and the flowers are all bunches of newspaper."

News comes often to Atwood of friends who have died, or are ailing. Gibson has been given a diagnosis of early dementia, and they are both supporters of the Canadian dying-with-dignity movement. "The story of Wharton's that really terrifies me is 'The Pelican,' " she went on, recalling a tale in which a well-born widow takes to giving public lectures to support her young son, and then continues to give them for decades, even after the son is a grown man. "People are very sympathetic, but the lecture itself is like watching someone unreeling from her mouth a very long spool of blank paper," Atwood said. "That's the metaphor that frightens me-that I am going to be up in public, unravelling from my mouth a long spool of blank paper."

In March, Atwood came to New York City, for the annual National Book Critics Circle award ceremony, where she was being given a lifetime-achievement award. (Atwood recently remarked, on an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, that she is at the "Gold Watch and Goodbye" phase of her career.) The ceremony was held at the New School, and the collective mood of the assembled editors, critics, and writers-a concentration of New York's liberal intelligentsia in its purest form-was celebratory, as such events always are, but also agitated and galvanized. That morning, President Trump had issued his first federal budget plan, and he had proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as ending funding for public broadcasting, and closing agencies devoted to social welfare and environmental oversight. The crowd felt like bruised defenders of a civilization that they hadn't realized was susceptible to attack.

Trump's agenda was criticized by many of the award recipients. Michelle Dean, a young Canadian writer who won the association's annual prize for excellence in reviewing, declared, "The struggle we presently find ourselves in is not a mistake, and not a fluke. . . . It crept into our lives while we were napping. Power sometimes works that way, but I still wish we hadn't missed it." Lately, Dean added, she'd been rereading "The Handmaid's Tale" for the first time since high school: "There are so few books like that being published right now. The application of literary intelligence to this question of power-it's kind of out of style. And many writers just seem more interested in exploring the self."

Two days before Trump's Inauguration, Atwood had published an essay in The Nation, in which she questioned the generalities sometimes made by left-leaning intellectuals about the role of the artist in public life. "Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals-dentists, for example-generally avoid," she observed. "There's nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. 'Mein Kampf' was a book." In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. "The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect," she wrote. "At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win."

At the New School, when Atwood, wearing a long black dress with a patterned black shawl draped around her shoulders, was summoned to the stage, she took a cheekier tack than she had taken in the Nation essay. "I'm very, very, very happy to be here, because they let me across the border," she said, her voice low and deliberate. Atwood characterized literary criticism as a thankless task. "Authors are sensitive beings," she observed, to titters of amusement. "You, therefore, know that all positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time." An author whom she had reviewed once berated her use of the adjective "accomplished," she recalled. " 'Don't you know that "accomplished" is an insult?' " she deadpanned. "I didn't know."

Then her remarks took an exhortatory turn. "Why do I do such a painful task?" she said. "For the same reason I give blood. We must all do our part, because if nobody contributes to this worthy enterprise then there won't be any, just when it's most needed." Now is one of those times, she warned: "Never has American democracy felt so challenged." The necessary conditions for dictatorship, Atwood noted, include the shutting down of independent media, which mutes the expression of contrary or subversive opinions; writers form part of the fragile barrier standing between authoritarian control and open democracy. "There are still places on this planet where to be caught reading you, or even me, would incur a severe penalty," Atwood said. "I hope there will soon be fewer such places." Her voice dropped to a stage whisper: "I am not holding my breath."

In the meantime, she thanked the book critics, though even her gratitude carried a note of subversion. "I will cherish this lifetime-achievement award from you, though, like all sublunar blessings, it is a mixed one," she said. "Why do I only get one lifetime? Where did this lifetime go?" ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the city in Texas where "The Handmaid's Tale" was banned. It also mistakenly cited the date of first publication in the U.S., rather than in Canada.

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Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia

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Rebecca Mead on Margaret Atwood, the author of dystopian novels about misogyny, oppression, and environmental destruction, such as "The Handmaid's Tale."

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The Handmaid's Tale is nominated for 20 Emmy Awards this year, after winning 8 for Hulu last year including 2017's Outstanding Drama Series. The first season of the television show is based on the novel of the same name, set in an oppressive, dystopian future in the Republic of Gilead which has overtaken the United States.

Not only was the television adaptation a critical success, Amazon lists The Handmaid's Tale as the most read fiction book on Kindle and Audible in 2017, beating 'A Game of Thrones' and all of the 'Harry Potter' books. Author Margaret Atwood published the bestselling novel in 1985 and is not surprised that the totalitarian theme of the book is resonating with audiences today.

"We live in a very anxiety-producing moment because a lot of the received wisdom is being challenged and overturned," says Atwood in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. "The world players are moving rapidly around the stage, taking positions that we're not used to having them take, so it makes a lot of people anxious."

Atwood started writing The Handmaid's Tale in 1984 while living in West Berlin on a grant that provided funding to filmmakers, writers and musicians to live and work in the West German district occupied by the allies.

"At that time it was a very dark, empty city, by which I mean there were a lot of vacant apartments," says Atwood. "People didn't want to live there, because it was surrounded by the wall. They brought in foreign artists to be there just so people wouldn't feel so cut off."

She says living through the Cold War in divided Berlin was instructive to the mood she created for Gilead in the book.

"We also visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland at that time," says Atwood. "It informed the atmosphere but not the content if you can see what I mean. The experience of having people change the subject, being fearful of talking to you, not knowing who they can trust, all of that was there."

Atwood finished writing the novel the following year in the United States, while working at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

"When I was writing it, we were still in an age in which America was seen as a beacon of light, of liberal democracy, a model for the rest of the world," says Atwood. "We're not there anymore, because the rest of the world has changed and so has America. That is why I think people are seeing The Handmaid's Tale as more possible than they did when it was first published."

A third season of the series that narrates the life of enslaved handmaid Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, was recently announced by Hulu. The streaming service has 20-million subscribers and doesn't release viewership numbers, but said in May that 2018's season 2 premiere was streamed by twice the number of viewers as the season 1 premiere last year.

Atwood is currently a consultant on the television show and notes that she has no veto, though says she is generally happy with the direction the series has taken. She says she would like to see the oppressive Aunt Lydia survive the cliffhanger season 2 finale in which she was attacked by a handmaid, and hopes to see more of Offred's best friend Moira who escaped from Gilead, in season 3.

Atwood is quick-witted in person, unpretentious and doesn't miss a beat. She acknowledges that the cultural impact of Offred's story has been significant.

"It's become an international symbol of protest," says Atwood. "Especially in situations in which women's rights are in question, or are being removed from them."

Dozens of women took to the streets in Buenos Aires this month wearing the red cloaks and white bonnets made famous by the subjugated women of The Handmaid's Tale. The protestors are in support of a historic bill to decriminalize abortion that will be voted on by the Argentinian Senate on August 8. Demonstrators across the United States have worn similar outfits to protest a woman's right to choose in the past.

It is not just abortion rights that The Handmaid's Tale represents. Atwood mentions fair laws, fair pay, and equal pay for work of equal value as issues that need to be addressed today. The 78-year old resists labeling herself a feminist, noting that there are many definitions of the word, but sees Iceland as a shining light in terms of women's rights.

"Iceland is probably a country that we should be studying because they've gone pretty far with equality, and their happiness quotient seems to be quite high."

The Nordic country ranks number 1 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index. Women make up 48% of elected representatives in parliament, and a new law introduced on January 1, 2018 mandates that companies prove that they pay men and women equally, or face fines.

"Does it make for a happier society on the whole if women have more equality? That does seem to be the case. Does it make for a more prosperous economy if women are engaged in the workplace and in decision making around the economy? That too seems to be the case," says Atwood.

Atwood herself was born in Ottawa, Canada, the middle child of an older brother and younger sister. She credits her female relatives with providing her with invaluable lessons early in life.

"They were all pretty tough in their various ways, so my image of a competent woman did not come with a negligee and a box of chocolates," says Atwood. "Being from a country that was pretty close to the frontier experience, I would say 'Granny on the farm' was more of a viable role model for me. I've got nothing against having your own toolkit, and knowing some elementary plumbing."

Her no-nonsense attitude led her to a B.A. at The University of Toronto and a Masters at Harvard's Radcliffe College. One of Atwood's first jobs out of university was as a market research interview writer. She moved back to Canada in 1964 and taught English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and published her first book, a collection of poetry the same year.

"When I first started in Canada, it wasn't just that women weren't viewed as serious writers. Writing itself was not viewed as a serious pursuit. One of the things we did to overcome it was we started publishing companies, some of which are still going, and I was the founder of one of those," says Atwood, referring to the Canadian publisher House of Anansi.

The 78-year old has since lived and written in 7 countries and published 40 books. She received a writing fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation at age 44, just before starting work on The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is pleased to see the contemporary options now available to writers looking to finance their work, such as crowdsourcing platforms Patreon and Unbound.

"The main thing writers have to figure out to do is how to pay their bills," says Atwood. "Patreon, they sponsor your project, whatever it is, and Unbound, they will crowdfund a book that they wish could be published. What writers need is time, and all of these things buy time. Are you going to stay up all night and have a day job? I've certainly done that. Or, are you going to not have to have a day job, and maybe get a bit more sleep?"

In addition to being an author, Atwood is a vocal advocate for environmental issues. The impact of climate change is a theme that runs through her work, and she notes particular concern at the state of the oceans and how food supply may impact women and children in the future.

Atwood's Toronto-based company, O.W.Toad, states that it does not use air conditioners or purchase plastic water bottles, and when airplane travel is necessary carbon neutral credits are purchased. Publishing contracts specify that acid-free paper must be used.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood attributes Gilead's declining birthrate on pollution and environmental mismanagement. She notes that everything that went into the novel had a historical precedence and that the producers of the television show have continued that principle in subsequent seasons. I asked her if when she was writing the book she believed the circumstances in the novel would come to fruition.

"Did I think it was going to come more true? No," says Atwood. "But, I understood that that possibility was there."

... Read More

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Author Margaret Atwood On Why 'The Handmaid's Tale' Resonates In 2018

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"We live in a very anxiety-producing moment because a lot of the received wisdom is being challenged and overturned," says Atwood. "The world players are moving rapidly around the stage, taking positions that we're not used to having them take, so it makes a lot of people anxious."

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Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale

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Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both. The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millio…

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Margaret Atwood has said worries about women's issues after the US election have made her book The Handmaid's Tale the latest dystopian novel to shoot back up bestseller lists.

The book, about a theocratic dictatorship in the US where women are forced to bear children for the ruling class, topped Amazon's bestseller list earlier this week, and still ranks in the top 10.

In an interview during Cuba's international book fair, Atwood said sales of The Handmaid's Tale were also boosted by a trailer during the Super Bowl for its new televised adaptation by video streaming site Hulu.

"When it first came out it was viewed as being far-fetched," the 77-year old said of her novel that was originally published in 1985. "However, when I wrote it I was making sure I wasn't putting anything into it that human beings had not already done somewhere at some time."

Atwood, who won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, said The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by her studies of 17th-century America and its puritan values.

"You are seeing a bubbling up of it now," she said, referring in particular to moves under President Donald Trump to restrict the right to abortion. Trump said last year women should face punishment if they receive abortions, a comment he later retracted.

"It's back to 17th-century puritan values of new England at that time in which women were pretty low on the hierarchy."

The first-person narrator of The Handmaid's Tale tries to escape to Canada. Some have already taken refuge there since Trump's election, Atwood said, adding that it had historically been seen as a place of relative safety.

In the TV adaptation that debuts in April and features Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss, Atwood plays a cameo role.

Dystopian fiction is enjoying a moment. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949, ranks third on Amazon's bestseller list.

Orwell's book features an authoritarian government that spies on its citizens and forces them into "doublethink", or simultaneously accepting contradictory versions of the truth. Sales spiked two weeks ago after a senior White House official, Kellyanne Conway, used the term "alternative facts", an expression some denounced as "Orwellian".

"We think as progress being a straight line forever upwards," said Atwood. "But it never has been so, you can think you are being a liberal democracy but then - bang - you're Hitler's Germany. That can happen very suddenly."

Cuba and Canada were alike in that they were small countries that both keenly felt the impact of international politics, said the author, who has made regular trips to the Caribbean island since a first cultural exchange in the 1980s. Birdwatching was one of the activities that kept her and partner Graeme Gibson coming back, she said.

Several new editions of her books are being presented at the Cuba book fair, which runs until 19 February and in which nearly 50 countries are participating.

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Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale sales boosted by fear of Trump

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Margaret Atwood has said worries about women's issues after the US election have made her book The Handmaid's Tale the latest dystopian novel to shoot back up bestseller lists. The book, about a theocratic dictatorship in the US where women are forced to bear children for the ruling class, topped Amazon's bestseller list earlier this week, and still ranks in the top 10.

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A great opportunity to listen to Attwood (57.18)

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A great opportunity to listen to Attwood (57.18)

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The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and showrunner Bruce Miller (full panel) | BookCon 2017

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Beginning theory An introduction to literary and cultural theory Second edition Peter Barry © Peter Barry 1995, 2002 ISBN: 0719062683 Contents Acknowledgements - page x Preface to the second edition - xii Introduction - 1 About this book - 1 Approaching theory - 6 Slop and think: reviewing your study of literature

to date - 8 My own 'stock-taking' - 9 1 Theory before 'theory' - liberal humanism - 11 The history of English studies - 11 Stop and think - 11 Ten tenets of liberal humanism - 16 Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis - some key moments - 21 Liberal humanism in practice - 31 The transition to 'theory' - 32 Some recurrent ideas in critical theory - 34 Selected reading - 36 2 Structuralism - 39 Structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs 39 Signs of the fathers - Saussure - 41 Stop and think - 45 The scope of structuralism - 46 What structuralist critics do - 49 Structuralist criticism: examples - 50 Stop and think - 53 Stop and think - 55

Stop and think - 57 Selected reading - 60 3 Post-structuralism and deconstruction - 61 Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism - 61 Post-structuralism - life on a decentred planet - 65 Stop and think - 68 Structuralism and post-structuralism - some practical differences - 70 What post-structuralist critics do - 73 Deconstruction: an example - 73 Selected reading - 79 4 Postmodernism - 81 What is postmodernism? What was modernism? - 81 'Landmarks' in postmodernism: Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard - 85 Stop and think - 90 What postmodernist critics do - 91 Postmodernist criticism: an example - 91 Selected reading - 94 5 Psychoanalytic criticism - 96 Introduction - 96

How Freudian interpretation works - 98 Stop and think - 101 Freud and evidence - 102 What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do - 105 Freudian psychoanlaytic criticism: examples - 105 Lacan - 108 What Lacanian critics do - 115 Lacanian criticism: an example - 115 Selected reading - 118 6 Feminist criticism - 121 Feminism and feminist criticism - 121 Feminist criticism and the role of theory - 124 Feminist criticism and language - 126 Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis - 130 Stop and think - 133 What feminist critics do - 134 feminist criticism: an example - 134 Selected reading - 136 7 Lesbian/gay criticism - 139 Lesbian and gay theory - 139 Lesbian feminism - 140

Queer theory - 143 What lesbian/gay critics do - 148 Stop and think - 149 Lesbian/gay criticism: an example - 150 Selected reading - 153 8 Marxist criticism - 156 Beginnings and basics of Marxism - 156 Marxist literary criticism: general - 158 'Leninist' Marxist criticism - 159 'Engelsian' Marxist criticism - 161 The present: the influence of Althusser - 163 Stop and think - 166 What Marxist critics do - 167 Marxist criticism: an example - 168 Selected reading - 170 9 New historicism and cultural materialism - 172 New historicism - 172 New and old historicisms - some differences - 174 New historicism and Foucault - 175 Advantages and disadvantages of new historicism - 177 Stop and think - 178

What new historicists do - 179 New historicism: an example - 179 Cultural materialism - 182 How is cultural materialism different from new historicism? - 184 Stop and think - 186 What cultural materialist critics do - 187 Cultural materialism: an example - 187 Selected reading - 189 10 Postcolonial criticism - 192 Background - 192 Postcolonial reading - 194 Stop and think - 198 What postcolonial critics do - 199 Postcolonialist criticism: an example - 200 Selected reading - 201 11 Stylistics - 203 Stylistics: a theory or a practice? - 203 A brief historical account: from rhetoric, to philology, to linguistics, to stylistics, to new stylistics - 205 How does stylistics differ from standard close reading? - 208

The ambitions of stylistics - 210 Stop and think - 213 What stylistic critics do - 214 Stylistics: examples - 215 Note - 219 Selected reading - 219 12 Narratology - 222 Telling stories - 222 Aristotle - 224 Vladimir Propp - 226 Gerard Genette - 231 1. Is the basic narrative mode 'mimetic' or 'diegetic'? - 231 2. How is the narrative focalised? - 232 3. Who is telling the story? - 233 4. How is time handled in the story? - 234 5. How is the story 'packaged'? - 235 6. How are speech and thought represented? - 237 'Joined-up' narratology - 239 Stop and think - 240 What narratologists do - 241 Narratology: an example - 241

Selected reading - 246 13 Ecocriticism - 248 Ecocriticism or green studies? - 248 Culture and nature - 251 Turning criticism inside out - 257 Stop and think - 261 What ecocritics do - 264 Ecocriticism: an example - 264 Selected reading - 269 Appendices - 272 1 Edgar Allan Poe, 'The oval portrait' - 272 2 Dylan Thomas, 'A refusal to mows' - 275 3 William Cowper, 'The castaway' - 276 Where do we go from here? Further reading - 279 General guides - 279 Reference books - 280 General readers - 280 Applying critical theory: twelve early examples - 281 Against theory - 283 Index - 285

Acknowledgements You'd better not look down, If you want to keep flying So says the great B. B. King. It is excellent advice, and trying to stick to it helped me to complete this book. I was also greatly helped by the advice and expertise of Anita Roy, Humanities Editor at Manchester University Press. Annie Eagleton was a meticulous and helpful copy-editor, and Alison Abel provided valuable help at the proof-reading stage. Many of the chapters are based on material I used on the 'Introduction to Literature' and 'Concepts of Criticism' courses at LSU. The former is taught by a 'team-ministry' of various colleagues, whose comments and advice I have been most grateful for over the past few years. In particular, I must thank Gillian Skinner for reading sections of the manuscript and making a number of extremely useful suggestions, all of which I have acted upon. Nicola King supplied the 'What feminist critics do' checklist, and I have adopted this idea for all the chapters. Of course, all the faults which remain in the book are entirely my own responsibility. Steve Dorney rescued me when my technical expertise proved unequal to the task of producing hard copy from my (as I thought) cunningly adapted disks. Marian and Tom enabled me to write the book by giving me frequent periods of study leave from Sainsbury's and 'Playdays'. The book is for my mother and in memory of my father, Francis Barry. I will be most interested to hear from any users of this book who might wish to write to me (either via Manchester University Press, or directly to English Department, UCW, Aberystwyth, Dyfed SY23 3DY, Wales, UK ([email protected]). If anything in the book seems unclear, or unnecessary, or misrepresented, or wrongly omitted, or fails to acknowledge a source, I will endeavour to improve or rectify matters in any subsequent edition. Sections of Chapter 3 have previously appeared (in a slightly different form) in The Use of English and The English Review. Peter Barry LSU April 1995 Preface to the second edition Since the first edition of this book (which was written in the earlier part of the 1990s) literary theory has continued to change and develop. To reflect these developments, I have added a new chapter on ecocriticism, making this the first book of its kind to register the increasing interest

in 'Green' approaches to literature. Of course, my own feelings about the various kinds of theory have changed a bit too. In particular, I now find structuralism rather more interesting than poststructuralism, and to reflect this I have added a new chapter on narratology, a branch of structuralist theory which lends itself very readily to enjoyable and thought-provoking practical applications. Apart from these new chapters, the second edition is the same book as the first, but with up-dated bibliographies. With my colleagues at Aberystwyth I teach on a range of theory courses, notably the 'RTRT' modules ('Reading Theory/Reading Text'), whose original twenty-seven mini-topics I helped reduce to four somewhat larger ones. This is more or less what the structuralists Levi-Strauss and Todorov wanted to do to the thirty-one narrative functions posited by Vladimir Propp (see Chapter 12), which shows how keen we are at Aber to apply the lessons of literary theory to our everyday teaching lives. I am very grateful to my colleagues and students for all the discussions we have had about 'RTRT', and to students on the 'Short Story' option over the past few years with whom the various theoretical approaches to narrative have been tried out. The cartoon narrative on page 225 is supplied courtesy of Gray Dudek, Marketing Division of Pedigree Masterfoods, a division of Mars UK 2001. I am very grateful to Matthew Frost at MUP lor his tireless promotion of this book (which is now part of the 'Beginnings' series), and, for nearly everything else, to Marianne and Tom (who has graduated since the first edition from 'Play-days' to 'Gameboy Advance'). English Department, Aberystwyth Introduction About this book The 1980s probably saw the high-water mark of literary theory. That decade was the 'moment' of theory, when the topic was fashionable and controversial. In the 1990s there was a steady flow of books and articles with titles like After Theory (Thomas Docherty, 1990) or 'Post- Theory' (Nicolas Tredell, in The Critical Decade, 1993). As such titles suggest, the 'moment of theory' has probably passed. So why another 'primer' of theory so late in the day? The simple answer is that after the moment of theory there comes, inevitably, the 'hour' of theory, when it ceases to be the exclusive concern of a dedicated minority and enters the intellec-tual bloodstream as a taken-for-granted aspect of the curriculum. At this stage the glamour fades, the charisma is 'routinised', and it becomes the day-to-day business of quite a large number of people to learn or teach (or both) this material. There are evident dangers of over-simplifying things and so offering a false reassurance to students facing the difficulties of this topic for the first time. All the same, the main responsibility of anyone attempting a book

like this one is to meet the demand for clear explanation and demonstration. If the task were impossible, and the mountain of theory could be climbed only by experts, then the whole enterprise of establishing it on undergraduate courses would have been a mistake. The emphasis on practice means that this is a 'work-book', not just a 'text-book'. As you read you will find suggested activities, headed 'STOP and THINK', which are designed to give you some 'hands-on' experience of literary theory and its problems. You will not just be reading about it, reducing theory to a kind of spectator sport played only by superstars, but starting to do it for yourself. Becoming a participant in this way will help you to make some personal sense of theory, and will, I hope, increase your confidence, even if you suspect that your practical efforts remain fairly rudimentary. It is also hoped that the 'STOP and think' activities will provide the basis for initiating seminar discussion if this book is being used in connection with a taught course on critical theory. All the critical approaches described in this book are a reaction against something which went before, and a prior knowledge of these things cannot be assumed. Hence, I start with an account of the 'liberal humanism' against which all these newer critical approaches, broadly speaking, define themselves. Likewise, the currently successful versions of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic criticism all define themselves against earlier versions of each of these, and therefore I try in each case to explain the earlier versions first. I think that many of the current difficulties students have with theory arise from trying to miss out this stage. My approach amounts to throwing you in at the shallow end. Potentially this is more painful than being thrown in at the deep end - the technique used in most other student introductions to literary theory - but it does reduce the risk of drowning. It should, perhaps, be stressed that the other general introductions to theory that are now available represent a stage on from this one. They offer an even and comprehensive coverage of the entire field, but with relatively little in the way of practical discussion of applications. I find them very useful, but they seem to me to be recapitulations of literary theory, often from a viewpoint more philosophical than literary, rather than introductions to it. The evenness of the coverage means that the pace never varies, so that there is no opportunity to stop and dwell upon an example in a reflective way. By contrast, I haven't tried to be comprehensive, and I do try to provide variation in pace by selecting questions, or examples, or key essays for closer treatment. Gen- erally, the available introductions don't grapple with the problems of teaching or learning theory: until recently, the only two that tried to do so were Durant and Fabb's Literary Studies in Action and Lynn's Texts and Contexts (see Further reading section). Both these are interesting but eccentric books whose rather fragmented format prevents any real flow of discussion or explanation. At undergraduate level the main problem is to decide how much theory can reasonably be handled by beginners. Time is not unlimited, and there is a need to think about a realistic syllabus lather than an ideal one. Theorists, like novelists, are dauntingly plentiful, and the

subject of theory cannot succeed in lecture rooms and seminars unless we fashion it into a student-centred syllabus. We are rightly dismissive these days of the notion of leaching a 'Great Tradition' of key novelists, as advocated by the critic F. R. Leavis. But Leavis's Great Tradition was essentially a syllabus, manageable within a year-long undergraduate course on the novel. It is possible to read and adequately discuss a novel or two by Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence within that time. We need to make sure that what is presented as theory today likewise makes teaching sense. When we are about to move into something new it is sensible to first take stock of what we already have, if only so that the distance travelled can later be measured. So in the first chapter of this book I invite you to look back critically and reflectively on your previous training in literary studies. We then go on to look at the assumptions behind traditional literary criticism, or 'liberal humanism' as theorists usually call it. The term 'liberal humanism' became current in the 1970s, as a shorthand (and mainly hostile) way of referring to the kind of criticism which held sway before theory. The word 'liberal' in this formulation roughly means not politically radical, and hence generally evasive and non- committal on political issues. 'Humanism' implies something similar; it suggests a range of negative attributes, such as 'non-Marxist' and 'non-feminist', and 'non-theoretical'. There is also the implication that liberal humanists believe in 'human nature' as something fixed and constant which great literature expresses. Liberal humanists did not (and do not, as a rule) use this name of themselves, but, says an influential school of thought, if you practise literary criticism and do not call yourself a Marxist critic, or a structuralist, or a stylistician, or some such, then you are probably a liberal humanist, whether or not you admit or recognise this. In the course of explaining some of the major critical ideas now current, this book provides summaries or descriptions of a number of important theoretical essays. But I want to stress at the outset that it is important, too, that you read some of the major theorists at first hand. Yet as soon as you begin to turn the pages of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, or Derrida you will encounter writing which looks dauntingly difficult and off-putting. How, then, to cope? I suggest that it is much better to read intensely in theory than to read widely. By this I mean that you will gain little from reading chapter after chapter of a book that is making little sense to you. You will gain much more by using the same amount of reading time to read one crucial and frequently mentioned chapter or article several times for yourself. Having a detailed knowledge of what is actually said in the pages of a well-known argument, being aware of how the argument unfolds and how it is qualified or con-textualised, will be far more useful to you than a superficial overall impression gained from commentaries or from desperate skim- reading. However daunting the material, you have to make your reading meditative, reflective, and personal. Try to become a slow reader. Further, some intensive reading of this kind will enable you to quote lines other than the handful that are cited in all the commentaries. And most importantly, your view of things will be your own, perhaps quirky and incomplete, but at least not just the echo and residue of some published commentator's prepacked version. In a nut-

shell, intensive reading is often more useful than extensive reading. 'English studies' is founded on the notion of close reading, and while there was a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when this idea was frequently disparaged, it is undoubtedly true that nothing of any interest can happen in this subject without close reading. I suggest, therefore, that you try out for yourself a useful form of intensive reading, the technique known as 'SQ3R'. This breaks down the reading of a difficult chapter or article into five stages, as designated by the letters 'SQRRR', or 'SQ3R', as is it usually given. The five stages are: S - That is, Survey the whole chapter or section fairly rapidly, skimming though it to get a rough sense of the scope and nature of the argument. Remember that information is not evenly spread throughout a text. It tends to be concentrated in the opening and closing paragraphs (where you often get useful summaries of the whole), and the 'hinge points' of the argument are often indicated in the opening and closing sentences of paragraphs. Q - Having skimmed the whole, set yourself some Questions, some things you hope to find out from what you are reading. This makes you an 'active' reader rather than a passive one, and gives your reading a purpose. Rl - Now Read the whole piece. Use a pencil if the copy is your own to underline key points, query difficulties, circle phrases worth remembering, and so on. Don't just sit in front of the pages. If the book is not your own jot something down on paper as you read, however minimal. R2 - Now, close the book and Recall what you have read. Jot down some summary points. Ask whether your starting questions have been answered, or at least clarified. Spell out some of the difficulties that remain. In this way, you record some concrete outcomes to your reading, so that your time doesn't simply evaporate uselessly once the book is closed. R3 - This final stage is the Review. It happens after an interval has elapsed since the reading. You can experiment, but initially try doing it the following day. Without opening the book again, or referring back to your notes, review what you have gained from the reading; remind yourself of the question you set yourself, the points you jotted down at the Recall stage, and any important phrases from the essay. If this produces very little, then refer back to your notes. If they make little sense, then repeat the Survey stage, and do an accelerated Read, by reading the first and last paragraphs of the essay, and skim-reading the main body assisted by your pencilled markings. You may well have evolved a study technique something like this already. It is really just common sense. But it will help to ensure that you gain something from a theoretical text, no matter how intially forbidding it might be.

Finally, it will, I hope, go without saying that no comprehensiveness is possible in a format such as this. Clearly, also, this book does not contain all you need to know about theory, and it does not in itself (without the reading it refers you to) constitute a 'course' in literary theory. It leaves out a good deal, and it deals fairly briskly with many topics. It is a starter-pack, intended to give you a sense of what theory is all about, and suggest how it might affect your literary studies. Above all, it aims to interest you in theory. Approaching theory If you are coming to literary theory soon after taking courses in such subjects as media studies, communications studies, or socio-linguistics, then the general 'feel' of the new theoretical approaches to literature may well seem familiar. You will already be 'tuned in' to the emphasis on ideas which is one of their characteristics; you will be undaunted by their use of technical terminology, and unsurprised by their strong social and political interests. If, on the other hand, you took a 'straight' 'A' Level literature or 'Access' course with the major emphasis on set books, then much of what is contained in this book will probably be new to you. Initially, you will have the problem of getting on the wave-length of these different ways of looking at literature. As you would expect in studying at degree level, you will encounter problems which do not have generally agreed solutions, and it is inevitable that your understanding of the matters discussed here will remain partial, in both senses of that word, as everybody's does. But whichever of these two categories you fall into, I want to assure you at the outset that the doubts and uncertainties you will have about this material are probably not due to: 1. any supposed mental incapacity of your own, for example, to your not having 'a philosophical mind', or not possessing the kind of X-ray intellect which can penetrate jargon and see the sense beneath, or 2. the fact that your schooling did not include intensive tuition in, say, linguistics or philosophy, or 3. the innate and irreducible difficulty of the material itself (a point we will come back to). Rather, nearly all the difficulties you will have will be the direct result of the way theory is written, and the way it is written about. Tor literary theory, it must be emphasised, is not innately difficult. There are very few inherently complex ideas in existence in literary theory. On the contrary, the whole body of work known collectively as 'theory' is based upon some dozen or so ideas, none of which are in themselves difficult. (Some of them are listed on pp. 34-6). What is difficult, however, is the language of theory. Many of the major writers on theory are French, so that much of what we read is in translation, sometimes of a rather clumsy kind. Being a Romance language, French takes most of its words directly from Latin, and it lacks the reassuring Anglo-Saxon layer of vocabulary which provides us with so many of our brief, familiar, everyday terms. Hence, a close English translation of a French academic text will contain a large number of longer Latinate words, always perceived as a source of difficulty by English-speaking readers. Writing with a high proportion of these characteristics can be off-putting and wearying, and it is easy to lose patience.

But the frame of mind I would recommend at the outset is threefold. Firstly, we must have some initial patience with the difficult surface of the writing. We must avoid the too-ready conclusion that literary theory is just meaningless, pretentious jargon (that is, that the theory is at fault). Secondly, on the other hand, we must, for obvious reasons, resist the view that we ourselves are intellectually incapable of coping with it (that is, that we are at fault). Thirdly, and crucially, we must not assume that the difficulty of theoretical writing is always the dress of profound ideas - only that it might sometimes be, which leaves the onus of discrimination on us. To sum up this attitude: we are looking, in literary theory, for something we can use, not something which will use us. We ought not to issue theory with a blank cheque to spend our time for us. (If we do, it will certainly spend more than we can afford.) Do not, then, be endlessly patient with theory. Require it to be clear, and expect it, in the longer term, to deliver something solid. Don't be content, as many seem to be, just to see it as 'challenging' conventional practice or 'putting it in question' in some never quite specified way. Challenges are fine, but they have to amount to something in the end. STOP and THINK: reviewing your study of literature to date Before we go on, into what may well be a new stage in your involvement with literature, it would be sensible to 'take stock' and reflect a little on the nature of our literary education to date. The purpose of doing this is to begin the process of making visible, and hence open to scrutiny, the methods and procedures which have become so familar to you (probably going back to the time when you began secondary school) that they are no longer visible at all as a distinct intellectual practice. But stock-taking is not part of our normal intellectual routine, unfortunately, and it is a difficult and demanding thing to do. Yet please do not skip this section, since theory will never make any sense to you until you feel the need for it yourself. What I would like you to do is to try to become conscious of the nature of your own previous work in English, by recalling: 1. what first made you decide to study English, what you hoped to gain from doing so, and whether that hope was realised; 2. which books and authors were chosen for study and what they had in common; 3. which books and authors now seem conspicuously absent; 4. what, in general terms, your previous study taught you (about 'life', say, or conduct, or about literature itself). Doing this will help you to begin to obtain a perspective on your experience of literature to date. Spend an hour or so doing it. I carried out a similar exercise myself as part of the process of working on this book, and some of the result is given below. It is intended more as a prompt than a model, and I have not responded in any systematic way to the four questions above. Reproducing it will perhaps help to 'personalise' the voice behind this book, but I leave you to decide whether you want to look at this before or after doing your own. My own 'stock-taking'

Since literary theory is the topic of this book I will concentrate on detailing the course of my acquaintanceship with it. In fact, I heard nothing at all about literary theory as an undergraduate at London University in the late 1960s. I took a straightforward 'Wulf-to-Woolf' English course {Beowulf to Virgina Woolf) with compulsory Old and Middle English papers. Essentially, I now realise, the English course I followed in the late 1960s retained the shape and the outlook of the pioneer English degree courses established at London University more than a century before. The one innovation in English teaching at London was to recognise the existence of something called American literature and to appoint a lecturer* to teach it. As a result of taking this American course I became an enthusiast for a range of American poets who were part of the 'alternative culture' of the time. At the same time, and for several years afterwards, I was also trying to write poetry of more or less this kind. It quickly became apparent that conventional criticism could make very little of poetry like this. So by the early 1970s I was beginning to look at newer critical approaches than those I had encountered at university. But I wasn't at that time an advocate of literary theory, since 'theory' as such was then a non- existent category in literary studies. * The lecturer was Eric Mottram, who died in January 1995. The change of emphasis seems to have happened in my own case around 1973, when the words 'structuralism' and 'semiotics' begin to feature in notes about what I was reading and in the titles of the books and articles I was interested in. Structuralism, we were then learning, was a new kind of literary theory which had recently become prominent in France, and semiotics ('the science of signs') was one of its sub-branches. I was loosely connected with the London Graduate Seminar started by Frank Kermode after he became Professor of English at University College, London. The group debated the work of the structuralist Roland Barthes and caught Kermode's enthusiasm for it. I bought and read everything by Barthes then in print in England, no great undertaking since all that was available was Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, probably his least interesting and least accessible books. His much more engaging collection Mythologies appeared in English in 1973 in the Paladin imprint. 1973 was also the year when The Times Literary Supplement devoted the major part of two issues (5 and 12 October) to a 'Survey of Semiotics', with articles by Umberto Eco, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kris-teva, major names in these new kinds of critical theory and encountered then (in my case) for the first time. This interest in theory was consolidated in 1981 when I was asked to devise a course on literary theory as part of the BA programme at my previous college, and, in turn, a decade or so of teaching that course has led to this book. 1 Theory before 'theory' -liberal humanism The history of English studies It is difficult to understand liberal humanism (that is, the traditional approach to English studies, see the Introduction, pp. 3-4) without knowing something about how English developed as an

academic subject. So this is the topic of the next few pages. STOP and THINK The multiple choice questions below indicate the scope of what is touched upon in this section. Underline what you think are the right answers before reading further, and then correct your answers, if necessary, as you read on: 1. When do you think English was first taught as a degree subject in England?: was it 1428, 1528, 1628, 1728, 1828, or 1928? 2. At which institution was English first taught as a degree subject in England?: was it Oxford University, Cambridge University, London University, Southampton University, or none of these? 3. Until the nineteenth century you had to be a member of the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church and male to take a degree in England. True or false? 4. Until the nineteenth century lectures degree courses in England had to be unmarried Church of England clergy. True or false? 5. Until the nineteenth century women were not allowed to take degrees in England. True or false? 6. In the early twentieth century women could take degree courses in England, but were not allowed to receive degrees. True or false? To explain the rise of English studies we need to indicate briefly what higher education was like in England until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The short answer is that it was a Church of England monopoly. There were only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. These were divided into small individual colleges which were run like monastic institutions. Only men could attend them, of course, and students had to be Anglican communicants and attend the college chapel. The teachers were ordained ministers, who had to be unmarried, so that they could live in the college. The subjects available were the classics (ancient Greek and Latin literature), divinity (which was taken by those seeking ordination) and mathematics. Anyone who was Catholic, Jewish, or Methodist, or atheist was barred from entry, and hence, in effect, barred from the professions and the Civil Service. As far as higher education was concerned, then, you could say that right up to the 1820s, the organisation of higher education had not changed since the Middle Ages. Many attempts were made to reform the situation, expand higher education, and introduce practical subjects into the curriculum, but they all came up against entrenched conservative forces. The breakthough came in 1826 when a University College was founded in London with a charter to award degrees to men and women of all religions or none. From 1828 English was offered as a subject for study, and they appointed the first English Professor of English in 1829. However, it was not really English as we know it. It was mainly the study of English language, merely using literature as a source of linguistic examples. English literature as such was first

taught at King's College, London (another college of what later became London University) beginning in 1831. In 1840 F. D. Maurice was appointed Professor at King's. He introduced the study of set books, and his inaugural lecture lays down some of the principles of liberal humanism; the study of English literature would serve 'to emancipate us ... from the notions and habits which are peculiar to our own age', connecting us instead with 'what is fixed and enduring'. Maurice regarded literature as the peculiar property of the middle class and the expression of their values. For him the middle class represents the essence of Englishness (the aristocracy are part of an international elite, and the poor need to give all their attention to ensuring mere survival) so middle-class education should be peculiarly English, and therefore should centre on English litera-ture. Maurice was well aware of the political dimension of all this. People so educated would feel that they belonged to England, that they had a country. 'Political agitators' may ask what this can mean 'when his neighbour rides in a carriage and he walks on loot', but 'he will feel his nationality to be a reality, in spite of what they say'. In short, learning English will give people a stake in maintaining the political status quo without any redistribution of wealth. You can see from this that the study of English literature is being seen as a kind of substitute for religion. It was well known I hat attendance at church below middle-class level was very patchy. The worry was that the lower classes would feel that they had no stake in the country and, having no religion to teach them morality and restraint, they would rebel and something like the French Revolution would take place. The Chartist agitation of the 1830s was thought to be the start of this, and the first English courses are put in place at exactly the same time. The conventional reading of the origins of the subject of English is that this kind of thinking begins with Matthew Arnold in the 1850s and reaches its height with the publication of the New-bolt Report on the Teaching of English in England in 1921. It is evident from material like Maurice's inaugural lecture that this was happening much earlier. However, I do not accept the simplistic view that the founders of English were motiviated merely by a desire for ideological control. This was undoubtedly one of their motives, but the reality was much more complicated. There was, behind the teaching of early English, a distinctly Victorian mixture of class guilt about social inequalities, a genuine desire to improve things for everybody, a kind of missionary zeal to spread culture and enlightenment, and a self-interested desire to maintain social stability. London University degrees were taught by external licence at university colleges in major industrial cities - Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and so on, all these places eventually becoming major universities in their own right. Hence the spread of the subject at degree level throughout the country. However, Oxford and Cambridge were suspicious of the new subject of English and held out against it, Oxford until 1894 and Cambridge until 1911. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century there was vigorous discussion and campaigning to establish a Chair in English at Oxford. In 1887 the first attempt was defeated largely because of a speech in the Convocation by the Professor of History, Edward Freeman. Freeman's speech is another key document: it touches upon several problems in English which are still unresolved. He said:

We are told that the study of literature 'cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind'. These are all excellent things, only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine. This is a problem which has never been entirely solved in English. What, exactly, is its knowledge component? As a way of attaching specific and technical information to the study of English, early supporters had advocated the systematic study of language, but early advocates of English wanted to separate literature and language study, so that the one could be done without the other. Freeman's famous response was: 'what is meant by distinguishing literature from language if by literature is meant the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley?' Freeman won the argument. Literature had to be studied along with language, otherwise it would not be an academic subject at all. So when the English course was finally set up at Oxford in 1894 it contained a very heavy element of historical language study - Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Letto-Slavonic, Middle English, etc., from which it has still not managed to free itself. A greater sense of direction was given to English in the Cambridge English school in the 1920s. Because Cambridge English was the most recently founded, dating only from 1911, it had the least weight of tradition to fight against, so change was relatively easy. The engineers of this change were a group of people who began teaching at Cambridge in the 1920s. They were: I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis. I. A. Richards was the founder of a method of studying English which is still the norm today. Firstly, it made a decisive break between language and literature. Richards pioneered the technique called Practical Criticism (the title of his book in 1929). This made a close study of literature possible by isolating the text from history and context. Instead of having to study, say, the Renaissance period as a distinct historical moment, with its characteristic outlook, social formations, and so on, students could learn the techniques of practical criticism and simply analyse 'the words on the page'. The gain from this was that it was no longer possible to offer a vague, flowery, metaphorical effusion and call it criticism. Richards argued that there should be much more close attention to the precise details of the text. A second Cambridge pioneer was a pupil of Richards, William Empson, who presented his tutor with the manuscript of the book which was published in 1930 with the title Seven Types of Ambiguity. This book took the Richards method of close verbal analysis to what many felt to be an extreme. Empson identified seven different types of verbal difficulty in poetry (which is what he meant by ambiguity) and gave examples of them, with worked analyses. Another Cambridge critic, F. R. Leavis, said in a review that it is a highly disturbing book because it uses intelligence on poetry as seriously as if it were mathematics. Not everybody liked this ultra- close form of reading. T. S. Eliot called it the lemon-squeezer school of criticism, and his own critical writing is always on a much more generalised level. The last of these Cambridge pioneers was F. R. Leavis, probably the most influential figure in twentieth-century British criticism. In 1929 he met and married Q. D. Roth, subsequently

known as Q. D. Leavis. He had written his doctoral thesis on the relationship between journalism and literature. She had written hers on popular fiction. These were revolutionary topics, and a certain excitement and glamour attached to this couple in the 1930s. In 1932 they founded an important journal called Scrutiny and produced it together for twenty-one years. As the title implies, it extended the 'close-reading' method beyond poetry to novels and other material. Leavis's faults as a critic are that his close readings often turn out to contain lengthy quotations on which there is surprisingly little comment. The assumption is that the competent reader will see there what Leavis sees. As has been said of him, he often gives the impression that he is analysing the text when he is really just paraphrasing it. Secondly, his approach to literature is overwhelmingly moral; its purpose is to teach us about life, to transmit humane values. His critical terms are never properly defined. He famously refused the invitation offered by the critic Rene Wellek in the 1930s that he should 'spell out the principles on which he operated in a more explicit way than hitherto'. The result was one more degree of isolation for literary studies. In the period of its growth just surveyed, it claimed independence from language studies, from historical considerations, and from philosophical questions. The consensus which held the subject together from the 1930s to the 1960s rested upon the acceptance of these demarcations. The 'project' of 'theory' from the 1960s onwards is in essence to re-establish connections between literary study and these three academic fields from which it had so resolutely separated itself. Ten tenets of liberal humanism The personal account on pp. 9-10 mainly responds to the second and third of the four questions given earlier. I'm now going to expand on the implications of the fourth question, which asked what it is, exactly, that we learn when we 'do' English in the traditional way. Of course, we learn things about specific books and authors, but I mean here the more general values and attitudes which we absorb from English, and which remain as a kind of distilled essence of the subject when all these specific details have been forgotten. These are not usually formulated and stated, but they are, in a sense, all the more real for that, being simultaneously both pervasive and invisible. They can only be brought to the surface by a conscious effort of will, of the kind we are now trying to make. So what follows is a list of some of the elements which seem to constitute this 'distilled essence' of the subject, that is, the corpus of attitudes, assumptions, and ideas which we pick up, probably unawares, as we do it. These seem to have been what we were learning when we studied English - these are the values and beliefs which formed the subject's half-hidden curriculum: 1. The first thing, naturally, is an attitude to literature itself; good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature. Such writing is 'not for an age, but for all time' (as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare): it is 'news which stays news' (Ezra Pound's definition of literature). 2. The second point is the logical consequence of the first. The literary text contains its own meaning within itself. It doesn't require any elaborate process of placing it within a context, whether this be: (a) Socio-political - the context of a particular social 'background' or political situation, or

(b) Literary-historical - whereby the work could be seen as the product of the literary influences of other writers, or as shaped by the conventions of particular genres, or (c) Autobiographical - that is, as determined by the personal details of the author's life and thought. Of course, as scholars, most academics would assert the value of studying these contexts, but as critics their adherence to the approach which insists upon the primacy and self-sufficiency of the 'words on the page' commits them to the process which has been called 'on-sight close reading'. Essentially, this removes the text from all these contexts and presents it 'unseen' for unaided explication by the trained mind. 3. To understand the text well it must be detached from these contexts and studied in isolation. What is needed is the close verbal analysis of the text without prior ideological assumptions, or political pre-conditions, or, indeed, specific expectations of any kind, since all these are likely to interfere fatally with what the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold said was the true business of criticism, 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. 4. Human nature is essentially unchanging. The same passions, emotions, and even situations are seen again and again throughout human history. It follows that continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation. Thus, a well-known eighteenth-century definition of poetry maintains that it is 'what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed'. Likewise, Samuel Johnson famously denigrated Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy on the grounds of its novelty, that is, its originality. 5. Individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique 'essence'. This transcends our environmental influences, and though individuality can change and develop (as do characters in novels), it can't be transformed -hence our uneasiness with those scenes (quite common, for instance, in Dickens) which involve a 'change of heart' in a character, so that the whole personality is shifted into a new dimension by force of circumstance - the miser is transformed and changes his ways, or the good man or woman becomes corrupted by wealth. Such scenes imply a malleability in the essence of character which is at odds with this underlying assumption of English studies. The discipline as a whole believed in what is now called the 'transcendent subject', which is the belief that the individual ('the subject') is antecedent to, or transcends, the forces of society, experience, and language. 6. The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values; but not in a programmatic way: if literature, and criticism, become overtly and directly political they necessarily tend towards propaganda. And as Keats said, 'we distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us', that is, literature which too obviously wants to convert us or influence our views.

7. Form and content in literature must be fused in an organic way, so that the one grows inevitably from the other. Literary form should not be like a decoration which is applied externally to a completed structure. Imagery, for instance, or any other poetic form which is detachable from the substance of the work in this way, rather than being integrated with it, is merely 'fanciful' and not truly 'imaginative' (the distinction made by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria). 8. This point about organic form applies above all to 'sincerity'. Sincerity (comprising truth-to- experience, honesty towards the self, and the capacity for human empathy and compassion) is a quality which resides within the language of literature. It isn't a fact or an intention behind the work, which could be gleaned by comparing, say, a poet's view of an event with other more 'factual' versions, or from discovering independent, external information about an author's history or conduct. Rather, sincerity is to be discovered within the text in such matters as the avoidance of cliche, or of over-inflated forms of expression; it shows in the use of first hand, individualistic description, in the understated expression of feeling, whereby (preferably) the emotion is allowed to emerge implicitly from the presentation of an event. Moreover, when the language achieves these qualities, then the truly sincere poet can transcend the sense of distance between language and material, and can make the language seem to 'enact' what it depicts, thus apparently abolishing the necessary distance between words and things. 9. Again, the next idea follows from the previous one. What is valued in literature is the 'silent' showing and demonstrating of something, rather than the explaining, or saying, of it. Hence, ideas as such are worthless in literature until given the concrete embodiment of 'enactment'. Thus, several of the explicit comments and formulations often cited in literary history contain specific denigrations of ideas as such and have a distinct anti-intellectual flavour to them. Here we see the elevation of the characteristic 'Eng Lit' idea of tactile enactment, of sensuous immediacy, of the concrete representation of thought, and so on. According to this idea (which is, of course, itself an idea, in spite of the fact that the idea in question is a professed distrust of ideas) words should mime, or demonstrate, or act out, or sound out what they signify, rather than just representing it in an abstract way. This idea is stated with special fervency in the work of F. R. Leavis. (For a critique of the 'enactment' idea see 'The Enactment Fallacy', by the present author, in Essays in Criticism, July 1980. For a general discussion see James Gribble's Literary Education: a Re-evaluation, Cambridge University Press, 1983, chapter 2). 10. The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader. A theoretical account of the nature of reading, or of literature in general, isn't useful in criticism, and will simply, if attempted, encumber critics with 'preconceived ideas' which will get between them and the text. Perhaps in this phrase 'preconceived ideas' we get another glimpse into the nature of this pervasive distrust of ideas within liberal humanism, for there seems to be the notion that somehow all ideas are 'preconceived', in the sense that they will come between the reader and text if given half a chance. There is, in fact, the clear mark here of what is called 'English empiricism', which can be defined as a determination to trust only what is made evident to the senses or experienced directly. Ultimately this attitude goes back at least to the philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), which gives a philosophical expression to it. His book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) puts forward the view that ideas are formed when direct sense impressions from the world are imprinted on the mind. The mind then

assembles these, so giving rise to the process of thinking. Locke rejected introspective speculation as a source of valid knowledge and insisted on the need for direct experience and evidence of things. Traditional English studies, we might say, has always been Lockean in this sense. The above list contains a series of propositions which I think many traditional critics would, on the whole, subscribe to, if they were in the habit of making their assumptions explicit. Together, ideas like these, and the literary practice which went with them, are now often referred to as 'liberal humanism'. Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis -some key moments So far I have perhaps given the impression that theoretical positions about literature were never explicitly formulated by liberal humanists, at least in Britain, and that everything remained implicit. Yet a widely current body of theoretical work existed from the start within English studies, and references were often made to it in books and essays. The average student or teacher of 'Eng Lit' up to the 1970s would probably have had a fairly limited direct contact with this body of work, since the whole thrust of the subject was away from this kind of generalised position-taking. What, then, constituted the body of theory about literature that has existed for many centuries as an available under-pinning for the study of literature, even if literary students seldom had any extensive first hand acquaintance with it? Well, the material goes back to Greek and Latin originals. Critical theory, in fact, long pre-dates the literary criticism of individual works. The earliest work of theory was Aristotle's Poetics, which, in spite of its title, is about the nature of literature itself: Aristotle offers famous definitions of tragedy, insists that literature is about character, and that character is revealed through action, and he tries to identify the required stages in the progress of a plot. Aristotle was also the first critic to develop a 'reader-centred' approach to literature, since his consideration of drama tried to describe how it affected the audience. Tragedy, he said, should stimulate the emotions of pity and fear, these being, roughly, sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist. By the combination of these emotions came about the effect Aristotle called 'catharsis', whereby these emotions are exercised, rather than exorcised, as the audience identifies with the plight of the central character. The first prestigious name in English writing about literature is that of Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote his 'Apology for Poetry' in about 1580. Sidney was intent on expanding the implications of the ancient definition of literature first formulated by the Latin poet Ovid, who had said that its mission is 'docere delictendo'- to teach by delighting (meaning, approximately, by entertaining). Sidney also quotes Horace, to the effect that a poem is 'a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight'. Thus, the giving of pleasure is here allowed a central position in the reading of literature, unlike, say, philosophy, which is implicitly stigmatised as worthy and uplifting, but not much fun. The notion of literature giving pleasure will now seem an unremarkable sentiment, but Sidney's aim was the revolutionary one of distinguishing literature from other forms of writing, on the grounds that, uniquely, literature has as its primary aim the giving of pleasure to the reader, and any moral or didactic element is necessarily either subordinate to that, or at least, unlikely to succeed without it. In a religious age, deeply suspicious of all forms of fiction, poetry, and representation, and always likely to denounce

them as the work of the devil, this was a very great step to take. In English too, then, critical theory came before practical criticism, as Sidney is writing about literature in general, not about individual works or writers. Literary theory after Sidney was significantly advanced by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Prefaces to Shakespeare can be seen both as another major step forward in critical theory, and as the start of the English tradition of practical criticism, since he is the first to offer detailed commentary on the work of a single author. Prior to Johnson, the only text which had ever been subjected to this intensive scrutiny was the Bible, and the equivalent sacred books of other religions. The extension of this practice to works other than those thought to be the direct product of divine inspiration marks a significant moment of progress in the development of secular humanism. After Johnson came a major burgeoning of critical theory in the work of the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. One of the main texts is Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth wrote in this preface was the product of collaborative discussions between himself and Coleridge. The introduction was added to the second edition of the ballads, published in 1800, after the first, of 1798, had been met with puzzlement. The book blends high literature and popular literature, since it contains literary ballads constructed on the model of the popular oral ballads of ordinary country people. The original readers of Lyrical Ballads also disliked the abandonment of the conventions of verbal decorum. These conventions had imposed a high degree of artificiality on poetic language, making it as different as possible from the language of ordinary everyday speech. Thus, a specialised poetic vocabulary had tended to enjoin the avoidance of simple everyday terms for things, and an elaborate system of rhyme and a highly compressed form of grammar had produced a verbal texture of much greater density than that of ordinary language. Suddenly, two ambitious young poets were trying to make their poetic language as much like prose as possible, avoiding the conventions of diction and verbal structure which had held sway for so long. Thus, this book is one of a number of significant critical works in literary theory whose immediate aim is to provide a rationale for the critic's own poetic work, and to educate the audience for it. It also anticipates issues of great interest to contemporary critical theory, such as the relationship between poetic language and 'ordinary' language, and that between 'literature' and other kinds of writing. A second significant work from the Romantic era was Coleridge's misleadingly titled Biographia Literaria. The title might lead us to expect a work like Johnson's Lives of the Poets, but in fact much of it directly addresses the ideas contained in Wordsworth's Preface, showing by a close consideration of aspects of his work that Wordsworth writes his best poetry when he is furthest away from adherence to his own theories of what poetry should be. Indeed, in the years during which he and Coleridge had drifted apart as friends, they had also taken radically differ- ent views about the nature of poetry. Coleridge came to disagree completely with the view that the language of poetry must strive to become more like the language of prose. He saw this as an

impoverishment of the poetic effect which must ultimately prove suicidal. The argument dovetails neatly with the works already cited: if literature and other works differ in their aims and effects, as Aristotle and Sidney had maintained, and if poetry, unlike other kinds of writing, aims to teach by entertaining, then the major way in which the entertaining is done must be through the language in which it is written. The language entertains by its 'Active' qualities - this is the source of the aesthetic effect. Something like this is also connoted in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821) which sees poetry as essentially engaged in what a group of twentieth-century Russian critics later called 'defamiliarisa-tion'. Shelley anticipates this term, since for him poetry 'strips the veil of familiarity from the world ... it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity ... It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know'. This remarkable critical document also anticipates T. S. Eliot's notion of impersonality (put forward in his 1919 essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent') whereby there is a distinction between (as we might call it) the author (who is the person behind the work) and the writer (who is, so to speak, the 'person' in the work). In Eliot's view, the greater the separation between the two the better, since 'the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates', so that poetry is not simply the conscious rendering of personal experience into words. Shelley registers all this a hundred years earlier in his characteristically magisterial prose: the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure. (A Defence, lines 999-1003, my italics) There is also an anticipation here of the Freudian notion of the mind as made up of conscious and unconscious elements. Indeed, the idea of the unconscious is an essential one in Romanticism, and implicit in everything written about poetry by another major Romanticist, John Keats. Keats did not write formal literary theory in the way Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley did, but he did reflect on poetry in a sustained way in his letters. He too formulates a notion of the workings of the unconscious, for instance in a letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817 when he speaks of how 'the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine suddenness'. The 'silent working' of the mind is the unconscious and the 'spirit' into which it erupts is the conscious. Keats's idea of 'negative capability' also amounts to this same privileging of the unconscious, this same desire to allow it scope to work, negative capability being 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' (letter to his brothers, 21 December 1817). In the critical writings of the Romantics, then, there are many anticipations of the concerns of critical theory today. After the Romantics the main developments in critical theory were the work of mid and late Victorians, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James. George Eliot's critical work ranges widely over classical and continental writers, and philosophical issues, as did Coleridge's. It is worth emphasising this, since there are two distinct 'tracks' in the development of English criticism. One track leads through Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. This might be called the 'practical criticism' track. It tends to centre upon the close analysis of the work of particular writers, and gives us our familiar tradition of 'close reading'. The other track lies through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, George Eliot, and Henry James. This track is very much 'ideas-led' rather than 'text-led': it tends to tackle big general issues concerned with literature - How are literary works structured? How do they affect readers or audiences? What is the nature of literary language? How does literature relate to the contemporary and to matters of politics and gender? What can be said about literature from a philosophical point of view? What is the

nature of the act of literary composition? These 'track two' preoccupations are very similar to the concerns of the critical theo- rists who became prominent from the 1960s onwards, and it is important to realise that these concerns are not an exotic imposition upon 'native' Anglo-American approaches to literature but, rather, have been part of it from the beginning. The insistence upon 'close reading' in the 1920s sprang partly from the work of Matthew Arnold in the previous century. Arnold has remained a key canonical figure in the history of English criticism, partly because F. R. Leavis adopted and adapted several of his ideas and attitudes and gave them twentieth- century currency. Arnold feared that the decline of religion would leave an increasingly divided society with no common system of beliefs, values, and images, with potentially disastrous consequences. He saw literature as a possible replacement for religion in this regard, but believed that the middle classes, on whom the burden and responsibility of democracy largely fell, had been progressively debased by materialism and philistinism. The critic would help such people to recognise 'the best that has been known and thought in the world' and thus enable them to give individual assent to the canon of great works which had emerged through the collective wisdom of the ages. Arnold's most significant thinking is contained in the essays 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' and 'The Study of Poetry'. He stresses the importance for literature of remaining 'disinterested', by which he means politically detached and uncommitted to any specific programme of action. The goal of literary criticism is that of attaining pure, disinterested knowledge, that is, to use another of his favourite phrases, of simply appreciating 'the object as in itself it really is' without wanting to press the insight gained into the service of a specific line of action. Arnold's key literary-critical device is the notion of the Touchstone, which avoids any definitions of desirable literary qualities, and merely suggests using aspects of the literature of the past as a means of measuring and assessing the literature of today. The way the Touchstone works is concisely explained in J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (3rd edition, Blackwell, 1991): A touchstone is ... so-called because gold is tried by it. Matthew , Arnold used the word in his essay The Study of Poetry (1880) in connection with literary criteria and standards: Arnold advises that we should 'have always in mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and apply them as a Touchstone to other poetry'. He suggests that his Touchstone method should provide the basis for a 'real' rather than an 'historic' or 'personal' estimate of poetry. (See Cuddon, p. 980.) In the first half of the twentieth century, the key critical names in Britain were F. R. Lea vis, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and I. A. Richards. All except Eliot were at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s, involved in the pioneering English School there which had a powerful influence on the teaching of English worldwide up to the 1970s. Eliot's contribution to the canon of received critical ideas was the greatest, his major critical ideas being: * the notion of the 'dissociation of sensibility', developed in the course of his review article on Herbert Grierson's edition of The Metaphysical Poets, * the notion of poetic 'impersonality', developed in the course of his two-part essay 'Tradition and the

Individual Talent', and * the notion of the 'objective correlative', developed in his essay on Hamlet. All these ideas have become controversial: the idea that a 'dissociation of sensibility' occurred in the seventeenth century, radically separating thought from feeling, is one for which historical evidence has never been found. Later in his career Eliot denied that he thought the dissociation had been caused by the English Civil War, though he added rather cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same factors as those which brought about the Civil War - a nice distinction. The best use of the idea is simply as a way of describing the special qualities of mind and sensibility which we detect in the Metaphysical poets: as a historical generalisation it seems quite without support. The best critique of the idea can be found in Frank Kermode's book Romantic Image . The idea of impersonality was partly Eliot's way of deflecting current thinking about poetry away from ideas of originality and self-expression which derived from Romanticism. Eliot's own personality, and the education he had received at Harvard, made this emphasis on the individual highly distasteful. It was much more congenial to him to see poetry not as a pouring out of personal emotion and personal experience, but as a transcending of the individual by a sense of tradition which spoke through, and is transmitted by, the individual poet. The best parts of a poet's work, he says, are not those which are most original, but those in which the voice of his predecessors can be most clearly heard speaking though him. Hence, there is a large distinction to be drawn between the mind of the individual, experiencing human being, and the voice which speaks in the poetry. This was not an original thought - Shelley, as we saw, had something very like it in his Defence of Poetry - but Eliot was the first to make it the cornerstone of a whole poetic aesthetic. The objective correlative, finally, is really another encapsulation of English empiricist attitudes: it holds that the best way of expressing an emotion in art is to find some vehicle for it in gesture, action, or concrete symbolism, rather than approaching it directly or descriptively. This is undoubtedly true: little is gained in fiction or poetry by having characters (or narrators) say what they feel: it has to be shown in some way in words or actions. This is perhaps little more than the ancient distinction (first made by Plato) between mimesis and diegesis. The former is a showing of something, in the character's own words, or in actions which we actually see on the stage, if it is a play, while the latter is telling the audience or reader about things they don't see for themselves or experience in the direct speech of the characters. All Eliot's major critical ideas are thus flawed and unsatisfactory, and perhaps their long-standing currency is indicative of the theoretical vacuum into which they were launched. The most influential British critic prior to the theory movement was F. R. Leavis. Leavis, like Arnold in the previous century, assumed that the study and appreciation of literature is a pre-condition to the health of society. He too distrusted abstract thought and looked for a system of literary appreciation (like Arnold's Touchstones) which by-passed fixed criteria, arguing instead for an openness to the qualities of the text. Like Arnold, finally, he rejected any attempt to politicise either literature or criticism directly. The two differ, however, in a few notable regards: Arnold, for example, takes the pantheon of past great writers more or less for granted: he does not question the excellence of Dante, for instance, which is why Dante can become a Touchstone. By contrast, Leavis sometimes wrote essays attacking the reputations of major established figures, and, indeed, it was the essence of his method to argue that some reputations

would not stand up to the kind of close textual scrutiny he constantly recommended. Arnold, in his critical ideas, seems essentially to license and encourage the amateur. You may not have read everything, he implies (how could you, since you don't have the unlimited time of the professional critic?), but if you have read the best, and can identify its qualities, then you can be confident in looking at new writing and reaching a true judgement on it. This 'protestant' aes-thetic encourages a direct relationship between the individual reader and the literary greats. F. R. Leavis began as an admirer of Eliot's critical work as well as of his poetry, but later greatly modified his views. He avoided the coining of critical vocabulary, and instead used as critical terms words and phrases which already had established lay senses: 'life', for instance, is used by Leavis almost as a critical term, as is the notion of 'felt experience'. For Leavis the crucial test is whether the work is conducive to 'life' and vitality. Leavis's extreme popularity was partly due to the fact that he was essentially a kind of combined avatar of Johnson and Arnold, offering again the former's moralism and the latter's social vision and anti-theoretical critical practice. Leavis is still so pervasive an influence that little more need be said about him here. William Empson and I. A. Richards can perhaps be taken as a pair, though the latter was the tutor of the former in the late 1920s. Empson's book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was itself somewhat ambiguous in its effects. On the one hand, its ultra-close readings of texts demonstrated the kind of text-led extreme which might be seen as the logical development of the 'track one' tradition of British criticism described above. The word 'ambi- guity' in the book's title can be translated as 'verbal difficulty', and Empson unravels his examples by meticulous textual surgery, rather than references out to a wider context. On the other hand, though, Empson's basic attitude towards language is that it is really a very slippery medium indeed: when we handle language we need to be aware that the whole thing is likely to explode into meanings we hadn't suspected of being there at all. As we go from ambiguity type one to type seven we seem to be approaching the frontiers of language, where the territory eventually becomes un-mappable, and we seem to end up looking into a void of linguistic indeterminacy. This can be seen as an anticipation from within the British tradition of post- structuralist views about the unreliability of language as a medium (see p. 64). But the placing of language within any context naturally tends to reduce or eliminate ambiguity. (For instance, the word 'pain', when you hear it spoken in isolation, is ambiguous, since it sounds the same as 'pane', but encounter it in the context of any actual situation of usage and the ambiguity disappears). Hence the later Empson drew back from the linguistic void by stressing, in particular, the autobiographical context in which literary works, in his view, are grounded. 1. A. Richards, finally, is the pioneer of the decontextualised approach to literature which became the norm in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s as 'practical criticism' and in America during roughly the same period as the 'New Criticism'. Richards's experiments in the 1920s of presenting students and tutors with unan-notated, anonymous poems for commentary and analysis gave rise to the ideal of removing the props of received opinion and knowledge and fostering a 'true judgement' based on first hand opinion. It is easy to see the connection betwen this and Arnold's 'Touchstones'. What is certain is that this decisive 'Ricardian' moment established the 'track one' 'practical' tradition of criticism so completely for so long that a selective amnesia descended on the discipline and it came to be widely regarded as the only tradition that had ever existed.

The subsequent conflict between liberal humanism and 'theory' is a pretty fundamental one, but it is worth reminding ourselves that it is actually much older than the 1970s when it broke out with such force in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Similar debates and arguments took place in the 1930s, for instance between F. R. Leavis, whom we might regard as the archetypal British liberal humanist, and the critical theorist Rene Wellek. Leavis and Wellek debated the relationship between literary criticism and philosophy in the pages of Leavis's journal Scrutiny. Wellek's point against Leavis was simply that practical criticism was not enough - he ought to spell out the theoretical assumptions on which his readings, and his procedures generally, were based. In Wellek's view a series of 'close readings' of Romantic poets in Leavis's book Revaluations is offered to the reader in a theoretical vacuum. As he politely put it, 'I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically' (Scrutiny, March 1937, p. 376). This refusal to accept the liberal humanist method as simply the 'natural' and taken-for-granted way of 'doing' literature is the crux of theory's general response to it. Though less politely than Wellek, theorists make the same demand as he did - spell out what you do, and why, when you read and criticise literature, so that your methods can be evaluated along with others. Implicit in this demand is the view that if these things are made explicit (as we tried to do in the previous section) then the weaknesses of liberal humanist assumptions and procedures will become apparent, and other approaches will have a chance of replacing them. The work of all the figures discussed in this section can be found in the collection English Critical Texts, ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (Oxford University Press, 1962). Liberal humanism in practice It is perhaps unnecessary to supply a full-scale example of liberal humanist practice, since that practice will surely be familiar to anyone reading this book. However, I will sketch out, mainly for comparative purposes, what I would consider to be a characteristic liberal humanist reading of Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The oval portrait' (see Appendix 1) since the tale will be used later to illustrate structuralism in practice, and narratology. A liberal humanist approach to this tale (or, to be more specific, a Leavisite approach) might focus on the evident conflict of values in the story between 'art' and 'life'. The central point of commentary and interpretation might be the moralist argument that true value lies in the 'lived life' of the unique individual, and that it is disastrous for the artist to fail to recognise a necessary subservience of art to a communal reality. Further, when artists begin to see themselves as Faustian super-heroes, able to cross all boundaries of taste, taboo, and conduct, and even to assume the god-like role of creating and sacrificing life itself, then a hubris-tic act is committed which ultimately dries up the sources of the life of art itself. Hence, the artist in this tale in his isolated turret, feeding vampire-like on the vital energies of his sitter, is an emblem of a debased and degenerate form of art whose values are of the purely aesthetic 'art for art's sake' kind and have no reference to any wider notion of personal and psychic health.

Two things stand out in this approach: firstly, this kind of reading is driven (ultimately) by its moral convictions (laudable in themselves, of course) rather than by any model of what constitutes a systematic approach to literary criticism. The robust championing of 'life' in the above sketch makes the term 'Leavisite' seem an appropriate one to apply to it. The second notable aspect of it is that it seems to by-pass matters of form, structure, genre, and so on, and launches straight into the discussion of matters of content. If the sketch were filled out, there would doubtless be comments on such characteristics as structure, symbol, and design, but they would probably be secondary in nature, intended as concrete support for the primary focus of the reading, which is the moral position taken. I am not, of course, dismissing such an approach as worthless: my intention is simply to characterise it and distinguish it from other approaches. The transition to 'theory' The growth of critical theory in the post-war period seems to comprise a series of 'waves', each associated with a specific decade, and all aimed against the liberal humanist consensus just illustrated, which had been established between the 1930s and the 1950s. In the 1960s, firstly, there were two older, but still unas- similated, rival new approaches, these being Marxist criticism, which had been pioneered in the 1930s and then reborn in the 1960s, and psychoanalytic criticism, which was of the same vintage and was similarly renewing itself in the 1960s. At the same time two new approaches were mounting vigorous direct assaults on liberal humanist orthodoxies, namely linguistic criticism, which came into being in the early 1960s, and early forms of feminist criticism, which started to become a significant factor at the end of the decade. Then, in the 1970s news spread in literary-critical circles in Britain and the United States of controversial new critical approaches, in particular structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which originated in France. The effect of these two was so powerful as to produce, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a situation which was frequently referred to as a 'crisis' or 'civil war' in the discipline of English. The questions these two approaches centred upon concerned matters of language and philosophy, rather than history or context. In the 1980s a shift occurred which is sometimes called the 'turn to history', whereby history, politics, and context were reinstated at the centre of the literary-critical agenda. Thus, in the early 1980s two new forms of political/ historical criticism emerged, new historicism from the United States and cultural materialism from Britain. Both these take what might be called a 'holistic' approach to literature, aiming to integrate literary and historical study while at the same time maintaining some of the insights of the structuralists and post-structuralists of the previous decade. Finally, in the 1990s a general flight from overarching grand explanations seemed to be taking place, and there was what seemed a decisive drift towards dispersal, eclecticism, and 'special- interest' forms of criticism and theory. Thus, the approach known as postcolonialism rejects the idea of a universally applicable Marxist explanation of things and emphasises the separateness or otherness of post-imperial nations and peoples. Likewise, postmodernism stresses the uniquely fragmented nature of much contemporary experience. Feminism, too, shows signs of dissolving into a loose federation known as gender studies, with gay and lesbian texts emerging

as distinct fields of literature, and hence implying and generating appropriate and distinct critical approaches: also part of this 1990s federation is black feminist (or 'womanist') criticism. The necessary limits on a book like the present one make it impossible to include everything, and for the time being it does not venture beyond postcolonialism and postmodernism. Some recurrent ideas in critical theory These different approaches each have their separate traditions and histories, but several ideas are recurrent in critical theory and seem to form what might be regarded as its common bedrock. Hence, it makes some sense to speak of 'theory' as if it were a single entity with a set of underlying beliefs, as long as we are aware that doing so is a simplification. Some of these recurrent underlying ideas of theory are listed below. 1. Many of the notions which we would usually regard as the basic 'givens' of our existence (including our gender identity, our individual selfhood, and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable essences. Instead of being solidly 'there' in the real world of fact and experience, they are 'socially constructed', that is, dependent on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing and thinking. In philosophical terms, all these are contingent categories (denoting a status which is temporary, provisional, 'circumstance-dependent') rather than absolute ones (that is, fixed, immutable, etc.). Hence, no overarching fixed 'truths' can ever be established. The results of all forms of intellectual enquiry are provisional only. There is no such thing as a fixed and reliable truth (except for the statement that this is so, presumably). The position on these matters which theory attacks is often referred to, in a kind of shorthand, as essentialism, while many of the theories discussed in this book would describe themselves as anti-essentialist. 2. Theorists generally believe that all thinking and investigation is necessarily affected and largely determined by prior ideological commitment. The notion of disinterested enquiry is therefore untenable: none of us, they would argue, is capable of standing back from the scales and weighing things up dis- passionately: rather, all investigators have a thumb on one side or other of the scales. Every practical procedure (for instance, in literary criticism) presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind. To deny this is simply to try to place our own theoretical position beyond scrutiny as something which is 'com- monsense' or 'simply given'. This contention is problematical, of course, and is usually only made explicit as a counter to specific arguments put forward by opponents. The problem with this view is that it tends to discredit one's own project along with all the rest, introducing a relativism which disables argument and cuts the ground from under any kind of commitment. 3. Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see. Thus, all reality is constructed

through language, so that nothing is simply 'there' in an unproblematical way - everything is a linguistic/ textual construct. Language doesn't record reality, it shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual. Further, for the theorist, meaning is jointly constructed by reader and writer. It isn't just 'there' and waiting before we get to the text but requires the reader's contribution to bring it into being. 4. Hence, any claim to offer a definitive reading would be futile. The meanings within a literary work are never fixed and reliable, but always shifting, multi-faceted and ambiguous. In literature, as in all writing, there is never the possibility of establishing fixed and definite meanings: rather, it is characteristic of language to generate infinite webs of meaning, so that all texts are necessarily self-contradictory, as the process of deconstruction will reveal. There is no final court of appeal in these matters, since literary texts, once they exist, are viewed by the theorist as independent linguistic structures whose authors are always 'dead' or 'absent'. 5. Theorists distrust all 'totalising' notions. For instance, the notion of 'great' books as an absolute and self-sustaining category is to be distrusted, as books always arise out of a particular socio-political situation, and this situation should not be suppressed, as tends to happen when they are promoted to 'greatness'. Likewise, the concept of a 'human nature', as a generalised norm which transcends the idea of a particular race, gender, or class, is to be distrusted too, since it is usually in practice Eurocentric (that is, based on white European norms) and androcentric (that is, based on masculine norms and attitudes). Thus, the appeal to the idea of a generalised, supposedly inclusive, human nature is likely in practice to marginalise, or denigrate, or even deny the humanity of women, or disadvantaged groups. Tosum up these five points: for theory: Politics is pervasive, Language is constitutive, Truth is provisional, Meaning is contingent, Human nature is a myth. If, at later points in this book, or later in your study of theory, you begin to find that your grasp of things is slipping it would be worthwhile coming back to this list to remind yourself of the basic frame of mind which theory embodies. It is very likely that a concept with which you are having difficulty will turn out to be a version of one of these positions. Selected reading Books representing the liberal humanist position Alter, Robert, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideogical Age (Simon and Schuster, 1989; rpt. W. W. Norton, 1997, with a new preface). Polemical anti-theoretical introduction, 'The disappearance of reading',

and final chapter, 'Multiple readings and the bog of indeterminacy'; the chapters in between are on traditional literary critical concepts such as 'Character', 'Style' and 'Perspective'. Gardner, Helen, In Defence of the Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1984). Based on a course of lectures responding to a book by Frank Kermode (then a champion of theory). A vigorous defence of traditional human- ist scholarship and criticism against what she saw as the malign influence of theory. Gribble, James, Literary Education: A Re-evaluation (Cambridge University Press, 1983). One of several books from the early 1980s which mounted a defence of traditional literary scholarship against theory. See chapter one, 'Literature and truth': chapter four, 'The subjection of criticism to theory': chapter five 'Literature and the education of the emotions'. Steiner, George, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (Faber, 1989; rpt. University of Chicago Press, 1991). Steiner is a polyglot, polymath humanist whose work has never been anti-theoretical. In the three long essays in this book he grapples with the problem of relating theoretical accounts to the actual experience of responding to literature and the other arts. Watson, George, The Certainty of Literature: Essays in Polemic (Harvester, 1989). Watson's opposition to contemporary theory is absolute and unqualified, as the title of this book implies. Books about the rise of English as an academic subject Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Studies 1848-1932 (Oxford University Press, 1983). A clearly argued history of literary criticism in England from Matthew Arnold. Detailed, and with a clear introduction. Doyle, Brian, 'The hidden history of English Studies' in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (Methuen, 1982), pp. 17-31. Asks 'why and how did English become a major subject in higher education?' An influential account, though the emphasis is slightly different from the one I have offered here. Eagleton, Terry, 'The rise of English', chapter one in his Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1983; 2nd edn. University of Minnesota Press, 1996). A polemical and very readable account of the growth of 'English', broadly in line with Doyle's. Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1987). A detailed account of the growth of English studies in the United States. Kearney, Anthony, The Louse on the Locks of Literature: John Churton Collins (Scottish Academic Press, 1986).

Collins was a nineteenth-century pioneer of English studies. This enjoyable book includes an account (on which I have drawn in the relevant part of this chapter) of debates in the press and Parliament on the proposed new academic subject of 'English'. Mulhern, Francis, The Moment of Scrutiny (New Left Books, 1979). Scrutiny was the journal founded by F. R. Leavis in 1932, so this widely respected book continues the story of 'English' from where Baldick (above) leaves off. Palmer, D. J., The Rise of English Studies (Oxford University Press, 1965). A readable account. Potter, Stephen, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (Cape, 1937, rpt. Folcroft, 1973). An early account of early English. The specimen examination papers from the nineteenth century (included in the appendices) are very revealing. Tillyard, E. M. W., The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London, Bowes & Bowes, 1958). Continues the story of English from where Potter (above) leaves off, describing Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s and the early careers of Richards, Empson, and Leavis. Palmer, Potter, and Tillyard together provide what might be called liberal humanism's own account of its development, distinctly different from that offered by Baldick, Doyle, Eagleton, and Mulhern. 2 Structuralism Structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980). It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single 'bottom-line' proposition, but if forced to do so I would say that its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of (hence the term 'structuralism'). Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s and attained widespread influence, and even notoriety, throughout the 1980s. The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organising experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world. It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things: rather, meaning is always outside. Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them. But let's try to be specific about what it might mean to think primarily in terms of structures when considering literature. Imagine that we are confronted with a poem, Donne's 'Good Morrow',

let's say. Our immediate reaction as structuralists would probably be to insist that it can only be understood if we first have a clear notion of the genre which it parodies and subverts. Any single poem is an example of a particular genre, and the genre and the example relate to each other rather as a phrase spoken in English relates to the English language as a structure with all its rules, its conventions, and so on. In the case of Donne's poem the relevant genre is the alba or 'dawn song', a poetic form dating from the twelfth century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part. But the alba, in turn, can hardly be understood without some notion of the concept of courtly love, and, further, the alba, being a poem, presupposes a knowledge of what is entailed in the conventionalised form as utterance known as poetry. These are just some of the cultural structures which Donne's poem is part of. You will see that your structuralist 'approach' to it is actually taking you further and further away from the text, and into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy, rather than closer and closer to it, as the Anglo-American tradition demands. Now if we use the crude analogy of chickens and eggs, we can regard the containing structures (the alba, courtly love, poetry itself as a cultural practice) as the chicken, and the individual example (Donne's poem in this case) as the egg. For structuralists, determining the precise nature of the chicken is the most important activity, while for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is paramount. Thus, in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them. These structures, as I suggested at the start of this section, are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic, or the nature of narrative itself, rather than 'mere' concrete specifics like the history of the alba or of courtly love, both of which, after all, we could quite easily find out about from conventional literary history. The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy, precisely because literary studies in these countries had traditionally had very little interest in large abstract issues of the kind structuralists wanted to raise. The so-called 'Cambridge revolution' in English studies in the 1920s had promulgated the opposite to all this: it enjoined close study of the text in isolation from all wider structures and contexts: it was relentlessly 'text-based' and tended to exclude wider questions, abstract issues, and ideas. Structuralism in that sense turned English studies on its head, and devalued all that it had held dear for around half a century, asking long-repressed questions such as: 'What do we mean by \"literary\"?' 'How do narratives work?' 'What is a poetic structure?' Traditional critics, in a word, did not welcome the suggestion that they ought to switch their attention from eggs to chickens. Signs of the fathers - Saussure Though structuralism proper began, as we said, in the 1950s and 1960s, it has its roots in the thinking of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure was a key figure in the development of modern approaches to language study. In the nineteenth century linguistic

scholars had mainly been interested in historical aspects of language (such as working out the historical development of languages and the connections between them, and speculating about the origins of language itself). Saussure concentrated instead on the patterns and functions of language in use today, with the emphasis on how meanings are maintained and established and on the functions of grammatical structures. But what exactly did Saussure say about linguistic structures which the structuralists later found so interesting? This can be summarised as three pronouncements in particular. Firstly, he emphasised that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are maintained by convention only. Words, that is to say, are 'unmotivated signs', meaning that there is no inherent connection between a word and what it designates. The word 'hut', for instance, is not in any way 'appropriate' to its meaning, and all linguistic signs are arbitrary like this. (There is the minor exception of a small number of onomatopoeic words like 'cuckoo' and 'hiss', but even these vary between languages.) Insisting that linguistic signs are arbitrary is a fairly obvious point to make, perhaps, and it is not a new thing to say (Plato said it in Ancient Greek times), but it is a new concept to emphasise (which is always much more important), and the structuralists were interested in the implication that if language as a sign system is based on arbitrariness of this kind then it follows that language isn't a reflection of the world and of experience, but a system which stands quite separate from it. This point will be further developed later. Secondly, Saussure emphasised that the meanings of words are (what we might call) relational. That is to say, no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other 'adjoining' words. For example, that word 'hut' depends for its precise meaning on its position in a 'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of words related in function and meaning each of which could be substituted for any of the others in a given sentence. The paradigmatic chain in this case might include the following: hovel shed hut house mansion palace The meaning of any one of these words would be altered if any one of the others were removed from the chain. Thus, 'hut' and 'shed' are both small and basic structures, but they are not quite the same thing: one is primarily for shelter (a night-watchman's hut, for instance), while the other is primarily for storage: without the other, each would have to encompass both these meanings, and hence would be a different word. Likewise, a mansion can be defined as a dwelling which is bigger and grander than a mere house, but not as big and grand as a palace. Thus, we define 'mansion' by explaining how its meaning relates to that of the two words on either side of it. If we have paired opposites then this mutually defining aspect of words is even more apparent: the terms 'male' and 'female', for example, mainly have meaning in relation to each other: each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other, so that 'male' can be seen as mainly meaning 'not female', and vice versa. Similarly, we could have no concept of 'day' without the linked concept of 'night', no notion of 'good' without a 'bad' to define it against. This 'relational' aspect of language gave rise to a famous remark of Saussure's: 'In a language there are only differences, without fixed terms'. All words, then, exist in

'differencing networks', like these 'dyads', or paired opposites, and like the paradigmatic chain of 'dwelling place' words given earlier. Saussure used a famous example to explain what he meant by saying that there are no intrinsic fixed meanings in language - the example of the 8.25 Geneva to Paris express train (see the Course, pp. 108-9, and Jonathan Culler's discussion of this example in Structuralist Poetics, p. 11). What is it that gives this train its identity? It isn't anything material, since each day it will have a different engine and carriages, different drivers and passengers, and so on. If it is late, it won't even leave at 8.25. Does it even have to be a train? I once asked at Southampton station for the Brighton train, and the ticket collector pointed to a bus standing outside the station and said, 'That's it'. It was a Sunday, and because of engineering works on the line a bus service was being used to ferry passengers beyond the sections being worked upon. Sometimes, then, a 'train' doesn't have to be a train. Saussure's conclusion is that the only thing which gives this train its identity is its position in a structure of differences: it comes between the 7.25 and the 9.25, that is, its identity is purely relational. Thirdly, for Saussure, language constitutes our world, it doesn't just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language: it is not already contained within the thing. Well-known examples of this process would be the choice between paired alternatives like 'terrorist' or 'freedom fighter'. There is no neutral or objective way of designating such a person, merely a choice of two terms which 'construct' that person in certain ways. Another example of the same concept is seen in the two ways of referring to the domestic tax imposed in Britain by the Thatcher government: opponents of this tax called it the poll tax, evoking images of the Middle Ages and the Peasants' Revolt. The government itself called the tax the community charge, avoiding the negative word 'tax' and making use of the favoured term 'community'. The term for this tax used by a given individual immediately indicated a political position, and, again, no neutral or 'objective' alternative was available. It has been said that there are three versions of every story, your version, my version, and the truth, but the case here is more complicated than that, since all the available terms are purely linguistic - there is no truth about these matters which exists securely outside language. Wherever we look, we see language constituting the world in this way, not just reflecting it. For instance, the words for colours make a reality, they don't just name things which are 'there': the spectrum isn't divided into seven primary colours; all the colours merge into one another. So we might have had fourteen names rather than seven. Another example is the terms we give to the seasons of the year. We have four distinct names ('spring', 'summer', etc.), but actually the year runs continuously without any breaks or decisive changes. It isn't, in reality, divided into four. Why not have six seasons, or eight? Since change is continuous throughout the year the divisions could be made anywhere at all. The seasons, then, are a way of seeing the year, not an objective fact of nature. So Saussure's thinking stressed the way language is arbitrary, relational, and constitutive, and this way of thinking about language greatly influenced the structuralists, because it gave them a model of a system which is self-contained, in which

individual items relate to other items and thus create larger structures. One other distinction made by Saussure gave structuralists a way of thinking about the larger structures which were relevant to literature. He used the terms langue and parole to signify, respectively, language as a system or structure on the one hand, and any given utterance in that language on the other. A particular remark in French (a sample of parole) only makes sense to you if you are already in possession of the whole body of rules and conventions governing verbal behaviour which we call 'French' (that is, the langue). The individual remark, then, is a discrete item which only makes sense when seen in relation to a wider containing structure, in the classic structuralist manner. Now, structuralists make use of the langue/parole distinction by seeing the individual literary work (the novel Middlemarch, let's say) as an example of a literary parole. It too only makes sense in the context of some wider containing structure. So the langue which relates to the parole Middlemarch is the notion of the novel as a genre, as a body of literary practice. STOP and THINK Consider some of the points made so far in this section about language. Firstly, can you think of other examples of language constituting reality, rather than merely naming something which is already there? Your examples may be of a similar type to those mentioned above ('freedom fighter', 'poll tax', the seasons). You may also like to consider the significance in this context of those 'speech acts' which are known as 'performatives', that is, the kind of utterance which is the reality it designates, such as making a promise ('I promise to tell him') or formally opening some new facility ('I now declare this bridge opened'). Secondly, can you see any flaws in the line of argument about language and reality put forward by Saussure? For instance, does it make sense to posit a category of pure difference? Do you see any force in the counter-view once put forward by the critic Christopher Ricks, that you can't just have difference, you have to have difference between things? (See his article 'In Theory' in London Review of Books, April 1981, pp. 3-6.) If you accepted Ricks's argument, and agreed that you can only have difference between things, what implications would this have for the Saussurean argument that languages have only differences, without fixed terms? Thirdly, are you convinced by that train? Is its position in the timetable really the only thing which gives it its identity? Saussure supplements the example with another one: Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does not constitute a purely material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, e.g. its location with respect to other streets (Course, pp. 108-9) A counter-argument might be that the 8.25 has to be train-like before it can be the 8.25: nobody will remark, 'There goes the

8.25 to Paris' if a flock of pigeons emerges from under the station canopy: likewise, it is true to say that a given street has a largely relational identity - you define 'X' Street by saying that it's the one that runs at right angles between 'Y' Street and 'Z' Street. All the same, a piece of string stretched between the two will not be mistaken for the street. The scope of structuralism But structualism is not just about language and literature. When Saussure's work was 'co-opted' in the 1950s by the people we now call structuralists, their feeling was that Saussure's model of how language works was 'transferable', and would also explain how all signifying systems work. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist outlook to the interpetation of myth. He suggested that the individual tale (the parole) from a cycle of myths did not have a separate and inherent meaning but could only be understood by considering its position in the whole cycle (the langue) and the similarities and difference between that tale and others in the sequence. So in interpreting the Oedipus myth, he placed the individual story of Oedipus within the context of the whole cycle of tales connected with the city of Thebes. He then began to see repeated motifs and contrasts, and he used these as the basis of his interpretation. On this method the story and the cycle it is part of are reconstituted in terms of basic oppositions: animal/human, relation/stranger, husband/son and so on. Concrete details from the story are seen in the context of a larger structure, and the larger structure is then seen as an overall network of basic 'dyadic pairs' which have obvious symbolic, thematic, and archetypal resonance (like the contrast between art and life, male and female, town and country, telling and showing, etc., as in the 'worked example' later). This is the typical structuralist process of moving from the particular to the general, placing the individual work within a wider structural context. The wider structure might also be found in, for instance, the whole corpus of an author's work; or in the genre conventions of writing about that particular topic (for instance, discussing Dickens's novel Hard Times in terms of its deviations from novelistic conventions and into those of other more popular genres, like melodrama or the ballad); or in the identification of sets of underlying fundamental 'dyads'. A signifying system in this sense is a very wide concept: it means any organised and structured set of signs which carries cultural meanings. Included in this category would be such diverse phenomena as: works of literature, tribal rituals (a degree ceremony, say, or a rain dance), fashions (in clothing, food, 'life-style', etc.), the styling of cars, or the contents of advertisements. For the structuralist, the culture we are part of can be 'read' like a language, using these principles, since culture is made up of many structural networks which carry significance and can be shown to operate in a systematic way. These networks operate through 'codes' as a system of signs; they can make statements, just as language does, and they can be read or decoded by the structuralist or semiotician. Fashion, for instance, can be 'read' like a language. Separate items or features are added up into a complete 'outfit' or 'look' with complex grammatical rules of combination: we don't wear an evening dress and carpet slippers: we don't come to lectures in military uniform, etc. Likewise, each component sign derives its meaning from a structural context. Of course, many fashions in clothing depend on breaking such rules in a 'knowing' way, but the 'statement' made by such rule-breaks (for instance, making outer garments which look like undergarments, or cutting expensive fabrics in an apparently rough way) depends upon the prior existence of the 'rule' or convention which is being conspicuously flouted. In the fashion world recently, for instance, (late 1994) the combination of such features as exposed seams, crumpled-looking fabrics, and garments which are too big or too small for the wearer signified the fashion known (confusingly, in this context) as deconstruction. Take any one of these features out of the context of all the

rest, however, and they will merely signify that you have your jacket on inside out or don't believe in ironing. Again, these individual items have their place in an overall structure, and the structure is of greater significance than the individual item. The other major figure in the early phase of structuralism was Roland Barthes, who applied the structuralist method to the general field of modern culture. He examined modern France (of the 1950s) from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist in a little book called Mythologies which he published in France in 1957. This looked at a host of items which had never before been subjected to intellectual analysis, such as: the difference between boxing and wrestling; the significance of eating steak and chips; the styling of the Citroen car; the cinema image of Greta Garbo's face; a magazine photograph of an Algerian soldier saluting the French flag. Each of these items he placed within a wider structure of values, beliefs, and symbols as the key to understanding it. Thus, boxing is seen as a sport concerned with repression and endurance, as distinct from wrestling, where pain is flamboyantly displayed. Boxers do not cry out in pain when hit, the rules cannot be disregarded at any point during the bout, and the boxer fights as himself, not in the elaborate guise of a make-believe villain or hero. By contrast, wrestlers grunt and snarl with aggression, stage elaborate displays of agony or triumph, and fight as exaggerated, larger than life villains or super-heroes. Clearly, these two sports have quite different functions within society: boxing enacts the stoical endurance which is sometimes necessary in life, while wrestling dramatises ultimate struggles and conflicts between good and evil. Barthes's approach here, then, is that of the classic structuralist: the individual item is 'structuralised', or 'contextualised by structure', and in the process of doing this layers of sigificance are revealed. Roland Barthes in these early years also made specific examinations of aspects of literature, and by the 1970s, structuralism was attracting widespread attention in Paris and world wide. A number of English and American academics spent time in Paris in the 1970s taking courses under the leading structuralist figures (and these included Colin MacCabe) and came back to Britain and the USA fired up to teach similar ideas and approaches here. The key works on structuralism were in French, and these began to be translated in the 1970s and published in English. A number of Anglo-American figures undertook to read material not yet translated and to interpret structuralism for English-speaking readers; these important mediators included: the American, Jonathan Culler, whose book Structuralist Poetics appeared in 1975: the English critic Terence Hawkes whose book Structuralism and Semiotics came out in 1977 as the first book in a new series published by Methuen called 'New Accents'. Hawkes was the general editor of the series, and its mission was 'to encourage rather than resist the process of change' in literary studies. Another influential figure was the British critic Frank Kermode, then professor at University College, London, who wrote with enthusiasm about Roland Barthes, and set up graduate seminars to discuss his work (though he later in the 1990s became identified, in retirement, with much more traditional approaches). Finally, there was David Lodge, Professor of English at Birmingham, who tried to combine the ideas of structuralism with more traditional approaches. This attempt is typified by his book Working with Structuralism (1980). What structuralist critics do

1. They analyse (mainly) prose narratives, relating the text to some larger containing structure, such as: (a) the conventions of a particular literary genre, or (b) a network of intertextual connections, or (c) a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure, or (d) a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs. 2. They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language, as described by modern linguistics. For instance, the notion of the 'mytheme', posited by Levi-Strauss, denoting the minimal units of narrative 'sense', is formed on the analogy of the morpheme, which, in linguistics, is the smallest unit of grammatical sense. An example of a morpheme is the 'ed' added to a verb to denote the past tense. 3. They apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of Western culture, and across cultures, treating as 'systems of signs' anything from Ancient Greek myths to brands of soap powder. Structuralist criticism: examples I will base these examples on the methods of literary analysis described and demonstrated in Barthes's book S/Z, published in 1970. This book, of some two hundred pages, is about Balzac's thirty-page story 'Sarrasine'. Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 lexies', or units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing these as the basic underlying structures of all narratives. So in terms of our opening statement about structuralism (that it aims to understand the individual item by placing it in the context of the larger structure to which it belongs) the individual item here is this particular story, and the larger structure is the system of codes, which Barthes sees as generating all possible actual narratives, just as the grammatical structures of a language can be seen as generating all possible sentences which can be written or spoken in it. I should add that there is a difficulty in taking as an example of structuralism material from a text by Barthes published in 1970, since 1970 comes within what is usually considered to be Barthes's post-structuralist phase, always said to begin (as in this book) with his 1968 essay 'The Death of the Author'. My reasons for nevertheless regarding S/Z as primarily a structuralist text are, firstly, to do with precedent and established custom: it is treated as such, for instance, in many of the best known books on structuralism (such as Terence Hawkes's Structuralism and Semiotics, Robert Scholes's Structuralism in Literature, and Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics). A second reason is that while S/Z clearly contains many elements which subvert the confident positivism of structuralism, it is nevertheless essentially structuralist in its attempt to reduce the immense complexity and diversity possible in fiction to the operation of five codes, however tongue-in-cheek the exercise may be taken to be. The truth, really, is that the book sits on the fence between structuralism and post-structuralism: the 561 lexies and the five codes are linked in spirit to the 'high' structuralism of Barthes's 1968 esssay 'Analysing Narrative Structures', while the ninety-three interspersed digressions, with their much more free-wheeling comments on narrative, anticipate the 'full' post-structuralism of

his 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text. The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are: 1. The proairetic code This code provides indications of actions. ('The ship sailed at midnight' 'They began again', etc.) 2. The hermeneutic code This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense. (For instance, the sentence 'He knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell Street' makes the reader wonder who lived there, what kind of neighbourhood it was, and so on). 3. The cultural code This code contains references out beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge. (For example, the sentence 'Agent Angelis was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a preexisting image in the reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling incompetence, perhaps, contrasting that with the image of brisk efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.). 4. The semic code This is also called the connotative code. It is linked to theme, and this code (says Scholes in the book mentioned above) when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a 'character'. Its operation is demonstrated in the second example, below. 5. The symbolic code This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak. It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities - male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on. These are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality. As the last two codes have generated the greatest difficulty (especially in distinguishing one from the other) I will use each in turn as the basis of an example, beginning with the symbolic code, which I will illustrate in use as the organising principle for the interpretation of an entire tale, the story being 'The oval por-trait' (reproduced in Appendix 1), by the early nineteenth-cen-tury American writer Edgar Allan Poe, an author who has received considerable attention from both structuralists and post- structuralists. In terms of the 'What structuralists do' list of activities above, this is an example of category l.(d), treating narrative structure as a complex of recurrent patterns and motifs. In discussing it I will enlist your help as a co-writer of this structuralist critique. The points at which your help is requested are indicated by the 'stop and THINK' heading. A brief working summary of the plot may be useful. During what appears to be a civil war in an unnamed European country a wounded officer (as we may assume him to be) takes refuge in a recently abandoned chateau. The room he sleeps in contains an extremely lifelike portrait of a young woman, and a written account of this portrait, which he finds in the room, tells how the artist was her husband, who had become so carried away with the creation of the portrait that he failed to notice that as 'life' was kindled in the painting it simultaneously drained away from the sitter. At the end of the tale the placing of the final touch of colour which renders the portrait perfect coincides with the death of the sitter.

The most basic difference between liberal humanist and structuralist reading is that the structuralist's comments on structure, symbol, and design, become paramount, and are the main focus of the commentary, while the emphasis on any wider moral significance, and indeed on interpretation itself in the broad sense, is very much reduced. So instead of going straight into the content, in the liberal humanist manner, the structuralist presents a series of parallels, echoes, reflections, patterns, and contrasts, so that the narrative becomes highly schematised, is translated, in fact, into what we might call a verbal diagram. What we are looking for, as we attempt a structuralist critique, and where we expect to find it, can be indicated as in the diagram below. We are looking for the factors listed on the left, and we expect to find them in the parts of the tale listed on the right: Parallels Plot Echoes Structure Reflections/Repetitions in Character/Motive Contrasts Situation/Circumstance Patterns Language/Imagery Listing some of the parallels, etc., which might be picked out in Poe's tale is perhaps the best way of illustrating all this. Firstly, then, the tale itself has a binary structure (a structure of paired opposites) made up of two contrasting halves: the first part is a 'framing' narrative, containing the first-person account of the wounded officer, while the second is the story-within- the-story which he reads in the commentary on the painting. There is a very marked difference in narrative pace between these two halves, the first being leisurely, ponderous even, reflecting the down-to-earth, rationalistic mind of the officer, while the second moves with increasingly disjointed rapidity, reflecting the frenzy of artistic creation, and the rapid downward spiral of the victim/sitter's health. A second contrast within the tale is that the chateau itself performs very different functions in the two halves. In the first half it is a place of refuge and recuperation for the officer, where he finds safety from his enemies and, we may assume, recovers his health. In the second half, by contrast, it is a place of danger and ultimately destruction for the sitter, where she is delivered to the whims of her artist-husband and her life is drained away. STOP and THINK Now, look for other contrasts between the two halves. For instance, each half features a relationship between two people (the officer and the valet in the first part and the artist and his

wife in the second): how do these two relationships differ? There is an unequal distribution of power within each relationship, but the effects are different. How, exactly? Is there a similarity in what the members of each couple do to and for each other? The main 'actors' in the two halves are (respectively) the wounded officer and the artist. What contrasts are observable in the mental state of these two? Both the officer in the first part and the artist in the second are, in a sense, engrossed in a painting, but the role of art in the two halves is very different. What exactly is the contrast? All these are contrasts, parallels, etc., between the two halves. There are also many more within the two halves. Firstly, there is a strongly implied contrast between the husband's self-absorbed artistic frenzy on the one hand, and a more conventional outwardly directed sexual passion of the kind which might be expected in a husband for a new bride. Instead of being fascinated by her, this husband is 'entranced before his work' in auto-erotic contemplation. Indeed, the marriage is in a sense bigamous, since the husband is described as 'having already a bride in his art'. The several weeks he spends alone with his new bride executing the painting are a kind of sustained negative parody of a honeymoon. Locked up together for several weeks, the husband painter 'took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task and wrought day and night', and towards the end 'the painter had grown wild with the ardour of his work'. In fact, he has spent this 'honeymoon' in passionate involvement with the first bride rather than the second. A third level of contrasts and parallels are those which concern narrative mechanisms such as presentation and language, as well as content. One such, for instance, is the parallel between the narrators of the two halves. Both have a degree of anonymity, and in the second case the anonymity is complete, since we are given no information at all about the identity of the author of the 'vague and quaint words' of the story-within-the-story. (The only named character is Pedro the valet, the least important figure in the tale.) But structuralists are encouraged by Roland Barthes to ask of a text the question 'qui parle?' - 'Who is speaking?' and if we ask that question of the second part of the tale, then the answer will involve dislodging the narrator from the position of a neutral spectatorial recorder, for this account must have been written by someone who witnessed these events without attempting any intervention. At the very least, this witness is someone without insight, indistinguishable from those who, having seen the portrait, 'spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well'. STOP and THINK The first narrator, too, can be seen as to some degree culpable, and as wilfully blind to the events witnessed. Could we go further? Is there a parallel between the two narrators, such that the first is aligned, through the language used, with the attitudes of the artist-husband?

For instance, what do you make of his prolonged contemplation of the painting? Are there elements in that part of the text which parallel the displaced eroticism of the artist's protracted gazing on his wife as he makes the painting? There are two examples, not just one, of an intense masculine gaze in the story. Look at the distribution of the words 'gaze' and 'glory' (or 'gloriously') in the text. Look at the way the passing of time is depicted in each of these cases. In both cases there is a moment when the gaze is averted: what is the significance of this parallelism? All these contrasts are of a very particular kind, proper to just this one tale. We may then perform a simplifying move which is rather like finding the lowest common denominator of a set of numbers, for these items might be reduced to a set of more generalised ones: the contrast and conflict between life and art, male and female, light and dark (in the sense of enlightenment and moral benightedness, as well as in purely physical terms), looking and doing, reality and representation. The thesis of the structuralist is that narrative structures are founded upon such underlying paired opposites, or dyads, so that contrasts such as these are the skeletal structure on which all narratives are fleshed out. If we had to reduce even this list of dyads, to achieve a single pair, then it would have to be the art/life contrast, since the tale seems most to be about life and art viewed as factors in an overall psychic economy. The obvious final question is to ask which side of this dichotomy the tale is on. There can surely be little doubt that it is on the side of art, for it is the act of artistic creation, and, to a lesser extent, that of contemplating a work of art, which is most vividly and passionately described in the tale, rather than any sense of the waste of a young life. The frenzy of this 'passionate, wild, and moody man' produces a work of art so lifelike that it seems the product of a divine being. This is no way to champion 'life'. 'Officially' the story is a pious protest at the sacrifice of a young life, but in practice the making of the sacrifice is presented with a kind of loving envy. As D. H. Lawrence didn't quite say, never trust the moral, trust the tale. So much, then, for the symbolic code. The second example centres on the operation within a text of the semic code. This code, as we have said, is linked with the process of characterisation and thematicisation but operates on a smaller scale than the symbolic code. For Hawkes, in the book mentioned earlier, it 'utilises hints or \"flickers of meaning\"', and given that it operates through the nuances of individual words and phrases, the best way to appreciate it in action is to use a variation of what educationalists call 'cloze procedure', which involves deleting words from a text and having readers fill these gaps by drawing inferences from context and overall structure. The passage below is the opening of a novel by Mervyn Jones. The central character, Mr Armitage, is presented in the opening scene and his character immediately established. I have left gaps in the text and have listed at the end of the relevant sentences several words which might fill that gap (one of which, in each case, is the word actually used by the author). You will see that the character is decisively altered, according to the word you choose to fill the gap, enabling us to feel the semic code actually at work. The paragraphs have been numbered for ease of reference. In terms of the 'What structuralists do' list, this is an example of l.(c), that is, of relating the text to a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure, since the critic would assume that the five Barthesian codes are fundamental to the workings of all narratives. Spend time now selecting a word for each gap before going on to my commentary. STOP and THINK

1. John Edward Scott Armitage: fifty-five years old, five feet eleven inches tall, weight thirteen stone three____ [pounds, ounces] 2. June the eighth: a fine morning, nine-fifteen by the programme change on the car radio, also nine-fifteen exactly as he checked the time on his____watch. [multi-function, Swiss, Swatch, Timex, Pocket, Mickey Mouse] 3. Hendon Way, north-bound. Armitage was driving a Jaguar, just run in. Its newness pleased him - the ____ smell of the leather, the neat zeros on the mileage dial. He was among those men whose car is never more than a year old. [rich, sweet, heady, sexy, opulent] There is further description, then Armitage slows the car to look at two hitch-hikers. They meet his standards of acceptability, and he offers them a lift, but the response to his offer is a momentary hesitation. The text resumes: 4. The boy still presented his pleasant smile, but did not get into the car. Now he seemed to be considering, not only the directions, but also the car, and even Armitage himself. The hitch-hiker, in fact, was deciding whether to accept the driver instead of the other way round. Armitage was____In a few seconds more he might have been indignant. But the girl said: 'This is fine - yes it is - super, really'. [baffled, stumped, gob-smacked] 5. She spoke eagerly, indeed with some impatience at the boy's hesitation. And she too smiled at Armitage, but more than pleasantly, ____, he thought. Of course, they were lucky to get a long ride in a new Jaguar. The girl clearly realised this; she seemed, moreover, to be happy to travel with Armitage. As soon as this notion occurred to him Armitage saw that it was absurd. Yet it was an attractive thing for her to give such an impression. [happily, cheerfully, invitingly, gleefully]

6. She____into the front seat, and the boy got into the back. Armitage pulled away quickly to get ahead of a removal van. He drove in a thrusting style, seizing every opportunity, overtaking in roaring third gear. He met, and then dismissed, the thought that the girl's presence beside him had made him show off his skill. [jumped quickly, plumped heavily, slid seductively, slid easily, squeezed awkwardly, slipped quietly] I'll comment briefly on the gaps in each of these paragraphs. In the first, the word in the published text is 'ounces', the precision of which immediately suggests a man with a very precise and ordered attitude to life. (How many people know their weight to the nearest ounce?) In the second paragraph the character of Armitage is completely changed if we change his watch. In the text his 'Swiss' watch reinforces the image of the well-ordered, well-to-do life already established in the first few lines of the book. But the semic code's 'flicker of meaning' can instantly change him into an ageing gadget-faddist with a multi-function digital timepiece, or a dedicated follower of fashion with a trendy Swatch Watch, or an old fogey with a pocket watch, or a hearty life-and-soul-of-the-party type with a jokey Mickey Mouse watch. In the third paragraph the words 'sweet', 'heady', and 'sexy' all come close to turning Armitage into a leather fetishist, while 'rich' has a certain directness and vulgarity which implies that his pleasure in things is in direct proportion to their cost. The text's 'opulent' retains an element of this but seems to imply an appreciation of quality and craftsmanship for its own sake. In the fourth paragraph (as often in fiction) the kind of word used by the narrating voice reflects the character being described. 'Stumped' suggests an undignified cluelessness, as, even more so, does 'gob- smacked', whereas the text's 'baffled' implies the offended dignity of a man of some standing accustomed to a degree of respect. In the fifth paragraph Armitage's perception of the nature of the girl's smile is a crucial element in his characterisation. The text has him seeing her as smiling 'cheerfully', indicating that he is pleased to perceive a positive reaction towards him. If she were smiling, in his view, 'invitingly', then the implication would be that his motives were entirely sexual. 'Gleefully', on the other hand, would make her into a child rather than an adult. In the final paragraph the missing phrase indicates that, all the same, Armitage finds the girl attractive and is physically aware of her. The text tells us that she 'slid easily' into the front seat, implying a certain slender gracefulness. Armitage's attention is less directed towards the boy, so he simply 'got into' the back. If we reverse these two phrases the implication is that Armitage is more interested in the boy than the girl, thus: 'She got into the front seat, and the boy slid easily into the back'. This has the effect of tending to construct Armitage as homosexual, even though no such explicit statement is made. This simple 'cloze' exercise, then, indicates something of the small-scale, but none the less crucial,

workings of the semic code in the construction of character, while also showing how, in sequence, this code can begin to activate thematic motifs, such as the notion of orderliness and control associated with Armitage. The operation of two other codes could easily be illustrated from the same passage. The hermeneutic code, for instance, is obviously important in it. Right at the beginning of a novel the reader has to be drawn into the process of speculating about possible outcomes, working out enigmas, and predicting the possible patterns of events and motives. Thus, with this example we are immediately involved in answering questions like 'What is going to happen as a result of this meeting?' 'Are the hitch-hikers as innocent as they seem?' 'Will Armitage's confidence be shaken in some way as the novel progresses?' Finally, an example of the cultural code is seen in the third paragraph when we are told that Armitage 'was among those men whose car is never more than a year old', where the text appeals to our prior knowledge of this kind of man as a distinct type with a whole range of related characteristics and habits. The last code, the symbolic, would be difficult to detect in such a brief and early extract from a novel, and has already been demonstrated at length on the Poe example. Selected reading Barthes, Roland, The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard (Blackwell, 1988). Essays by the best-known structuralist critic; see chapter in section three 'Textual analysis of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe', on 'The facts in the case of M. Valdemar'. Barthes, Roland, A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (Vintage, 1993). Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (Routledge, 1975). A book which immediately established the author's reputation as a 'mediator' of difficult theories. Thorough, but seldom succinct. Culler, Jonathan, Barthes (Fontana, 1983). Culler, Jonathan, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Paperbacks, 2002). Hawkes, Terence, Structuralism and Semiotics (Methuen, 1977). A pioneering book in a key series. Equivalent to Culler, but does it better, in my view, because the series format makes for brevity and tightness. Scholes, Robert, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (Yale University Press, 1974). An admirable book. Don't be put off by its age. You won't find anything to match it. Sturrock, John, Structuralism (Paladin, 1986). Covers structuralism in a variety of fields (language, social sciences, etc.). Chapter four is a good, succinct

account of literary structuralism and its antecedents. 3 Post-structuralism and deconstructlon Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism Is post-structuralism a continuation and development of struc-turalism or a form of rebellion against it? In one important sense it is the latter, since a very effective way of rebelling is to accuse vour predecessors of not having the courage of their convictions. Thus post-structuralists accuse structuralists of not following through the implications of the views about language on which their intellectual system is based. As we saw, one of structuralism's characteristic views is the notion that language doesn't just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The post-structuralist maintains that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we have no certain standard by which to measure anything. Without a fixed point of reference against which to measure movement you cannot tell whether or not you are moving at all. You have probably at some time had the experience of sitting in a stationary train with another train between yourself and the far platform. When that t rain begins to move you may have the sensation that it is your train which is moving and only realise this isn't so when the other train has gone and you again see the fixed point of the platform. Post-structuralism says, in effect, that fixed intellectual reference points are permanently removed by properly taking on board what structuralists said about language. Or, to change the analogy, in space, where there is no gravity, there is no up and down, and these pronoucements about language send us into a gravity-free universe, without upside down or right way up. This situation, of being without intellectual reference points, is one way of describing what post-structuralists call the decentred universe, one in which, by definition, we cannot know where we are, since all the concepts which previously defined the centre, and hence also the margins, have been 'deconstructed', or undermined, in the manner described later. The characteristic concerns of post-structuralism, as hinted at here, may at first seem pretty remote. Why this constant high anxiety about language, we might ask, when it seems to work perfectly well most of the time for day-to-day purposes? But on reflection we may find that it is precisely on this matter of anxiety about language that we can most easily identify with post- structuralist concerns, for these anxious feelings seem remarkably pervasive whenever we have to use language at any level beyond that of casual daily exchange with people we know very well and whose status is the same as our own. For instance, think of any slightly less straightforward language situation, like writing to your bank, writing an essay, striking up a friendship with a stranger at a party, or sending a letter of condolence. In these cases, and many more, there is an almost universally felt anxiety that the language will express things we hadn't intended, or convey the wrong impression, or betray our ignorance, callousness, or confusion. Even when we use a phrase like 'If you see what I mean' or 'In a manner of speaking' there is the same underlying sense that we are not really in control of the linguistic system. These feelings, writ large, are really the same, or, at least, surely have the same source, as the radical linguistic scepticism which is so typical of deconstruction. Here, then, is a way into the post-structuralist

frame of mind which lies very much within attitudes and anxieties which most of us experience. However, perhaps it will be helpful simply to list some differences and distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism, under the four headings below. 1. Origins Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. Linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge. It believes that if we observe accurately, collect data systematically, and make logical deductions then we can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world. Structuralism inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system, and reason as being able to establish reliable truths. By contrast, post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things. This point of view is encapsulated in Nietzsche's famous remark 'There are no facts, only interpretations'. Philosophy is, so to speak, sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions. Its procedures often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted as simply the way things are. Post-structuralism inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in the scientific method as naive, and even derives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know anything for certain, fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entails. 2. Tone and style Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached, 'scientific coolness' of tone. Given its derivation from linguistic science, this is what we would expect. An essay like Roland Barthes's 1966 piece 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative' (reprinted in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath, 1977) is typical of this tone and treatment, with its discrete steps in an orderly exposition, complete with diagrams. The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific writing. Post-structuralist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. Often the tone is urgent and euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well contain puns and allusions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word-play of some kind. Often deconstructive writing fixes on some 'material' aspect of language, such as a metaphor used by a writer, or the etymology of a word. Overall it seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than detached coolness. 3. Attitude to language Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. All the same, it decides to live with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with. After all, language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair. By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist in insisting upon the consequences of the view that, in effect, reality itself is textual. Post-structuralism develops what threaten to become terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through language. The verbal sign, in its view, is constantly floating free of the concept it is supposed to designate. Thus, the post-structuralist's way of speaking about language involves a rather obsessive imagery based on liquids - signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and subject to constant 'slippage' or 'spillage'. This linguistic liquid, slopping about and swilling over unpredictably, defies our attempts to carry signification carefully from 'giver' to 'receiver' in the containers we call words. We are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meanings cannot be planted in set places, like somebody planting a row of potato seeds; they can only

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‘A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket’ Offred describing another handmaid, removal of individuality, conformity.

‘ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it’ People are indoctrinated. They ignore the injustice, suffering and oppressive environment.

‘better never means better for everyone.. It always means worse, for some’ commander highlighting inequality, hypocrisy, Improvement for some comes with a cost for others.

‘We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom’ Offred looking at those who are disregarded by the regime. Isolation and lack of power.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Literary Devices | LitCharts

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Use of literary devices in The Handmaid's Tale

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Use of literary devices in The Handmaid's Tale

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Critical Essays Use of Literary Devices in The Handmaid's Tale

Like a portion of modern fiction writers - Ray Bradbury, Fred Chappell, and Toni Morrison - Margaret Atwood is, by nature, training, and profession, a poet. Her facile expression of thought processes and manipulation of language to probe the psychological perversions in Gilead produce fascinating, multi-level rhetorical maneuvers, often juxtaposing weakness with power or cruelty with vulnerability. For instance:

Simile

We would exchange remedies and try to outdo each other in the recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs.

His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.

Symbol

I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do.

The camera moves to the sky, where hundreds of balloons rise, trailing their strings: red balloons, with a circle painted on them, a circle with a stem like the stem of an apple, the stem of a cross.

Humor

There's a wad of cotton attached to the back, I can see it as she half turns; it looks like a sanitary pad that's been popped like a piece of popcorn. I realize that it's supposed to be a tail.

Is anything wrong dear? the old joke went.
No, why? You moved.
Alliteration

In the curved hallway mirror, I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke.

As for us, any real illness, anything lingering, weakening, a loss of flesh or appetite, a fall of hair, a failure of the glands, would be terminal.

Historical and Cultural Lore

Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.

Behind this sign there are other signs, and the camera notices them briefly: FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY. RECAPTURE OUR BODIES. DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN'S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE?

Literary Allusion

I would not be able to stand it, I know that; Moira was right about me. I'll say anything they like, I'll incriminate anyone. It's true, the first scream, whimper even, and I'll turn to jelly, I'll confess to any crime, I'll end up hanging from a hook on the Wall. [recall Winston's capitulation to Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984.]

But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. [Parallel the shunning of Hester Prynne, wearer of the red A in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.]

Aphorism

Try to pity them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Parody

My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.

"Blessed be the fruit," she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

Parallel Construction

I want to go to bed, make love, right now. I think the word relish. I could eat a horse.

Fake it. . . . Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly.

Dialogue

"I didn't know Ofglen very well," I say. "I mean the former one."

"Oh?" she says . . .

"I've known her since May," I say. "Around the first of May I think it was. What they used to call May Day."

"Did they?' she says, light, indifferent, menacing.

"I could help you," he says. Whispers.

"What?" I say.

"Shh," he says. "I could help you. I've helped others."

"Help me?" I say, my voice as low as his. "How?.

"How do you think?" he says . . .

Foreshadowing

She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty.

"Mayday," she says. "I tried it on you once."

"Mayday," I repeat. I remember the day. M'aidez.

"Don't use it unless you have to," says Ofglen.

Biblical Allusion

Give me children, or else I die. There's more than one meaning to it.

"Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule," says a reassuring pink face, back on screen. "Three thousand have arrived this week in National Homeland One, with another two thousand in transit."

Historical Allusion

Possibly, we reasoned, this house may have been a "safe house" on the Underground Femaleroad during our period, and our author may have been kept hidden in, for instance, the attic or cellar there for some weeks or months, during which she would have had the opportunity to make the recordings.

The need for what I may call birth services was already recognize in the pre-Gilead period, where it was being inadequately met by "artificial insemination," "fertility clinics," and the use of "surrogate mothers," who were hired for the purpose.

Sense Impression

Down there in the lawn, someone emerges from the spill of darkness under the willow, steps across the light, his long shadow attached sharply to his heels.

Once we had to watch a woman being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out.

Repetition

I am, I am, I am, still.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

Euphemism

Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels.

"Think of it as being in the army," said Aunt Lydia.

Philosophy

Even though some of them are no more than fourteen - Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost - still they'll remember.

Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's plan. . . . Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women.

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Like a portion of modern fiction writers - Ray Bradbury, Fred Chappell, and Toni Morrison - Margaret Atwood is, by nature, training, and profession, a poet. Her facile expression of thought processes and manipulation of language to probe the psychological perversions in Gilead produce fascinating, multi-level rhetorical maneuvers, often juxtaposing weakness with power or cruelty with vulnerability.

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Top Five Quotes From The Handmaid's Tale

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Important Quotes
"It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge." (p.8)
This quote is important because it symbolizes and exemplifies confinement in the republic. The narrator reminds us that there are different levels of freedom. In Gilaed, there isn't even the freedom of choice on life. Life is mandatory in the republic. Windows of buildings only open partly and the glass is shatter proof inhibiting the possibility of suicide.

"Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us." (p. 8)
This quote is part of the red motif. The handmaids are cloaked in red as a reminder of their fertility. Red not only symbolizes menstrual blood or blood resulting from birth, but the red is a threat of death.

"The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you." (p. 23)
This quote contributes to the setting. In Gilead, everything is controlled. The place becomes part of you, not just a place where you reside. The republic of Gilead will make the choices: not the actual individuals.

"They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then." (p. 25)
This quote exhibits the narrator reflecting on the past. It shows the twisted ordeal of how women are forced to be/act in Gilead. They had the choice of how to represent themselves. However, nowadays, they are confined to either being a wife, handmaid, or aunt.

"Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen- to be seen-is to be- her voice trembled- penetrated." (p. 28).
This quote also has to do with gender roles. Woman must be hidden because they are seen as different than men. They wear veils that cover their heads, gloves, and long gowns that hide every part of their bodies. In Gilead,

"She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word." (p. 46)
The narrator is reflecting on the past in this quote. It represents how normal life was before Gilead, and now it has completely distorted the lives of women. The commander's wife used to be on television and make speeches voicing her opinion. Now, she is silenced and she is defined by her role as a wife.

"I almost gasp: he's said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law." P. 61
This quote exemplifies the motif of women's roles. According to Gilead, woman are not seen as useful, besides the fact that they have an egg that fertilizes to produce children. Offred has said in the past "I am his." Gilead has truly made her believe that her role as a women is inferior to a man's role.

Give me children, or else I die. There's more than one meaning to it." (p. 61).
This is another example of the role of women. This relates to the book because as a handmaid, Offred is constantly being told by Aunt Lydia that if she isn't fertile, she is worthless. Aunt Lydia acts as a form of propaganda for Gilead.

"My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated." P.63
"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely." (p. 63)
These quotes definitely relates to the world we live in today. Girls are constantly being defined by their bodies, just like they are in Gilead. Bodies can be seen as shameful, something that needs to be covered. In Gilead the women are forced to wear heavy material to shield skin, just like many girls all over the world are forced to cover their own face.

"My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number , useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried." (p. 84).
This quote applies to the motif seen commonly: identity. When people are kept from using their real names, they become lesser versions of themselves and start to who they are on the inside. Offred is falling to the suppressive ways of the republic by valuing her own name as worthless.

"Hurry up and wait," says Nick. He laughs, moves his foot so it's touching mine again. No one can see, beneath the folds of my outspread skirt. (p. 81).
This quote exemplifies the lack of touch and feeling of Gilead. Just a simple toe touch means so much in a world without any feelings. I think this quote characterizes Nick, in addition. He can be a symbol of rebellion in the novel. He attempts to bend the rules in the republic. Whether it is winking at Offred, touching her foot, or eventually kissing her, he doesn't completely succumb to the ways of Gilead.

"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the moldy old Rachel and Leah stuff we had drummed into us at the Center. Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And so on and so forth." (p. 88).
This is a prayer that Offred and the other handmaids are forced to say. The republic uses religion as a form of propaganda. They pray for the ability to have kids, which is what they are brainwashed into thinking there only purpose is. According to Genesis 29:29, Bilhah is "Rachel's handmaid, whom she gave to Jacob." Since the Old Testament had handmaids. The republic uses outdated Christianity to persuade the women that childbearing is the only way of life.

"The voice was a man's. Blessed be the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed be the meek. Blessed are the silent. I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted." (p. 89).
This quote is another allusion to the bible. The Beatitudes are eight blessings in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. The republic added to the Beatitudes by making up a line about how the silent and the meek are blessed. The republic did so because they want their people to not speak up and remain ignorant.

"It has nothing to do with passion or love or romance or any of those other notions we used to titillate ourselves with. It has nothing to do with sexual desire, at least for me, and certainly not for Serena." (p. 94).
This is Offred describing her job as a handmaid. Sex has completely lost its purpose and value. In Gilead, it is simply used to reproductive

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Important Quotes "It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge." (p.8) This quote is important because it symbolizes and exemplifies confinement in the republic. The narrator reminds us that there are different levels of freedom.

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10 Powerful Quotes: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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'The Handmaid's Tale' is commonly considered to be one of Margaret Atwood's best novels. It contains unforgettable quotes about love, the past, storytelling and words, imprisonment, and even identity. In the novel, readers are exposed to her skill creation of imagery, her ability to craft realistic and terrifying scenes, and her skill with language.

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Everything you ever wanted to know about the quotes talking about Identity in The Handmaid's Tale, written by experts just for you.

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"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

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"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.

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Behind the Hit Show: Quotes from “The Handmaid’s Tale” Novel

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Discover key passages from the novel written by Margaret Atwood that inspired the hit Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

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Everything you ever wanted to know about quotes about The Handmaid's Tale, written by experts with you in mind.

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Quotations from The Handmaid’s Tale

Nick Bowden

‘I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made up thing, not something born.’ (p 76)

‘We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the black and white spaces at the edges of print.’ (p.66)

‘We are for breeding purposes: we aren’t concubines, geisha girls, courtesans... no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favours are to be wheeled, by them or us, there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.’ (p.146)

‘Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let's get this over with or you’ll be here all night. Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breath audibly. It’s the least you can do.’ (p.267)

‘I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened.’ (p.273)

‘And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.’ (p.307)

‘Are there any questions?’ 9P.324)

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The Handmaid's tale - themes and symbols - English literature AS & A-Level

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Luke is Offred’s husband from the time before Gilead. He was captured whilst trying to help his family escape across the border to Canada. He has been missing ever since his capture and is presumed to be dead even before the narrative begins. Offred is haunted by his memory and his story is told through flashbacks and her ongoing anxiety about his fate. He features constantly in her nightmare of their failed escape attempt where her final image of him was lying face down in the snow after being shot. She is left wondering is he dead, in prison or did he escape. She hopes he will send her a message and help her escape back into their old family life when she says, “It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in this message.” Through Offred’s memories of him he is portrayed as a liberated man from the time before Gilead who was courageous, funny and is remembered for their intimate personal relationship. He was older than her and had been married before. He was Offred’s lover, husband and the father of her daughter. As her affair with Nick the chauffeur develops her memories of Luke begin to fade.

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Offred is the main protagonist and narrator of the story. She is a young woman who is trapped in Gilead as a Handmaiden, a surrogate mother or ‘two-legged womb’. In the time before Gilead, she was married to her husband Luke, and they had a daughter. Her name is derived from Of-Fred, Fred being the name of her current Commander and her real name is never revealed. She is forbidden to use her own name but keeps it like a buried treasure as a guarantee of her other identity. Her individual rights have been taken away and she is virtually imprisoned in the domestic spaces of the home she is assigned to and where she is only allowed to go out with a shopping partner. Most of the time she is isolated and afraid. Through all of this she retains her psychological freedom and has a vivacious awareness of the world around her. She is also prudently subversive but never fully rebellious and refuses to be taken in by the propaganda and rhetoric of Gilead when she finds ways to challenge and evade the absolute authority of the state. This helps her to maintain her integrity, dignity and self-respect.

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Head of the household which Offred is assigned as the handmaid.

Serena Joy’s husband.

Appearance described as ‘“like a Midwestern bank president.’

Selfish

He is nostalgic for the past. His relationship with his wife is distant and stained. He is also patronizing and condescending. He controls Offred.

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(12.40) Crash Course Part One

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The Handmaid's Tale, Part 1: Crash Course Literature 403

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(12.12) Crash Course Part Two

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The Handmaid's Tale, Part 2: Crash Course Literature 404

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Trivia Fun Facts & Interesting Information

1. Fred is the Commander she is assigned to (hence Offred), and Nick is his chauffeur with whom Offred attempts to have a baby when it becomes clear it will not happen with the Commander. John was just a random name I threw in.

2. Janine has had it bad in the past. She was attacked at 14 and then convinced by the Aunts at the Red Centre that it was her fault. When things start to get too much for her, she starts to briefly regress back to her past life as a waitress, a world which she eventually retreats to permanently.

3. Whenever Offred is feeling especially opressed by the Gilead regime, she thinks about her name. She also tells it to Nick when she feels she is falling in love with him, as a way of letting him get closer to her. As readers, we never find out her real name, but in the 1990 film starring Natasha Richardson, we quite quickly find out that Offred is really called Kate. I think this diminishes the power of the knowledge, but others may disagree.

4. Offred worries several times about being sent there. When Moira says she has seen Offred's mother working in the Colonies on television, Offred's initial reaction is relief. This is quickly dashed when Moira says she would be better off dead.

5. Ofglen eventually reveals that she throws the word 'May day' into conversation with any Handmaid she is partnered with, and the reaction it gets tell her whether her partner is aware of the rebellion.

6. The Particicution is actually the final event within the Salvaging, a ceremony in which those who have defied the principles of Gilead are hanged and put on The Wall as an example. Speaking of examples, two of the crimes that could get you this punishment are following any religion (or in fact denomination of Christianity) other than the denomination followed in Gilead, and 'Gender Treachery', the dysphemism created to refer to homosexuality.

7. Since women are forbidden from reading or writing in Gilead (even the shops are signed by pictures rather than words so as not to 'tempt' them), being asked to play Scrabble is an act of rebellion against the regime to Offred. Unfortunately, however, it goes unnoticed by all except her and the Commander, so it is ultimately fruitless.

8. Called the Red Centre by its inhabitants because of the red clothes Handmaids are forced to wear, the Centre is actually named after the two wives of Jacob who gave him their handmaids in order to conceive children.

9. Offred says she read this in a biography before women were banned from reading. She remarks that the stage name 'Serena Joy' sounds like a hair product.

10. Serena Joy, the ex Gospel singer, was supposedly based on Phyllis Schlafly, a right wing activist who maintained that it was a woman's duty to stay in the home. Realising the irony of touring the country to put across this message, she made out that it was a great sacrifice for her to do so in order that other women would not need to.

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The Handmaid's Tale Trivia Quiz and Fun Facts | Atwood, Margaret

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I was very impressed when reading this novel of an oppressive society. The scariest part is that almost every aspect is based on something that was actually happening somewhere in the world at the time of writing. How much do you know about this book? (Author Bulm)

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The Features of Speculative Fiction 3:03

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The Features of Speculative Fiction 3:03

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The Challenge of Speculative Fiction 3.58

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Narrative Structure in The Handmaid's Tale - Watch up until 9.50

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Narrative Structure in The Handmaid's Tale - Watch up until 9.50

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The Handmaid's Tale - Exploring Narrative Structure

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Book Summary

In the mid-1980s near Boston, Massachusetts, a cabal of rightwing fundamentalists murders the U.S. President and members of Congress, disenfranchises women by impounding their credit cards and denying them jobs and education, and sets up Gilead, a repressively conservative state bent on annihilating homosexuals, abortionists, and religious sects other than their own, and resettling Jews, old women, and nonwhite people in radioactive territory, known as the Colonies. Because nuclear and biological warfare has polluted vast areas, the population suffers a sharp decline in viable births and a rise in birth defects. Consequently, infertile and aged females, as well as homosexuals, are dispatched as clean-up crews in the Colonies. Fertile women involved in illicit liaisons or second marriages are apprehended, indoctrinated, and parceled out to Commanders of the secret police as Handmaids. These reduniformed breeders live in seclusion and virtual slavery and are deprived of their real names and labeled with a patronym of the men who control their lives-as in "Ofcharles" and "Ofwarren." The purpose of these polygynous relationships is the perpetuation of the white race, which carries on warfare in outlying areas in a struggle for supremacy.

Offred, the second wife of Luke and mother of a five-year-old daughter, attempts to escape to Canada. She is apprehended and separated from her family. Her mother, a vocal feminist, disappears. Virtually alone and friendless, Offred is selected as a potential breeder and indoctrinated at the Rachel and Leah Re-Education Center. The Handmaids-in-training share pared-down barracks - like quarters in a gymnasium surrounded by fences topped by barbed wire. Reunited with her feisty, rebellious college pal Moira, Offred maintains spunk and individuality while pretending to follow the direction of sadistic armed matrons, particularly Aunt Lydia and Aunt Elizabeth.

After lights out, Moira, Offred, and other Handmaids offer surreptitious support, survival tips, and bits of information. Like conspirators, they observe the patrolling Aunts and seize unguarded moments for normal behavior, including gripe sessions, food stolen from the cafeteria, and brief touches of hands between cots. Janine, a compliant stooge, struggles so hard to adapt to the restrictive Handmaid lifestyle that she retreats into a blank stare, evidence of impending mental and emotional collapse. Because Moira pretends to suffer an attack of appendicitis, she is tortured by beatings with steel cables on her feet. Ultimately, she overpowers Aunt Elizabeth, strips her, and escapes in the Aunt's khaki uniform.

Offred leaves the Center and joins the robotic cadre of Gilead's Handmaids. After one failed attempt to conceive, she passes into the possession of a second official, Commander Fred, whose previous Handmaid hanged herself from the bedroom light fixture. Daily, Offred carries a basket to local markets to obtain fresh food, then returns to a boring incarceration in a cloistered room, relieved only by public prayer sessions, birthings, monthly medical exams, and executions. Once a month she mates with Commander Fred in a pseudo-religious ritual requiring Bible reading, followed by copulation with the Commander in the presence of his aging Wife, Serena Joy. A spiteful, unhappy former gospel singer, Serena at first disdains Offred, then grows so despondent at their mutual barrenness that she arranges for Offred to conduct a secret sexual liaison with Nick, the family chauffeur.

Unknown to Serena, the Commander has been summoning Offred to late-night visits to his den for companionship, games of Scrabble, kisses, and gifts of hand lotion, fashion magazines, and information about the outside world. Offred divulges a Latin phrase that her predecessor scratched on the wall. The Commander translates it for her. On one of her visits, the Commander presents her with borrowed finery - makeup, high heels, a sequined and feathered costume, and an evening cloak. Offred abandons her standard red outfit and, dressed in whorish frippery, accompanies him to Jezebel's, an illegal nightclub staffed by prostitutes and frequented by Gilead officials and Japanese and Arab businessmen. Offred locates Moira among the prostitutes and pumps her for information. Moira relates her failed attempt to escape Gilead and reports seeing a documentary film that contained a glimpse of Offred's mother, now an Unwoman at a radioactive Colony.

On a late summer day, Serena confronts Offred with the garish sequined garment and accuses her of treachery. As Offred contemplates her alternatives - escape, suicide, retreat to Nick's quarters, a plea for mercy from the Commander - a black police van arrives. Nick enters her room and hurries her into the custody of two operatives of the Eyes, whom he indicates are double agents for Mayday, the underground liberation group that Ofglen has hinted at. Against the Commander's objections, the two agents charge Offred with violating state secrets and hustle her into the waiting van. Her narrative ends with her ambiguous departure from the Commander's custody.

On June 25, 2195, over two centuries after the formation of Gilead's theocratic dictatorship, an academic consortium listens to a keynote speech delivered by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, an archivist who gives evidence of Offred's experiences as narrated on thirty cassette tapes. The unnumbered segments do not establish the existence of a real historical figure, but shreds of data suggest that the voice on the tapes belongs to a single speaker who identifies a real Commander, possibly Frederick R. Waterford, who was eradicated during a state purge of liberals. Pieixoto's surmise is that Offred escaped Gilead on the Underground Femaleroad, connected with a Quaker way station in Bangor, Maine, and concealed her story on pre-recorded commercial tapes before departing to either Canada or England. Pieixoto assumes that Offred lived out her life in seclusion to spare her family from lethal reprisals.

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In the mid-1980s near Boston, Massachusetts, a cabal of rightwing fundamentalists murders the U.S. President and members of Congress, disenfranchises women by i

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Structure and Plot in The Handmaid's Tale

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Structure and Plot in The Handmaid's Tale

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Margaret Atwood: There’s Nothing In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ ‘That Didn’t Happen, Somewhere’

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The author of the classic dystopian work discusses her influences and fears regarding women’s rights in the real world.

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Since its release in 1985, Margaret Atwood has been asked the same question about The Handmaid's Tale: 'how did you come up with this stuff'? Her answer has always been the same, that the terrifying events of the novel all have their precedents in some of the darkest chapters in world history.

Here, during a trip to the University of Toronto where the archives for her classic novel are kept, Atwood speaks about what precisely those events are, from the brutal Communist reign of Ceaușescu in Romania to the battles waged over female rights in America during the 1980s.

It is a rare insight into what galvanised the author to write what is proving to be the most prescient dystopia of our times and its new sequel, The Testaments. And like both novels, her answers are a reminder of what we shouldn't take for granted in 2019.

Q: Hello, Margaret. It's very exciting to see you here in the Fisher Library, reunited with the boxes of historical sources, ideas and materials you collected for The Handmaid's Tale. Can you tell us more about what's inside?
MA: There's a lot to rummage through, but let's start with this. This would be the first draft. It was called Offred before I changed the title.

These are the early epigraphs which I didn't use, but they're pretty interesting. I found better ones in the end. These ones were a bit too obvious. The first is fromDora Forster, who in 1905 wrote a book called Sex Radicalism: As Seen by an Emancipated Woman of the New Time: 'I hope the scarcity of children will go on until motherhood is honoured at least as much as the trials and hardships of soldiers campaigning in wartime. It will then be worthwhile to supply the nation with a sufficiency of children.' And this one is from the 1980s, by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, who wrote about the relationship between biology and culture: 'The great majority of economically more primitive societies are polygamous, and the number of wives is generally regarded as a measure of masculine success.' And then there's the one I did use, from the Rachel and Leah story: 'Give me children, or else I die.'
Q: What are all these newspaper clippings?
MA: They are Handmaid's Tale background material. They're nicely sorted and laminated. 'Women forced to have babies.' This is an article about Ceaușescu and Romania. He passed laws that said women had to have four babies. They had to have pregnancy tests every month and if they weren't pregnant they had to explain why. 'The latest sicko Red ruling was announced by cold-blooded Romanian president Nicolas [ sic] Ceaușescu, who wants women to have more babies so the country will get richer.' It was this policy that filled up the Romanian orphanages, which then became a scandal around the world for their inhumane conditions.

Here's another piece: 'Conservatives are out to get the women's movement. They wish to attack birth control and voluntary sterilization. Their eventual target is to wipe out the women's movement.' And this is a good headline that highlights religious tensions: 'Catholics say cult taking over.' It's about a cult called the People of Hope that 'subordinates its women, discourages social contact with non-members, arranges marriages, moves teenage disciples to households for indoctrination . . . their treatment of women is very Islamic. It's a form of brainwashing.'

Here's a batch of headlines about chemicals affecting fertility: 'Lead-poison in work place on increase,' 'Perilous chemical problem out of control,' 'Billion-dollar Agent Orange trial opens.' This one relates directly to The Handmaid's Tale: 'Infertility: not uncommon male problem, but often treatable.' In Gilead, male infertility is similarly glossed over - there are no infertile men, only women.

This is a particularly good one: 'Birth dearth is a deliberate myth. The super-patriotic, hyper-capitalists running America these days are deciding that we must do "it" more often . . . We're not breeding fast enough to keep ahead of the dirty commies and dusky third-worlders.' This was in 1986, but it's the same stuff that's happening now. Though I don't think you'd get quite such plain speech in a newspaper these days.
Q: What was your intention in collecting all these clippings?
MA: My intention was just to document what I was doing and had done. As somebody on Twitter put it, 'How do you come up with this shit?' As if I invented it. Here's one from 1985, which is when I was finishing The Handmaid's Tale: 'What causes the high rate of infant death in the US? Especially among black people?' That is still being written about. 'Battle of the sexes rages on as Soviet women gain clout,' 'Overworked mothers and frustrated career women,' 'Rights gains imperilled,' 'Village moneylenders sometimes take an infant from the farmer to punish him for not paying a loan. She's later married off to anyone, or kept as a maid,' 'Reducing access in Saskatchewan to abortions,' 'Slavery and human progress,' 'Missing children,' 'Baby stealing,' 'Disappearing children.' Gives a pretty vivid picture of what was on people's minds then, doesn't it?
Q: It must have been very intense researching this way.
MA: I didn't even research it. There was no Internet then, you couldn't just go online and put in a topic, so this is just stuff I came across when reading newspapers and magazines. I cut things out and put them in a box. I already knew what I was writing about and this was backup. In case someone said, 'How did you make this up?' As I've said about a million times, I didn't make it up. This is the proof - everything in these boxes.

There's so much of it. 'Ayatollah Khomeini's slaughterhouse. The jails of Iran.' Here's one about Klan-watch, an organization that tracked the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacists were very active then. 'Liberation theology, why is the Vatican so worried?' Death row. The battle of the Bible belt. In 1985 racists in the US were preaching revolution: 'US conservatives push new order - the push to the right.' And religion was a significant part of that whole movement: 'Racism and religion a potent brew,' 'Evangelist moles running for US president,' 'The power and influence behind America's right' - meaning the rise of the religious right.

Talking of the rise of the right, here's a piece about the Lebensborn movement in Nazi Germany, when SS men were given racially pure extra 'wives' to make more little SS men: 'Why Nazis slaughtered own super-race babies . . . The super-race child would be bred for looks and loyalty, stalwart, tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed. Nazism would be his creed, Adolf Hitler his god...'

Here's an even better one about the birth dearth: 'Make a baby for Christmas, MP tells Canadians.'

A progressive conservative MP has suggested that Canadians start with renewed vigour over the holidays to increase the country's population. Dave Nickerson, Western Arctic, based his proposal in the House of Commons on Statistic Canada figures that show Canada's fertility rate dropping to an all-time low. 'It ought to be public policy to encourage families to have more children,' said Nickerson, 'in that the process involved is not unduly distasteful. Might I suggest that we could all start with renewed vigour this Christmas.'" Which leads nicely into this one, I think: 'Artificial birth methods are attacked by some feminists fearing male control. There is concern that we are moving toward methods that are not always in the best interests of individual women,' says a sociologist. No kidding.

'The smart card: how to make a plastic payment,' 'Electronic debit cards met with resistance,' 'Germans computerize identity cards.' Aha! Don't say I didn't warn you!
Q: Yes, what is it with you and debit cards? You seem to have a thing about them.
MA: Whenever you put your card into a machine, that machine knows where you are. It's a tracker. And the other thing of course is that if you wanted to single out a particular group, you could very easily just cut off their cash. Which is what happens to women at the start of Gilead. Nowadays there are a lot more ways of tracking people, through the GPS on their phone and so on, and it's not just cash that can be stopped. Now you can cut off access to the whole of the Internet, as India has just done in Kashmir. In China, Facebook and other social media sites are blocked and the Communist Party have their own internal network they can monitor. Like any human technology, there's a plus side, a minus side, and a stupid side you didn't anticipate. Pick out any technology, it's true of them all.
Q: Have you noticed how if you talk about something, then all of a sudden it's being advertised on your phone and computer?
MA: I know. It's watching you. But the algorithm doesn't seem to understand 'I already bought that' - stop bugging me about something I already bought, I don't want another one.

We should probably get back to the boxes, shouldn't we? Friends of the Earth. Already started in 1985. Toxic chemicals poisoning babies. A lot on toxic chemicals and waste. Greenpeace. Arctic preservation. Quotes about the US. One from Carlos Fuentes: 'What the US does best is to understand itself; what it does worst is to understand others.' Still going as topics. How long ago all of this was, and how current it still is.
Q: What's that? Is it another piece of a manuscript?
MA: It's a handwritten piece about The Handmaid's Tale which I must have sent to somebody or other. Who knows. It looks like it was in 1986.
Q: Would you like to read from it?
MA: When I first began thinking about The Handmaid's Tale way back in 1981' - that's interesting: apparently I was thinking about it as early as 1981 - 'I thought it was a very strange sort of book for me to be writing. Also I was afraid people would think it was merely paranoid. Like many books, The Handmaid's Tale began with the question, What if? I guess I was tired of having people say, 'It can't happen here.' They were right only if you accepted their definition of 'it.' 'It' could mean Russian-style communism or Germany under Hitler, but what if we were looking at the wrong 'it'; what if while we were busily staring down the wolf at the door, another one was creeping over the back fence? Once any democracy starts curtailing freedom in the name of freedom, it may land us in trouble. What if you wanted to take over the US today? What flag could you wave successfully? The Handmaid's Tale is one answer to these 'What ifs?' And it goes on from there.
Q: Have your views on this changed? Do you think we are still worried about the wrong "it"?
MA: What I said then is what I'd say now. It hasn't changed.
Q: Do you have a similar set of clippings for The Testaments?
MA: A lot of the things I was looking at for The Testaments were online. I've kept some of those things, but today I would probably be referencing the URLs rather than cutting things out. If I wanted a box I could easily run off those pieces; it's a form of job creation for the future.

Box or no box, the same rule applied: nothing goes in that there isn't backup for.

Q: Is there anything else in here you particularly remember?
MA: Yes, I've been looking out for all the stuff about forced polygamy. I did actually research polygamy in the States, meaning your old-order Mormons, not just the people who get married again but fail to inform their first wife or the second of that situation. I had a long article about old-order Mormons and how they were circumventing the law. I remember it really well. It was quite funny because in the interview these guys were saying, 'People think this is just fun, it's not, it's really hard work. I'm run ragged all the time, running from one wife to the next.' Here it is! I knew it had to be in here somewhere. 'The private place of plural marriage.' Here's a good bit-the guy says, 'Sometimes I take them out individually, and sometimes I take all the wives out. It's really a strange and interesting experience to have your wife help you get ready for a date. As I was going out of the door one time when we were on our honeymoon, Betty was brushing me off and making sure I looked nice and saying, 'Don't be bashful, just step up and put your arm around her..''

Q: There's a TV show about that now, a Mormon reality show.
MA: Really? And how's that going over?
Q: It's a huge hit.
MA: A huge hit! I have a clipping from the 1950s about how to be a good wife, with all these things you have to do and have not to do, and so forth. And women read it and they say, 'This is horrible.' And men read it and they say, 'This sounds pretty good.' It contains gems like: 'Never question your husband, he is the head of the household, even if he doesn't come home all night. He knows what he's doing. And you don't have to know what he's doing . . .'

That was certainly relevant to The Handmaid's Tale thirty-five years ago, but it's clearly also still relevant to your 2019 hit reality TV show, too. How nice! All of these pieces I've been looking at and reading from are from 1984, 1985, and 1986. These are topics that are still with us today, in fact even more so if anything.

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Margaret Atwood on the real-life events that inspired The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

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Since its release in 1985, Margaret Atwood has been asked the same question about The Handmaid's Tale: 'how did you come up with this stuff'? Her answer has always been the same, that the terrifying events of the novel all have their precedents in some of the darkest chapters in world history.

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Moments in history that inspired the book - Warning - some of this is difficult to watch. 13:24   

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Moments in history that inspired the book - Warning - some of this is difficult to watch. 13:24   

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Moments in History That Inspired The Handmaid's Tale |⭐ OSSA Insights

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The Handmaid's Tale is About the Present

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Dystopia - definition

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Seneca - All about 'The Handmaid's Tale'

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Seneca - All about 'The Handmaid's Tale'

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Margaret Atwood - English Lit: Edexcel A Level The Handmaid’s Tale

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Margaret Atwood is one of the most acclaimed and honoured authors of modern times. She has won numerous awards for her range of novels, poems, non-fiction and children’s literature.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Character Analysis | LitCharts

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Offred

The novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Handmaid of the Commander and Serena Joy, former wife of Luke, and lover of Nick. We never learn her real name (Offred means "Of Fred," her... read analysis of Offred

The Commander

The head of the household where Offred serves as a Handmaid, and husband of Serena Joy. The Commander has gray hair, wears a black suit, and looks "like a Midwestern bank president." Though he... read analysis of The Commander

Serena Joy

Also known as the Commander's Wife, she is unable to have children and therefore requires Offred's services. Before Gilead, she was a singer who became famous on TV for her emotional Christian music... read analysis of Serena Joy

Nick

The Commander's driver and Serena Joy's helper in the garden, and Offred's lover. Nick's official position is Guardian, and he seems to be low-ranking because he hasn't been assigned a woman. From... read analysis of Nick

Luke

Offred's pre-Gilead husband and father of her daughter. He was previously married and had a long affair with Offred before divorcing his first wife. Though Offred passes a lot of time remembering him... read analysis of Luke

Moira

Offred's best friend in college, a brave, opinionated feminist lesbian whom Offred encounters again at the Rachel and Leah Center. After one failed attempt, she manages to escape the Center and move along the... read analysis of Moira

A professor at Cambridge University in 2195 and a specialist in 20th and 21st century history. The keynote speaker in the Historical Notes.

She taught Gyn Ed at the Rachel and Leah Center, and is a sort of midwife who helps with Janine's birth. The Aunt that Moira threatens and ties up in the furnace room during her second escape attempt.

An aunt at the Rachel and Leah center, who watches over the women in the center while carrying a cattle prod.

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The novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Handmaid of the Commander and Serena Joy, former wife of Luke, and lover of Nick. We never learn her real name (Offred means "Of Fred," her... read analysis of Offred The head of the household where Offred serves as a Handmaid, and husband of Serena Joy.

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The Handmaid's Tale Introduction

Want more deets? We've also got a complete Online Course about The Handmaid's Tale, with three weeks worth of readings and activities to make sure you know your stuff.

The title The Handmaid's Tale sounds kind of... perky. Like it might be a saucy recounting of the life 'n' times of a French maid. Or a zany romp where various servants compare the goings-on of their employers. It brings to mind cute intrigue, friendly gossip, and flirtatious banter, right?

Hahaha- no. Dead wrong. Words like perky, saucy, and zany would never be used to describe the contents of Margaret Atwood's most famous work. Instead, this novel could be classified as terrifying, bleak, and cruel and unusual.

It could also be classified as science-fiction-and .

The Handmaid's Tale, a best-selling book first published in 1985, was marketed as a sci-fi horror story. After all, it takes place in a scary vision of a dystopian future, kind of like Brave New World, , or even The Hunger Games. In this future, nearly all the women have become infertile, so the few who can still have babies have been rounded up, brainwashed, and assigned to powerful men in a twisted attempt to restore the human race. The Handmaid's Tale won author Margaret Atwood some seriously major awards, including the 1986 Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Award, the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, and a nomination for the Booker Prize.

But while The Handmaid's Tale has gotten tons of praise as a work of science fiction, Atwood has claimed that this book is actually something else completely. She calls it "speculative" fiction instead, which has caused some problems with sci-fi fans. (For more on this, see "Genre.")

But whether you think the distinction is necessary or arbitrary, The Handmaid's Tale is now considered standard-even required-reading, appreciated both by the public and critics. It received glowing sound bites from most major newspapers and sat on the New York Times best-seller list for a good stretch.

It seems that whether you like science fiction or not, or whether you call this speculative fiction or not, The Handmaid's Tale has something to offer readers of all stripes.

What is The Handmaid's Tale About and Why Should I Care?

Everyone seems to like getting scared from time to time. We go on roller coasters. We've taken Halloween to the next level with pee-your-pants level terrifying haunted houses. We like natural disasters, psychopaths, monsters, zombies, and vampires on the big and small screens.

But we like our scary stuff to be fictional and temporary. Two and a half hours with Immortan Joe at the multiplex? Awesome. Reading about a real murderous dictator on CNN? Not awesome... but just as scary.

The Handmaid's Tale is guaranteed to terrify you-both in a fun, entertaining way and in a viscerally upsetting, too-close-to-home way.

In The Handmaid's Tale, characters have no voice in their dystopian government and no control over their lives. In an interview with the New York Times, Margaret Atwood summed up her book like this: "[...] it's a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime" ( source).

And when you put it like that, it seems like the book's implications are pretty universal. Although our world isn't as totalitarian and frightening as Atwood's futuristic vision of the United States, it's still not as good a place as it could be. We still live in scary times.

There's censorship aplenty. There are public executions. There are people who are taken away in vans, never to be seen again. The same stuff that makes Gilead so freaky is very much part of the world in which we live now.

Even the main issue that The Handmaid's Tale tackles-the total subjugation of women-is hardly a stretch of the imagination. Today there are places in the world where women don't have the right to choose what clothes they wear or whom they marry, and where they can be stoned to death for committing adultery. And there are plenty more places where women are grouped into categories that are almost as vice-like as those seen in this novel-when you think about it, dichotomies like "Madonna/Whore" are a whole lot like "Wife/Handmaid."

Yup: this is a scary book on a whole bunch of levels. But hey, at least we're not in Gilead. We're allowed to read. And that might be the single biggest reason you should read this book-because you can.

The Handmaid's Tale Resources

Websites

Quiz
Quiz yourself on your knowledge of The Handmaid's Tale here.

Movie or TV Productions

The Handmaid's Tale
This 1990 feature film stars the late Natasha Richardson as the narrator.

Movie Review
Janet Maslin reviews the film for the New York Times.

Historical Documents

1986 Review in Time Magazine
Check out this thoughtful review by Paul Gray.

New York Times Review
Check out this 1986 review by Mary McCarthy. She wasn't the biggest fan.

Video

Images

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Want more deets? We've also got a complete Online Course about The Handmaid's Tale, with three weeks worth of readings and activities to make sure you know your stuff. The title The Handmaid's Tale sounds kind of... perky. Like it might be a saucy recounting of the life 'n' times of a French maid.

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reading novels and effective study skills

Why study a novel?
There's nothing wrong with reading a novel just to pass the time, or as an alternative to watching TV. But if you want to get more out of your reading experience, if you want to start appreciating the finer points of literature, or if you want to make a serious study of the books you read - then you need to go in at a deeper level. For this you may need new reading techniques.

The tips and skills listed here are not in any order of priority, and some may be more appropriate for the book you are reading than others. Use them in any combination possible, and I guarantee you'll start seeing things in novels you never saw before.

Method
There isn't one single formula or a secret recipe for the successful study of a novel. But to do it seriously you should be a careful and attentive reader. This means reading, then re-reading. It means making an active engagement with the book, and it probably means reading more slowly than usual. And it means making notes.

Approach
You can read the novel quickly first, just to get an idea of the story-line. Then you will need to read it again more slowly, making notes. If you don't have time, then one careful slower reading should combine understanding and note-taking. For instance you could read a novella such as Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness quite quickly, then re-read it more carefully, making detailed notes. But in the case of a long novel such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House it's unlikely that you would have enough time to read it more than once. You would need to make the notes at the same time as a single reading.

Make notes
There are two possible types of notes - some written in the pages of the book itself, and others on separate sheets of paper. Those in the book are for highlighting small details as you go along. Those on separate pages are for summaries of evidence, collections of your own observations, and page references for study topics or quotations.

Notes written in the book are absolutely vital if you are going to write about the book - say for a term paper or a coursework essay. They will save you hours of searching through the pages to locate a passage you wish to quote.

Notes in the book
Use a soft pencil - not a pen. Ink is too distracting on the page. Don't underline whole paragraphs. If something strikes you as interesting, write a brief note saying why or how it is so. If you read on the bus or in the bath, use the inside covers and any blank pages for making notes. Do not of course write in library books - only your own copy. To do so is both insulting to other readers, and very stupid - because you lose the notes when the book is returned.
Vladimir Nabokov's notes on Kafka's Metamorphosis
What to note?
You can nmake a note of anything that strikes you as interesting, but here are some suggestions:

the appearance of characters

recurring themes or motifs

features of the author's style

plot twists or crucial scenes

important details of the story

Some do's and don'ts
Underline up to a couple of lines of the text if necessary - but also put a word or two in the margin that gives it a title. In other words, give a name to what you think is important. Don't underline whole paragraphs: that creates an ugly page, and it's a waste of time. Instead, write a note in the top or bottom margin, saying what you think is important. Or put a circle round a name or a special couple of words.

Separate notes
You will definitely remember the characters, events, and features of a novel more easily if you make notes whilst reading. Use separate pages for different topics. You might make a record of

characters

chronology of events

major themes

stylistic features

narrative strategies

Characters
Make a note of the name, age, appearance, and their relationship to other characters in the novel. Writers usually give most background information about characters when they are first introduced into the story. Make a note of the page(s) on which this occurs. Note any special features of main characters, what other characters (or the author) thinks of them.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include - setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic.

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Chronology of events
A summary of each chapter will help you reconstruct the whole story long after you have read it. The summary prompts the traces of reading experience which lie dormant in your memory. If the book is divided into chapters, make a short summary of each one as you finish reading it.

A chronology of events might also help you to unravel a complex story. It might help separate plots from sub-plots, and even help you to see any underlying structure in the story - what might be called the 'architecture of events'.

Major themes
These are the important underlying issues with which the novel is concerned. They are usually summarised as abstract concepts such as - marriage, education, justice, freedom, and redemption. These might only emerge slowly as the novel progresses on first reading - though they might seem much more obvious on subsequent readings.

Seeing the main underlying themes will help you to appreciate the relative importance of events. It will also help you to spot cross-references and appreciate some of the subtle effects orchestrated by the author.

Stylistic features
These are the decorative and literary hallmarks of the writer's style - which usually make an important contribution to the way the story is told. The style might be created by any number of features:

choice of vocabulary

imagery and metaphors

shifts in tone and register

use of irony and humour

Quotations
If you are writing an essay about the novel, you will need quotations from it to support your arguments. You must make a careful note of the pages on which they occur. Do this immediately whilst reading - otherwise tracking them down later will waste lots of time.

Record page number and a brief description of the subject. Write out the quotation itself if it is short enough. Don't bother writing out long quotations.

Bibliography
If you are reading literary criticism or background materials related to the novel - make a full bibliographic record of every source. In the case of books, you should record - Author, Book Title, Publisher, Place of publication, Date, Page number.

If you borrow the book from a library, make a full note of its number in the library's classification system. This will save you time if you need to take it out again at a later date.

In the case of Internet and other digital sources (CDs, websites, videos) you need to look at our guidance notes on referencing digital sources.

Maps and diagrams
Some people have good visual memories. A diagram or map may help you to remember or conceptualise the 'geography' of events. Here's Vladimir Nabokov's diagram of the geography of Southerton in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Chapter summaries
Many novels are structured in chapters. After reading each chapter, make a one sentence summary of what it's about. This can help you remember the events at a later date. The summary might be what 'happens' in an obvious sense [Mr X travels to London] but it might be something internal or psychological [Susan realises she is 'alone'].

Deciding what is most important will help you to digest and remember the content of the novel. The process of deciding will also help you to separate the more important from the less important content.

Making links
Events or characters or details of plot may have significant links between them, even though these are revealed to the reader many pages apart. Always make a note as soon as you see them - because they will be very hard to find later.

Use a dictionary
Some novelists like to use unusual, obscure, or even foreign words. Take the trouble to look these up in a good dictionary. It will help you to understand the story and the author, and it will help to extend the range of your own vocabulary. If you need help choosing a good dictionary for studying, have a look at our guidance notes on the subject.

What is close reading?
When you have become accustomed to looking at a novel in greater depth, you might be interested to know that there are four possible stages in the process of understanding what it has to offer and what can be said about it. These are the four, in increasing degree of complexity.

1. Linguistic
You pay especially close attention to the surface linguistic elements of the text - that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer's individual style. This level of reading is largely descriptive.

2. Semantic
You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean - that is, what information they yield up, what meanings they denote and connote. This level of reading is cognitive. That is, we need to understand what the words are telling us - both at a surface and maybe at an implicit level.

3. Structural
You note the possible relationships between words within the text - and this might include items from either the linguistic or semantic types of reading. This level of reading is analytic. You assess, examine, sift, and judge a large number of items from within the text in their relationships to each other.

4. Cultural
You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author, or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology. This level of reading is interpretive. We offer judgements on the work in its general relationship to a large body of cultural material outside it.

Next steps
If you want a sample of these four levels of reading illustrated with brief extracts from a short story and a long novel, here are -

© Roy Johnson 2004

Literary studies links

Literary studies guides

Tutorials on 19th century authors

Tutorials on 20th century authors

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How to study a novel - a tutorial and guidance notes

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Why study a novel? There's nothing wrong with reading a novel just to pass the time, or as an alternative to watching TV. But if you want to get more out of your reading experience, if you want to start appreciating the finer points of literature, or if you want to make a serious study of the books you read - then you need to go in at a deeper level.