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eye_of_a_catFriend Who Lives In The Real World: So, what have you been doing lately?
Me: I just wrote the final draft of an eleven-thousand word chapter, in a week! It's almost done apart from bibliography and footnotes! omgwtfeleventyone!
FWLITRW: Oh, okay. What else have you been up to?
Um, slept?
That's not entirely true. I saw The Incredibles at the weekend, which was fun if a little bit too close to the mess Prince Charles got himself into recently, and I went to hospital with my housemate (who lost a toenail, btw - the only two things in the world I'm squeamish about are toe injuries and seafood). Also, I re-read The Handmaid's Tale, which I hadn't read since I was 17 and frantically memorising every useful-sounding line in time for my A-levels.
It's as scary as I remembered. Not scary in a this-could-happen sense (although places like Afghanistan suggest it could), but in what it says about what people are capable of allowing. My A-level class was all-female, which the teacher said made the discussions less interesting - in previous years, there'd been some good arguments about whether men would really let this sort of society form, even if they weren't directly forming it themselves. To our credit, we did notice that the society wasn't just created by men - it's a difficult point to miss, especially when we all agreed on the ceremony where a mob of Handmaids willingly tear a man to pieces as the most disturbing scene in the book - but I don't think I saw until this time round just how much of it was done by women.
When I was seventeen, we didn't like Offred much. We would have preferred it if the book had been about the first Ofglen instead, who could've talked just as much about that society from a Handmaid's perspective, and who seemed far more interesting because she was part of Mayday. And who wants to read about a man character angstily going along with the system when you could be reading about one who's trying to bring that system down from within? (I still wish we'd heard more about Mayday - the people at the end call it a 'quasi-military organisation' that's separate from the underground railroad, and then go back to being haughty and superior academics, which I can do all by myself thankyouverymuch.) But with Offred as the narrator, it's a much more interesting book. Dystopian futures as external forces of oppression aren't difficult to write, and they're easy to feel smug about - we all want to think we'd have been like Ofglen in that situation, sacrificing our lives to fight against it. Except probably we wouldn't. Offred's self-conscious enough to realise she's buying into the mindset, but that doesn't stop her buying into it, and 'Serena Joy' is no more of a real name than 'Offred' is. She doesn't fall for it completely; she just falls for it enough.
I remember the film being pretty terrible, though. Still, there aren't many film adaptations that work as well as the books do.
Me: I just wrote the final draft of an eleven-thousand word chapter, in a week! It's almost done apart from bibliography and footnotes! omgwtfeleventyone!
FWLITRW: Oh, okay. What else have you been up to?
Um, slept?
That's not entirely true. I saw The Incredibles at the weekend, which was fun if a little bit too close to the mess Prince Charles got himself into recently, and I went to hospital with my housemate (who lost a toenail, btw - the only two things in the world I'm squeamish about are toe injuries and seafood). Also, I re-read The Handmaid's Tale, which I hadn't read since I was 17 and frantically memorising every useful-sounding line in time for my A-levels.
It's as scary as I remembered. Not scary in a this-could-happen sense (although places like Afghanistan suggest it could), but in what it says about what people are capable of allowing. My A-level class was all-female, which the teacher said made the discussions less interesting - in previous years, there'd been some good arguments about whether men would really let this sort of society form, even if they weren't directly forming it themselves. To our credit, we did notice that the society wasn't just created by men - it's a difficult point to miss, especially when we all agreed on the ceremony where a mob of Handmaids willingly tear a man to pieces as the most disturbing scene in the book - but I don't think I saw until this time round just how much of it was done by women.
When I was seventeen, we didn't like Offred much. We would have preferred it if the book had been about the first Ofglen instead, who could've talked just as much about that society from a Handmaid's perspective, and who seemed far more interesting because she was part of Mayday. And who wants to read about a man character angstily going along with the system when you could be reading about one who's trying to bring that system down from within? (I still wish we'd heard more about Mayday - the people at the end call it a 'quasi-military organisation' that's separate from the underground railroad, and then go back to being haughty and superior academics, which I can do all by myself thankyouverymuch.) But with Offred as the narrator, it's a much more interesting book. Dystopian futures as external forces of oppression aren't difficult to write, and they're easy to feel smug about - we all want to think we'd have been like Ofglen in that situation, sacrificing our lives to fight against it. Except probably we wouldn't. Offred's self-conscious enough to realise she's buying into the mindset, but that doesn't stop her buying into it, and 'Serena Joy' is no more of a real name than 'Offred' is. She doesn't fall for it completely; she just falls for it enough.
I remember the film being pretty terrible, though. Still, there aren't many film adaptations that work as well as the books do.
