Should The Handmaid’s Tale be banned?

I know that some of you didn’t enjoy the novel but should it be banned from schools?

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the early 80s, a time when there was a backlash against the feminism of the 70s. In the many of the advances that women had made, the sacrifices they had made in order to create more opportunities for subsequent generations of women, were being ignored or rejected. There were calls for women to return to the home, to leave the workplace and go back to raising children. The 1980s were very conservative times.

The story is told by Offred, a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a society in which women of a lower caste are the concubines for the ruling caste and provide babies for the women. In this society, sexual intercourse is considered degrading to women so only the lower class women have it. Men and women are very strictly segregated, according to their gender as well as to their class. Atwood critiques fundamentalist religions as well as caste societies and the military.

At the time of its publication the novel provoked much discussion and debate. The Handmaid’s Tale is listed as one of the 100 “most frequently challenged books” from 1990 to 1999 on the American Library Association’s website. The Canadian Library Association (remember Atwood is Canadian) says there is “no known instance of a challenge to this novel in Canada” but says the book was called anti-Christian and pornographic by parents after being placed on a reading list for secondary students in Texas in the 1990s.

It has been reviewed this year in some places (including Canada) because of complaints over sexuality and criticism of religious fundamentalism.

According to Education Reporter Kristin Rushowy of the Toronto Star in 2008 a parent in Toronto, Canada, wrote a letter to his son’s high school principal, asking that the book no longer be assigned as required reading, stating that the novel is “rife with brutality towards and mistreatment of women (and men at times), sexual scenes, and bleak depression.” Rushowy quotes the response of Russell Morton Brown, a retired University of Toronto English professor, who acknowledged that “The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t likely written for 17-year-olds, ‘but neither are a lot of things we teach in high school, like Shakespeare. … ‘And they are all the better for reading it. They are on the edge of adulthood already, and there’s no point in coddling them,’ he said, adding, ‘they aren’t coddled in terms of mass media today anyway.’ … He said the book has been accused of being anti-Christian and, more recently, anti-Islamic because the women are veiled and polygamy is allowed. … But that ‘misses the point,’ said Brown. ‘It’s really anti-fundamentalism.”

Is it too brutal, sexist for school?

Read an interesting discussion of the novel here.

The Real Room 101 – Part One

Give this a watch – it’s well worthwhile.

Why I write

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
— George Orwell, “Why I Write”

Read the whole thing here.

Well done!

Well done to those of you who turned up for the extra exam today. Some really good work and clear improvement shown.

V for Vendetta

The requested material is now on moodle.

25 days

Revising Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty Four, is a dismal and brutal dystopian novel about a future in which protagonist Winston Smith attempts to remain human.

‘If you want an image of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever’.

Winston, lives in a world without personal freedom but in an act of personal rebellion he begins to write a diary. ‘Thoughtcrime’ in Oceania society is one that is punishable by death.

‘Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.”

Orwell created his novel as a warning to society about the dangers of totalitarianism:

‘What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ” I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

Why I Write’ 1944 article

Some of the themes of the novel that we have looked at are:

• the destruction of history
• the attack on sex
• the appreciation of the past
• the importance of memory.
• the attack on privacy
• the fallibility of the human mind
• alienation
• love
• individuality/freedom of thought and speech
• governmental control
• appearance vs. reality

Symbols discussed include:

• scarlet sash
• dreams
• paperweight
• Room 101
• chess pieces
• art work
• nursery rhymes

More on Themes, Motifs and Symbols here.

DVD Transcript from Slavoj Zizek

The R1 DVD release of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men features a 6-minute commentary from Zizek. Here it is-

(Background/Foreground)
“For me, Children of Men, I would say that the true focus of the film is there in the background, and it’s crucial to leave it as a background. Here comes his true art, Cuaron’s. It’s the paradox of what I would call this anamorphosis. If you look at the thing too directly at the oppressive social dimension, you don’t see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background. Children of Men is in a strange way a remake of Y Tu Mama Tambien. What attracted me immensely in to ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ is this wonderful tension between foreground and background. That is to say if you look at the film superficially, foreground, it’s just a sexual adventure, with desperate ending, but you can not say it’s really a movie about two young boys rediscovering their sexuality, the meaning of their life, whatever. It’s the other way round. You see this absurdity of their life. It’s so clear that the way they experience their sexual traumas and so on, is against the background, it throws the light on these signs of oppression, and it’s the same, I think in this film. It’s not really that all this infertility and so on is just a pretext for, I don’t know, the hero’s inner journey from this apathetic anti-hero mode to more active engagement and so on. No, it’s…This fate of the individual here remains a kind of prism through which you see the background even more sharply.”

(All That’s Solid Melts Into the Air)
“I think that the film gives the best diagnosis of ideological despair of late capitalism, of a society without history. This, I think, is a true despair of the film. The true infertility is the very lack of meaningful historical experience, and that’s why I like this elegant point in the film of importing all the works of art. All those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They’re totally meaningless because what does it mean to have a statue of Michelangelo or whatever? It only works if it signals a certain world, and when this world is lacking, it’s nothing. It is against this background, I think that the film approaches the topic of immigration and so on. By setting the movie in England, only there, despair can be felt. England’s one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have a constitution. Because it can rely on its substance of traditions, you don’t need it written. And in such a country, the loss of this historical dimension, the loss of this substance of meaning is felt much worse.”

(Novel and Film Adaptation)
“Two changes between the novel and the film I want to mention. It’s to replace the anti-hero hero’s best friend, Jasper. In the novel, he’s just a kind of retired ex-official, whatever. Here, to make him into this, and everybody who is the after ’68 generation knows what this is, this old, obscene, impotent retired hippie person…In all its ambiguity, on the one hand, many old leftists have fond memories of this generation, but, at the same time, there is something infertile, ridiculous about this. I think that the decadence started there in a way. This is a stroke of absolute genius. Another thing that I immensely appreciate, and this is a very risky thing to do, is to avoid sex. Here we have fertility reinstalled, but not through the form of a couple being created. The fertility is spiritual fertility. It’s to find the meaning of life and so on. So these are the reasons again for my admiration of the film, that precisely because it doesn’t directly make some kind of political, moralistic parable and so on and so on, it works perfectly.”

(Rootlessness)
“What I like is that the solution is the boat. It doesn’t have roots. It’s rootless. It floats around. This is, for me, the meaning of this wonderful metaphor, boat. The condition of the renewal means you cut your roots. That’s the solution. Look at films like Children of Men. This is the future. Only films like this can guarantee that cinema as art will really survive.

Slavoj Zizek reacts to Children of Men

In class we watched Slavoj Zizek’s excellent commentary on Children of Men.

If you go here you will find a transcript, where he discusses issues including the foreground/background dynamics of the film, infertility and politics. Zizek brings a complex and informative view on Children of Men’s portrayal of London, the emotional state of the characters and overall vision of the film.

Please have a read!

Where are my essays?

I am waiting …

Only 28 days to go … I have added a few visual text questions below to get you started. You can write about more than one film in your essay if you wish.

1.      How does a  film  you have studied use narrative and other film techniques to examine the values of society?

2.      Classic movies linger in the mind long after the final credits have rolled. With reference to aspects of production as well as the story itself, discuss the ways in which a  film you have studied could be considered a classic.

3.      Discuss the techniques used to create and develop character in a  film you have studied.