History and futures are tangled together with the present time as readers are invited to join in the conference debate by the final words of the text: 'Are there any questions?' ( THT: 324)ĢBearing in mind Offred's comment that ‘Context is all or is it ripeness’? ( THT: 202), our first question might be, how much of The Handmaid's Tale is already written, or at least prefigured in Atwood's earlier texts? To go back to Survival published thirteen years earlier, what connections might there be between that literary history (as product of Canadian cultural nationalism in the early 1970s) and her American dystopia addressed to an international readership? In Survival Atwood's emphasis was on the identity of Canada as separate from America, Britain and France, focussed through Canada's favourite cultural myth of wildemess. However, her voice and her story relayed through the edited transcript of her cassette tapes remain as testimony to the survival of the human spirit, and although under threat from the voice of the male Cambridge historian, Offred's message manages to reach us from another time which looks very like our own. Of course the Handmaid herself has not survived, and indeed we never know the length of her life span because her tale is left incomplete. Atwood's contemporary fable of prophecy and warning to her late twentieth century readers stages a scenario of catastrophe in the near future, from which the human race is shown to be saved in a second futuristic scenario several hundred years later in the Historical Notes. Questions of individual and collective survival condition not only the thematics and plot structure of The Handmaid's Tale but also provide a rationale for the choice of genre, an interesting hybridised version of dystopia inflected by gender, for this is a woman's tale of resistance which manages to combine oral narrative with the written epistolary form (‘A story is like a letter. Survival, like wildemess, is one of the distinctive marks of Atwood's Canadian signature and it provides a major due to the continuities within Atwood's writing over the past thirty years as well as a means of contextualising The Handmaid's Tale within that web of interrelationships. ( Survival: 31-2)ġIt may seem odd to begin this discussion of Atwood's futuristic novel set in the United States with a reference back to her early thematic guide to Canadian literature, but my argument is that the topic of Survival engages with The Handmaid's Tale at every level. Possibly the symbol for America is The holds out a hope, never fulfilled but always promised, of Utopia, the perfect human society.The central symbol for Canada.is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.
I'd like to begin with a sweeping generalization and argue that every country or culture has a unifying or informing symbol at its core.
0 kommentar(er)
