Last week, we discussed in class about how Shirley Neuman suggests in her article that various female characters in The Handmaid’s Tale such as Offred, her mother, and Moira serve as representations of three different attitudes that women in 1980s America had towards feminism. During our discussion, thoughts came to my mind about an article that I studied last year titled, “Thinking As a Hobby”, which serves as a great continuum to Neuman’s analysis. The author of this article is William Golding, who also wrote the famous novel, Lord of the Flies. Here, Golding classifies people according to three different categories of thinking. Interestingly enough, Offred, her mother, and Moira each epitomize one of the three distinctive categories that Golding describes.

The first category of thinking that Golding establishes in his article is third-grade thinking, which entails conformist attitudes towards social norms and values that contain elements of “unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy”. As such, Golding describes how third-grade thinkers typically do not appreciate contradictions in their beliefs. This is generally an accurate representation of Offred’s character, for Offred is passive and lacks the courage to stand up against the oppressive state of Gilead. Although she has the inner desire to resist, she makes no actual independent decision to take part in any form of rebellion. Moreover, Offred shows contempt towards her mother’s fervent efforts in the feminist movement.

While third-grade thinkers tend to follow social norms regardless of their flaws, the next level of thinkers, the grade-two thinker, actively seeks to find contradictions to social values, albeit in a manner that “destroys without the power to create”. Moira is a character who embodies these characteristics for unlike Offred, she willingly rebels against the oppressive State of Gilead through her open challenges against the state’s policy on homosexuality as well as her two attempted escapes from Red Center. However, Moira lacks the charisma to initiate any form of change for the overall betterment of Gilead’s society. In the end, she succumbs to the fate of having to work a Jezebel for the Commanders, which reflects Golding’s claim that grade-two thinkers ultimately “fall into another fault and lag behind”.

Finally, there is the first-grade thinker, who exhibits a sense of adventure on the basis of promoting a moral cause. In contrast to second-grade thinking, which demonstrates courage but results in destruction, a first-grade thinker strives to achieve moral consequences. Offred’s mother would exemplify a grade-one thinker for she spearheaded the struggle for women’s rights, which she claims involved participants confronting armored tanks. However, unlike Moira, the actions of Offred’s mother radically elevate the status of women in the next generation of her society. As Golding notes in the final paragraph of his article, an illustration of grade-one thinking involves the statue of the Thinker inside the shadow of an incoming leopard while Venus’ statue is off to the side as an object admiration.

In conclusion, The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that reinforces the arguments that Golding presents in “Thinking As a Hobby”, which I strongly recommend all of you to check out. Here is the link to the article:

http://faculty.weber.edu/dkrantz/en2500/Thinking%20as%20a%20Hobby%20-%20Golding.htm

When I was preparing for my AP Literature exam last year, my teacher mentioned that Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is one of many works that AP students have written their essays on in the exam. If you are not familiar with what I’m talking about, there is one component of the exam that requires students to select a literary work with enough academic credibility to answer a question on a common theme in literature. Having studied the novel, I can now see for myself how this novel’s themes would make an effective essay for an AP Literature exam.

Given the state of Gilead’s oppressive laws on women and in particular the Handmaids, I initially expected that Offred, the novel’s protagonist, would be an active resistor against the state. Much surprisingly, Offred is rather passive despite her experience of heartbreaking tragedies (e.g. separation from her family) and the fact that her mother was a fervent feminist. However, after having read Shirley Neuman’s commentary on The Handmaid’s Tale, I happened to have realized that Atwood intended to use Offred’s characterization to represent the attitudes of younger women in the 1980s. As Neuman explains, these women generally took their freedoms for granted and were not overly appreciative of their mothers’ efforts in the rigorous struggle for women’s rights. From this respect, I would make the argument that the novel intends to satirize the growing complacence of the younger women at the time of the novel’s publication. As a continuum to this, I looked at a poem that I studied back in high school titled, “It’s Dangerous to Read Newspapers”, which was also written by Atwood. This poem does well to reinforce the novel’s notion that passiveness in the worse case scenario ultimately contributes to conflicts taking place in the real world. As Atwood writes, “I (poem’s narrator) am the cause” of the different examples of turmoil that Atwood mentions in the poem.

Having mentioned about the poem, here is a link to the text: http://watsonpoetry.wordpress.com/how-to-analyze-a-poem/

Another interesting aspect of the novel is its various similar themes to George Orwell’s renowned novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. One example of this would be the idea of censorship. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the state of Gilead purposely forbids women from reading as a preventative measure against potential uprisings. Similarly, the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four also practices censorship through the modification of factual information. On this note, I also made the observation that the various societal titles in Gilead are comparable to the names of the different ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four given that are all incredibly ironic. This appears to be characteristic of totalitarian states. A real-world example would be North Korea, where the country’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Strangely, North Korea is arguably the most totalitarian state on the planet.

In retrospect, I honestly have to admit that I regret not having read The Handmaid’s Tale back in high school. Despite that I had actually forgotten the question that was on my AP Literature exam, I can be sure that the themes in this novel nevertheless would have definitely proven suitable for practically any question that might have appeared on the exam.