Margaret Atwood visits West Point for a frank conversation on gender, politics and oppressionThe cel

Margaret Atwood visits West Point for a frank conversation on gender, politics and oppressionThe celebrated author speaks to a class of military academy cadets about her dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”“The entire first-year class of cadets at West Point had read her 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” for a literature course. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set in a dystopian future not too distant from the current date. A totalitarian theocratic regime has taken over portions of the U.S., where the narrator, a young woman known only as Offred (as in “of Fred,” for the man in whose household she lives) has been consigned to the status of a Handmaid. Her only role, as one of the few women whose fertility has survived decades of environmental contamination, is to provide the Commander with a child via a ritualized and joyless act of copulation. In this future, women must wear color-coded, body-concealing robes and are not allowed to hold jobs outside the home, to own property, to live on their own or even to read.While Atwood prepared to go onstage, Lt. Col. Naomi Mercer, the assistant professor and course director responsible for assigning “The Handmaid’s Tale” (which was paired with the Ursula K. LeGuin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”), talked about her choice. Mercer, an Iraq War veteran, is also the author of a forthcoming book on feminist science fiction from the 1980s, “Toward Utopia.” “The Army has real gender issues, still,” she said. Reading a book like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “at least creates a vocabulary to talk about those issues. It was very prescient.”  “Reading this book was a life-changing experience,” a bright, well-scrubbed plebe enthused as he handed Atwood a worn paperback of “The Handmaid’s Tale” to sign. “That’s a frightening thought,” she quipped in her nasal deadpan. “What were you like before?”  As they stood in the Ike Theater’s green room waiting for Atwood’s car to be summoned, one last cadet popped in the door with a book to be signed. He said he’d twice read “The Handmaid’s Tale” for classes. “You must know it better than I do by now,” Atwood said. “I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet, ma’am,” he replied. But he did have a question. He couldn’t help but notice that some of the worst treatment the novel’s female characters receive comes at the hands of other women.“That’s true,” Atwood said. “That’s how these things work. All dictatorships try to control women, although sometimes in different ways. And one of the ways they control any group is to create a hierarchy where some members of the group have power over the others. You get those people to control their own group for you.”Read the full piece hereThe Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood -- source link

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