Dystopia Critical Quotes

Question 1

THMT body

Answer 1

Gilead / regimes leaders ‘are far more interested in controlling the body over the mind’
Davis

Question 2

THMT women

Answer 2

Women in Gilead ‘subjugate their own kind’
Goldblatt

Question 3

THMT Offred’s complicity

Answer 3

‘Some feminist critics have accused Offred of being complicit in her own imprisonment’
‘The perverse joy in the genre is seeing how people like us struggle in atrocious situations’
Roberts

Question 4

THMT Offred’s cowardliness

Answer 4

‘Offred’s behaviour should not be so easily and self-righteously dismissed as cowardliness from the safe distance of being snuggled into an armchair’
Mohr

Question 5

THMT Offred’s cowardice that we share

Answer 5

‘Her cowardice and complicity convict us all, because we share it’
‘Does not represent Atwood’s ideal in how to respond to totalitarianism’
Weiss

Question 6

THMT pessimism

Answer 6

‘Atwood’s pessimism comes to the fore as she tries to frighten us into an awareness of our own destiny before it is too late’
Globe and Mail

Question 7

1984 Newspeak section

Answer 7

‘It is written in ordinary language, not Newspeak. The obvious implication is that the regime has fallen’
(Section on Newspeak at the end of 1984)
Atwood

Question 8

THMT Offred’s acceptance

Answer 8

‘acceptance of comfortable paternalistic domination over dangerous political commitment’
Weiss

Question 9

Rebellion

Answer 9

‘there will always be some who resist the controlling forces at the expense of their personal wellbeing and safety’
McConnell

Question 10

Orwell and the past

Answer 10

Orwell ‘looked back in time as much as he looked forward’
Meyers

Question 11

Responce to Gilead

Answer 11

‘the apathetic pubic response to Gilead… seems like real life’
Robertson