Imposing power quotes

Question 1

Threat of violence/fear

Answer 1

• bodies on wall
• vapourising
• Ministry of Love

Question 2

Restriction of language

Answer 2

• prescribed greetings
• Newspeak
• Syme
• ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ ‘we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible’

Question 3

Destruction of individuality

Answer 3

• indoctrination of Handmaids
• destruction of r/ships

Question 4

Distortion of sex/love

Answer 4

• chapter with Commander
• ceremony
• Jezebel’s and hypocrisy of the regime
• ‘our duty to the Party’ Winston and Katherine’s r/ship

Question 5

Big Brother

Answer 5

• ‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party’
• his exploits ‘extended into the fabulous world of the forties and thirties’ (furthering ideology)
• ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’
• source of fear/intimidation
• inspires love/adoration - personifying ideology of regime
• debate about existence - truth, Winston’s scepticism and changing views
• didactic message of dystopia, Orwell warning against accepting ideology completely

Question 6

Religion in Handmaid’s

Answer 6

• ‘give me children, or else I die’ epigraph and more than one meaning for Handmaids
• biblical language for power/control/create fear - insistence on natural childbirth, linked to Eve’s original sin
• misappropriation/decontextualisation of biblical scripture - Bible as ‘incendiary device’
• legitimisation of oppression
• Atwood: hypocrisy of Puritanism - distort Bible out of context and espouse Biblical way of life and don’t follow it, Atwood not criticising Christian but misuse of religion by those in power

Question 7

Surveillance in THMT

Answer 7

• Aunts patrol ‘electric cattle prods’
• affirms to the tourists that she is happy
• ‘they look in all our rooms. What for? he said. I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said’
• ‘even this meeting of eyes holds danger’
• man picked up by Eyes as a ‘limp cloth bundle’
• eyes come to arrest O, ‘Serena Joy goes white’ the Commander ‘is shrinking’
• ‘under his eye’
• ‘the Eyes of God run all over the earth’
• O’s room, the chandelier is removed and left ‘the place in a face where the eye has been taken out’