Motherhood/memory/past quotes

Question 1

Offred’s daughter

Answer 1

• ‘if it’s a story I’m telling, then I can have control over the ending’
• ‘angel, solemn, compact, made of air’
• ‘she’s in good hands, they said. with people who are fit. You are unfit, but you want the best for her. Don’t you’
• ‘she fades, I can’t keep her here with me, she’s gone now.’
• ‘they were right, its easier to think of her as dead’

Question 2

Different depictions of motherhood

Answer 2

• Birth Day
• ‘spindly legs’ ‘ridiculous white gown’
• ‘as it’s a bouquet of flowers’

Question 3

Presentation of the past in Gilead

Answer 3

• movies of ‘women being raped, beaten up, killed’ at Red Centre and Unwomen films without sound
• ‘hard to imagine’
• Jezebel’s as ‘a movie about the past is not the same as the past’ clumsy representation
• doctors persecuted retroactively, erasing of hospital records

Question 4

Erasure of the past in 1984

Answer 4

• falsification of ‘Comrade Ogilivy’ to replace unperson
• denial of alliance with Eurasia, contrast to W’s memory
• ‘For how could you establish even the most obvious fact where there existed no record outside…’

Question 5

Offred and Luke

Answer 5

• ‘as small as a doll’ ‘he doesn’t mind this’ ‘I am his’ but too scared to ask what he really thinks
• ‘already he’s starting to patronise me’