Rebellion quotes

Question 1

Serena Joy

Answer 1

• ‘like a business transaction’
• ‘But what did I have, to trade?’ (smokes cigarettes)
• her garden
• ‘the domain of the Commander’s wife’
• ‘pointing with her stick’

Question 2

Moira

Answer 2

• ‘Moira had power now’ ‘Moira was our fantasy’
• ‘Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual’
• story of Moira’s escape passed ‘from bed to bed at night’, powerlessness of HM clinging to story, fantastical, mythologised
• ‘she was the lava beneath the crust of daily life’
• different model of survival in regime, more symbolic power than actual power?
• in Jezebel’s O is ‘frightened’ by her ‘indifference’ and ‘lack of volition’ and wants ‘swashbuckling heroism’
• ‘I never saw her again’ failure of rebellion? But symbolic value of rebellion regardless of success

Question 3

Ofglen

Answer 3

• ‘You were always so stinking pious’
• Partesicution
• Moira as rebelling more politically/ideologically and Ofglen as more organised, pragmatic

Question 4

Winston

Answer 4

• ‘smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age’
• ‘suddenly he began writing in sheer panic’
• ‘If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles’
• ‘The paperweight’
• ‘The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk’
• ‘they were loyal to one another… The proles had stayed human’
• ‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’

Question 5

Offred and the Commander

Answer 5

• limitations of Gilead’s rule
• hypocrisy of those in power
• lack of liberty causes transgressions/sparks rebellion
• dissatisfaction- hopeful, encouraging?
• Jezebel’s as ‘our little club’
• ‘What’s dangerous in the hands of multitudes, he said, with what may or may not be irony is safe enough for those whose motives are beyond reproach’
• ‘He watched me smoothing it over my hands and then my face with that same air of looking in through the bars’
• ‘He’s breaking the rules under their noses, thumbing his nose at them, getting away with it’ (Jezebel’s)

Question 6

‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum’

Answer 6

• ‘Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me small joy’
• ‘I turn her into Moira… irreverent, resourceful’
• power in existence, symbol of rebellion, resistance, vehicle for endurance