Posted on 04/12/2006 11:44:39 AM PDT by Racehorse
I missed this on the first read. So she's saying that her novel is really about The JEWS??
The book is an exercise in feminist paranoia, alleging a right-wing Christian takeover in "the near future." (It was, I believe, written during the Reagan years.) None of its predictions have even remotely come to pass. It is a silly, asinine book that should be rejected on those grounds, not some alleged prurience.
One other thing: Atwood is simply lying if she is trying to claim that she was not talking about a right-wing Christian dictatorship. That's how virtually all of her readers understood it; I know, because I have read many of their revues on amazon.com..
I read the "handmaiden's tale" in college. I thought it was entertaining for being so unbelievable. The idea that Jerry Falwell types taking over the US is far less likely than watermelon atheists. OR, in more recent times, Islamofacists. Even in my liberal youth, I couldn't imagine a civil war with Baptists bothering to blow up Quakers and Amish. If anything, they'd tell the Amish to do more breeding and ignore the Quakers.
Methods to drive up the birth rate would best be done by massive tax credits for parents, not raping fertile women. The stress of confinement would decrease her fertility, not increase it. And passing women from man to man until she got pregnant would increase the risk that the infected men would give the precious fertile ones a disease.
If anything, the world it paints already exists behind the burqa. The violation of womens' rights is here and now, but it's behind the Veil, not the Bible belt.
Yep. (Read it while visiting my father on summer vacation, so you can imagine the cognitive dissonance THERE.) And it's worse than either of those...Kingsolver's got excellent characterization, and Tepper can do plot and metaphor. All Atwood did was plod. :-)
"The violation of womens' rights is here and now, but it's behind the Veil, not the Bible belt."
Got that right. What ever happened to the people who were speaking out about the horrid mutilation of young girls and boys in Africa? Sick stuff.
Excellent book. And actually that brings up a good point. "The Stand" would be a great AP English book - there is so much there to analyze and discuss.
I will forgive authors a lot if their books are good. I don't demand that their views match or even respect mine. All I ask is that if they have to preach, they do it subtly; and if they write something that's supposed to be science fiction, that it makes sense. Margaret Atwood can't do either, so I no longer try to read her stuff.
This book somehow reminded me of Lois Lowry's "The Giver", another psuedo-science-fiction 'dystopia' that made no logical sense when you spent any actual time thinking about the society. That book is also often controversial in schools because parents don't want their kids reading it for various reasons.
I agree about "The Stand." Problem is, Stephen King is considered by 'scholars' to be a hack.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I proposed it.
King has had as much influence on our culture as any fiction author, far more than Atwood. Atwood gets attention because she wrote a horror story that fit the conceptions of an academic minority whereas King encompasses all social strata.
You mean like most sitcoms and commercials? These shows and commercials that make adult males look like total morons are getting out of hand.Makes me long for the days of "Father Knows Best".
Nowdays - it's more like "Father Doesn't Know Diddly-Squat".
Let's get REAL S.F. into the school curricula. I vote for Poul Andersen's "The High Crusade," and "Space Cadet," "Citizen of the Galaxy," and "Farmer in the Sky" for Heinlein.
See... the best thing about homeschooling was that I got to count reading Heinlein and other greats as part of my schooling.
And my future kids will get a full course in SF, of course, so they can tell the good from the Atwood.
I think you may be selling Atwood short on that score, whatever else she is Atwood's not a hypocrite on such matters. Atwood has frequently disparaged Islamic beliefs as regards the role of women, and for example was very active in the "No Religious Arbitration Coalition", a group formed to fight the proposal in Ontario to allow the use of Islamic law to settle family disputes (in the end the anti-Sharia forces were successful).
So whatever one thinks of her politics, it appears to me that she's usually acting from a consistent set of principles whether the conclusions to which they lead her are "PC" or not.
It's encouraging to know the written word is still taken so seriously.That thought aside, I would like to congratulate the students, parents and teachers who have supported the use of my book in Advanced Placement courses. They have aligned themselves against the censors, book-banners and book-burners throughout the ages and have stood up for open discussion and a free expression of opinion — which, last time I looked, was still the American way, though that way is under pressure.
Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, and the koran are all examples of the written word taken seriously by some extremly dangerous elements in society. There are those of us who urge caution the presentation of such works (they are not positive examples for living).
And it is good of her to thank those who have made her richer by requiring the reading of her book.
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