[ELP] Handmaid’s Tale Chapter 10-12 Notes & Primo Levi Extract
Chaper 10&12:
- What is the significance of this juxtapositioning between past and present selves?
-The flashback of the past are used to contrast between life in Gilead society and the US from before time. It also provides us information on who Offred was (characteristics, relationship, etc.), which emphasizes on how her identity as a Handmaid is a ‘made thing’ her actual identity is suppressed in Gilead.
– Reconstructing the past through flashback by writing Handmaid’s Tale is her escape route from isolation in Gilead. The oscillation between her past and present, following the stream of consciousness of Offred, demonstrates how she inhabits in 2 spaces in Gilead (1. the actual/physical place of Handmaid 2. freer & happier space of past memory)
-Additionally, the flashback of Offred gives us information on how Gilead society came to be. Before Gilead, she was passive &reluctant to resist against the oppression unlike Moira and her mom that fought against for those rights of women, as she believed that remaining below the raidar would give her freedom. However, by showing Offred being the prisoner of the Gilead, it highlights her regretting of her reluctance to fight and her attempt not to lose her natural identity.
- By what means does regime impose new identities on its citizens?
– Taking their names away
– Restriction of language, attitude, clothing, etc. (specific color, clothing)
– Fear: Aunt lydia eating rodent
– engraving a four-digit number to their ankles
-Surveilience (Cora waiting outside while Offred was taking a bath)
Primo Levi Extract:
What is the significance and interrelationship of naming, identity, and power in this extract?
How does it relate to Offred’s experiences in the state of Gilead?
- ” They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” – only those with strength will gain power to maintain their name , which is the main symbol of their identity.
This particularly relates to the situation in Offred as it is not allowed to use her own name but ‘Of’fred, as if she is a property of the male who represents power and sexual potency in the society of Gilead.
- “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, “
By taking all the elements of his life away, he says that he became ‘hollow’: it is dehumanizing them by depriving their identity. Offred also had her daughter and husband Luke as well as all the elements that composes herself taken away. However, she is different from the narrator of Primo Levi as she consistently tries to maintain her identity despite of the circumstances, having her single soul of motivation as her daughter.
- Primo Levi: “I have learnt that I am Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.”
- Handmaid’s Tale: “I cannot avoid seeing, now, the small tattoo on my ankle. Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse.”
Marking a number instead of a certain name dehumanize them much more & the tattoo of Offred alluding to the Jews in Auschwitz implies that she is also a ‘prisoner’ of Gilead. Therefore, even if she wants to resist against Gilead acknowledging her passivity in the past, there is not much she can do as she is living the society as a ‘victim’/’prisoner’.
