Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

It turned out that the young woman wasn’t having a heart attack after all. She was having, and I quote, “a ball of gas as big as a grapefruit.” She was just so excited to be in my house.

But I tell this story to illustrate a well-known fact: any writer whose work you study in high school is dead By Definition. And since a lot of kids have studied The Handmaid’s Tale in high school over the years, there are a lot of people who are surprised to discover that I am still alive. It’s getting so I’m sometimes surprised by that myself. But such is the effect of fame, even a moderate amount of it. You can get a zucchini mould—usually advertised at the backs of comic books—which, if placed around a growing zucchini, produces a zucchini in the shape of Elvis Presley’s head. It could work with an eggplant, as well. I have yet to reach that level of fame.

And I had not got even close to the zucchini mould level when I began writing The Handmaid’s Tale. Since some of you were not born then, and since others among you were of tender age, let me take you back in time.

First, me. Born in November 1939, just after the beginning of the Second World War. That means I am of the generation that remembers Hitler and Stalin, and not just from the history books. In 1949 I was ten, and thus read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when it came out in paperback. I was fifteen in 1955, when Elvis made his TV debut. I was twenty in 1960, thirty in 1970, and forty in 1980. I always make a chart like this for characters in my books: I want to know how old they were in relation to major world events because our personal histories interact with what’s going on in the world outside us.

In 1984, we were in a mini-backlash phase against hippies, women’s liberation, and suchlike modes of social behaviour. In music, I think it was Late Disco. Hippies had burst forth in approximately 1968, just after beatniks and existentialists and folk singers and the Beatles; they had been preceded by the birth control pill, the advent of pantyhose, and miniskirts. (Those three things are connected, especially the pantyhose and the miniskirts.) Women’s Lib, as it was called at the time, got going in approximately 1969. I wasn’t there: I was in Edmonton, Alberta, which was far, far away from New York City. There was not yet any Internet. I heard about these doings in the form of letters from friends. I was also too old to have been a hippie, though I did go through the existentialism, and the folk singing, and the black eyeliner. Let’s not forget that!

Feminism then entered its second wave. The first wave was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its proponents were called suffragettes, and their goal was female suffrage, or getting the vote for women. Then

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.