Chapters 5 & 6
English Lit: Edexcel A Level The Handmaid's Tale, topic 9.1.3
Chapter 5 - Key Quotations
Here are five key quotations from Chapter 5:
"Doubled, I walk the street"
"Freedom to and freedom from"
- According to Aunt Lydia, 'freedom to' is the kind of freedom the Handmaids had before the creation of Gilead, where women were raped and harassed.
- The Aunt advocates freedom from instead. This means freedom from all those negative things. This idea presents Gilead as a kind of salvation for these women.
"We were a society dying...
- "We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice"
- Aunt Lydia suggests that too much choice leads to people making the wrong decisions (i.e. giving in to debauchery and sin).
"...an object of envy..."
- "She's a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her"
- The women are talking about Ofwarren, who is pregnant.
- The women can only save themselves from death by becoming pregnant.
"...taken so little time..."
- "We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this"
- Offred is talking about the provactive appearance of the Japanese tourists.
Chapter 6 - Key Quotations
Here are three key quotations from Chapter 6:
"The heads are zeros"
- The heads of the bodies hanging on the wall are covered to conceal the identities of these people.
"...time travellers..."
"These bodies hanging on the Wall are time travellers, anachronisms. They've come here from the past"
"...I must not feel"
- "What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these men is Luke. Luke wasn't a doctor. Isn't."
- Offred's overriding feeling is relief that she has no definite proof that her former husband, Luke, was killed in this way.
- Her relief overrides other feelings, like revulsion.
- In the next sentence, she corrects herself from talking about Luke using the past tense to using the present tense.
Test yourself on Chapters 5 & 6
What does Aunt Lydia say the society is "dying of"?
Why does Offred say this about the bodies on The Wall?
"The heads are zeros"