Eco-Criticism & Complacency - Quotes
English Lit: Edexcel A Level The Handmaid's Tale, topic 9.2.5
Quotations Relating to Eco-Criticism
Human's mistreatment of the environment has had a devastating effect on Gilead and the former United States.
Quotation about the environment
- Atwood gives clues through Offred's recollections as she remembers that: "The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells. Who knows, your very flesh may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death to shore birds and unborn babies".
Women in the past
- Offred also mentions the "past" when “Women took medicines, pills, men sprayed trees, cows ate grass, all that souped-up piss flowed into the rivers. Not to mention the exploding atomic power plants, along the San Andreas fault, nobody's fault, during the earthquakes…".
Quotations Relating to Complacency
Atwood may use The Handmaid's Tale to criticise complacency in society, and the act of turning a blind eye to what is happening in the world if it doesn't directly affect us.
Offred on complacency
- In her flashbacks, Offred shares her own memories of complacency:
- "The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."
Quotation analysed
- By emphasising the "blank white spaces", Atwood may be suggesting that racial divides stop people from viewing prejudice and discrimination as a universal human problem:
- Offred was happy in her privileged life and decided to ignore the warning signs until it was too late.
"Nothing changes..."
- "Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men."