"The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984"

Critic: Jocelyn Harris
Source: Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.
Criticism about: Dystopias in Contemporary Literature
"The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984",


[(essay date 1999) In the following essay, Harris examines parallels between Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, asserting that Atwood's novel is a critique of George Orwell's treatment of women in his works.]
By publishing The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Margaret Atwood openly invited comparison between her own dystopian novel and George Orwell's 1984. She herself draws the parallel when in an interview of 1986 she compares her epilogue to his:
In fact, Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for. He did the same thing. He has a text at the end of 1984. Most people think the book ends when Winston comes to love Big Brother. But it doesn't. It ends with a note on Newspeak, which is written in the past tense, in standard English--which means that, at the time of writing the note, Newspeak is a thing of the past.1
Indeed, if his Winston Smith had imagined "little knots of resistance ... leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off," the Handmaid's tapes similarly survive.2 As Atwood remarks in the same interview, "I'm an optimist. I like to show that the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever." By means of a recorded voice she creates the same miracle as in Shakespeare's sonnet 65, where black marks on white paper still express love: she allows the dead to speak. And although Atwood says that "writers frequently conceal things. They ... don't want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets they don't want to give away," I shall argue that she wants us to notice whenever she imitates and diverges from Orwell. Her invitation has vital theoretical implications for this author's use of allusion, and more generally for the way that books are made.
First, the similarities. Gilead, the world of The Handmaid's Tale, is recognizably Orwellian in both structure and minute detail. In both novels, a totalitarian society is divided by hierarchy; at a time of rations and austerity, only the privileged in Atwood receive real food, as in Orwell (278), and the separate orders are marked by distinctive clothing as they were in 1984, indeed as they are distinguished traditionally in utopian fiction as far back as More's use of the sumptuary laws in his Utopia. The Commander's shoes, shiny like black beetles, especially recall Orwell's definition of tyranny as the boot stepping on the human face, for ever.3
Both societies are controlled by secret police, Atwood's Eyes, and soldiers, Atwood's Angels. Spying, betrayal, arbitrary arrest and torture are all commonplace. Winston is betrayed by Charrington and O'Brien, whom he trusted; the Handmaid and her family are also betrayed, and the worst is knowing "that some other human being has wished you that much evil" (30). If Orwell's Julia is doubled over by a fist in the solar plexus and carried out like a sack (350), a man in The Handmaid's Tale is doubled over by something sharp and brutal done to him, and is carried away like a sack of mail (27). Winston and Julia are tortured; Atwood's Moira suffers the bastinado (15), and the younger nuns, who do not let go so easily, are more broken than the rest of the women (34). Deliberate incitements to blood lust hold these societies together: Orwell's Two Minutes Hate (165) and his Hate Week (157) serve the same purpose of arousal as Atwood's Wall hung with the corpses of enemies of the state. Her Prayvaganza and Salvagings, or public hangings, recall Orwell's hangings which children clamor to attend and Syme enjoys (176, 199). During the hangings the Handmaids must hold a rope coated with pitch so that their defilement is truly collective (42); Winston finds it impossible not to join in raging at Goldstein (168). Atwood's Particicution, in which helping to tear a man to death makes the Handmaid as hungry as a horse (44), arouses the participants to the same sort of bestiality as in Orwell (313). Imaginary enemies and reports of war reinforce this tribal blood lust--Jews and other nation states in Orwell, Quakers, Baptists, feminists, homosexuals, and abortionists in Atwood. The sadism that Orwell argues to be characteristic of totalitarianism hideously spreads, so that even Winston would throw acid in a child's face (305). In totalitarian Gilead, violence is always a threat or an open presence, and the thought of it arouses even the Handmaid, numbed as she is. She longs to stab the Commander, to "put my arms around him and slip the lever from the sleeve and drive the sharp end into him suddenly, between his ribs. I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands" (23).
Sexual repression assists social control. O'Brien boasts in 1984, "We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman." Children are taken away at birth "as one takes eggs from a hen," he says. So too the Handmaid's daughter is torn away from her. In a society where sex is "an annual formality" for procreation only (389), Winston and Julia's love affairs necessarily becomes "a political act" (265). The Handmaid's affair with Nick is equally subversive.
Orwell famously simplifies the language in 1984 to Newspeak and Doublethink, to words stripped of all politically undesirable associations. As he writes in the Appendix, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible." It was designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." Parts of speech are interchangeable, and negatives are formed simply by adding the prefix "un-." Thus rejects from society are "unpersons" in Orwell, and Atwood talks similarly of "Unwomen" and "Unbabies," the imperfect ones, the "shredders." Orwell's B vocabulary imposes desirable mental attitudes for political purposes, and obliterates value words such as free, honor, justice and morality. So does the official language of Gilead.
Atwood believes, as Frank Davey puts it, that all the troubles of the world are in a sense linguistic: the female Wordhoarder in her futuristic story, "The Festival of Missed Crass," speaks for her as a "custodian of language and culture, a protector and renewer of meanings."4 In her futuristic novel, Atwood demonstrates the disaster that results from the burning of books, the closing of libraries, the ban on reading and writing, and the reduction of conversation to brief, ritualized phrases of subservience. "Under his Eye," say the Handmaids, like Winston knowing that Big Brother is watching him. In this pre-literate world, shop signs replace words, often to comic effect. The "Loaves and Fishes" has nothing in it, let alone enough to feed a multitude (27), and the Handmaid asks whether it would count to read the cushion with "FAITH" stitched upon it (10). If Orwell had devised such euphemisms as "Ministry of Love" for a place of torture, "colonies" for places where homeless children are sent, and "Reclamation Centres" for labor camps (298), Atwood also uses "Colonies" for places of death rather than new life, and "Salvaging" for hanging. Of course, both authors remember Nazi Germany, while "Salvaging" is a piece of Doublespeak actually invented in the Philippines, as her epilogue makes clear. In Orwell, class threatens individual identity; in Atwood personal names are similarly replaced by those of function. Wives, Econowives and Handmaids are defined simply by their relationship to men. A woman who is simply Offred, of the Commander, is indeed the non-essential, sexual other described by Simone de Beauvoir, the object to his absolute subject.5
Along with language, both societies suppress memory, and in consequence history, truth, and choice. Winston knows that all history is a palimpsest, to be scraped clean and re-inscribed (190); O'Brien says, "You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you ... You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed" (378). Former leaders disappear along with their photograph in Orwell; a film of Offred's feminist mother is blacked out with crayon in Atwood (20). "Orthodoxy," says Syme, "means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" (202). Offred drifts as if anesthetized in an eternal present, fed and bathed like a child, like a doll, infantized. She even speaks in the present tense, and her sentences are often incomplete, or unfold in the linear, flat, affectless mode of the comma splice. But when she says of Luke, "he was, the loved. One. Is, I say Is, is, two letters, you stupid shit, can't you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?" (35), she fights to keep meaning alive, and hope.
Memory proves irrepressible in both books. Winston remembers his mother, lost in the great purge, and an affair in an unspoiled forest in a Golden Age (181-82); Offred also remembers her mother, sent to a deadly Colony for being a feminist, and looks back to a time of happiness with Luke and their daughter. Her way of recollection recalls Locke's phrase for associationism, "the hooks and eyes of memory." It hurts here to remember: as Atwood wrote in a poem elsewhere,
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.6
The Handmaid's associative, involuntary memory is triggered in a very Proustian way through the senses, "a reminder, like a kick," from such banal objects as a blue and white striped tea-towel (8), or the chocolate fragments on an ice cream (27). Then flood in choice, pun, variety--in short, the free play of the signifier--and with them comprehensive memory, history, truth, understanding, and at last, freedom.
"It's strange, now," [muses the Handmaid], "to think about having a job. Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie, they'd say to children, when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet. You were supposed to hit them with rolled-up newspapers, my mother said. I can remember when there were newspapers, though I never had a dog, only cats."
"The Book of Job" (28)
Thus she works her way like a lexicographer from meaning to meaning, from the financial dependence of women to memories of newspapers to the recognition that she is persecuted and afflicted by arbitrary powers, like Job. She has named the truth.
Thus, acts of reading, remembering, and writing defy a totalitarian regime. If Winston writes "voluptuously" on the thick creamy paper of his diary (171), the Handmaid uses the same lavish word to describe her feelings when she plays Scrabble:
We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious.
(23)
Words arouse her: she imagines "the Commander and me, covering each other with ink, licking it off, or making love on stacks of forbidden newsprint" (28). Holding a pen is an especially sensuous experience. It is "alive, almost, I can feel its power." When in a pleasant pun she says, "Pen Is Envy ... I envy the Commander his pen" (29), she takes issue with Freud, whose therapy worked also through association and word-play. What women want, she says, is not a penis but a pen, the power to write. Only thus can they speak to posterity, survive and tell their truths. "A word after a word / after a word is power," Atwood wrote in a poem.7
Words promise communication, and trust. If "faint scribbles on lavatory walls" (171) encourage Winston to hope for an underground resistance, "Aunt Lydia sucks" scratched on the cubicle is "like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion" (34). Offred is comforted too by the dog-Latin inscribed by one of her predecessors, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" (p. 156), don't let the bastards grind you down. Ofglen and Offred dare to let their eyes meet, to question the value of the Soul Scrolls, and in this breathtaking moment of "subversion, sedition, blasphemy, heresy, all rolled into one", they trust each other (27), and Offred learns that there is an underground. She will escape.
Winston and Offred rebel, then, by means of sexuality, memory, writing, trust, and dreams of escape: Winston devises numerous ways to break out (287); the Handmaid imagines multiple possibilities for Luke, her mother, her daughter, and herself. Even tiny details confirm the deliberate kinship between the two books, for instance the long yellow teeth of the rat which finally breaks Winston become Aunt Lydia's, while the humiliations, punishments, and petty rebellions of Orwell's public-school life are renewed in Atwood's re-education centers, which have been set up in girls' schools.
But the differences are vital too. Atwood sets her dystopia not in Orwell's socialist Britain but in the capitalist USA, at the very heart of scientific enquiry and liberal humanist education, Harvard University. Here the Puritans rebelled against British imperialism, but they also memorably oppressed. Puritan fundamentalism rules a state devastated by ecological disaster, the bitter fruit of scientific progress. The Harvard Wall, hung with corpses, reminds us of the Berlin Wall which Kennedy of Harvard visited so pointedly as a free man, for in Gilead no one is free.
Not the new invention of television, as in Orwell, but the even newer one of electronic money management has brought this dystopia about. Women have been rendered powerless simply by the withdrawal of their credit at banks. Virginia Woolf had argued in Three Guineas that the powerlessness of women derived from denial of access to education, writing, and therefore money, and she drew an explicit comparison between the exclusion of women and the exclusion of Jews, between nineteenth-century feminists fighting patriarchy and the twentieth-century need to fight Fascism. The fear that forbids freedom in a private house is connected with the public fear of the dictator, she wrote, for "the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."8 Nor was the idea new with her. In reply to Sir Robert Filmer's justification of the divine right of kings on the analogy of husband and wife, in his Patriarcha (1680), John Locke had argued in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1689-90) that men were entitled to rebel against unjust tyranny. And if the organization of state and family was the same, it was logical to conclude that a woman could resist her domestic king if he proved tyrannical. Locke in fact says that there were two curses laid upon women, pain in childbirth and obedience to their husbands. Having urged women to avoid pain in childbirth if they could, he stopped just short of recommending they disobey their husbands by recollecting the force of custom. But others saw where his train of thought was leading, and the idea of the family as a domestic monarchy was made much of by Restoration dramatists, women writers of the eighteenth century, and most powerfully Samuel Richardson, in Pamela and Clarissa.9
In his time Orwell also knew that private and public words were linked, that men could be "little Stalins, little Hitlers" to other men, as Crick puts it (122), but he did not extend this important insight to men's hierarchy over women. Atwood seems to agree with Woolf that gender, not class, is the source of tyranny, and thus casts her vote against Orwell in the debate identified by Adrienne Rich, as to "whether an oppressive economic class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in fact patriarchy--the domination of males--is the original model of oppression on which all are based."10
The source of women's oppression is misogyny, and Atwood criticizes Winston's hatred of women by her differences. He thinks his wife Katherine has "the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered," and complains that in the sexual act she "would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and after a while, horrible" (213-14). Atwood comments on this "frigid little ceremony" (270) when she elaborates it into her own grotesque, ritualized "Ceremony." As the Commander couples mechanically with the Handmaid, Atwood, unlike Orwell, makes us feel for the woman who passively lies there. And where Julia's instant responsiveness is a male fantasy come true (264-65)--Winston is excited by Julia's "improvement" by cosmetics, her womanly longing for a frock, for silk stockings and high heeled shoes (279)--the Handmaid's tawdry dress, "absurdly high heels" and smeared makeup serve only to mark the pathetic dreams of the Commander (300). Winston may think himself intellectually superior to Julia, but from Orwell's hints that she swears, and laughs during the Two Minutes Hate (289), Atwood would develop Moira, the bravest, the most boisterous of all the Handmaids.
Winston dreams avidly of rape and murder (169);11 the Handmaid is haunted by her memories of snuff movies and pornography, because she knows how they threaten her. And if Winston thinks women are sexual objects, stupid, and only rebellious from the waist down (291), Offred's persistent imaging of the separation of the heads from bodies as hateful, for instance, when the hanging sheet at the doctor's "intersects" her (11), shows Atwood thinking perhaps of Descartes. Her female protagonist is not a sex object, but a thinking subject, whose head and body are one. But Atwood's most defiant answer to the misogyny of 1984 is to make a woman the center of narrative consciousness. Where Orwell spoke as an author, authoritatively, using the omniscient voice, this heroine speaks directly to us. Like Chaucer, whom Atwood's title deliberately invokes, she allows her character to speak for herself.
And where Winston was betrayed by the Brotherhood, Nick and Offred's "sisters" befriend her and help her along the Underground Female-road. Winston and Julia thought only of themselves, at the end: "the proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you" (244); but Offred's predecessor wrote a message of encouragement before she hanged herself, and Ofglen dies in order that Offred may live. "She saw the van coming for her. It was better," says the new, replacement Ofglen (44). Orwell believed that mutual trust was the sole foundation for democracy, but his hope was not fulfilled in 1984. "May Day," say members of the Resistance to one another in The Handmaid's Tale, "M'aidez." And they do.
The most striking difference from 1984 in that The Handmaid's Tale is set not thirty-five years ahead but in the immediate future. The meat hooks, the dunces' caps, the punitive amputations, the death-camps, the Salvagings, have happened, are happening, in Italy, China, Iran, Germany, the Philippines, all about us (Bosnia and Rwanda were yet to come, in 1984). As an active supporter of Amnesty International, Margaret Atwood knows that well. She wrote in "The Arrest of the Stockbroker,"
Reading the papers, you've seen it all:
the device for tearing out fingernails,
the motors, the accessories,
what can be done with the common pin.
Not to mention the wives and children.12
In fact, The Handmaid's Tale begins where 1984 leaves off. Instead of charting the destruction of a rebel, it shows a victim learning to survive. For as Atwood wrote in her book about Canadian literature, Survival, "if you are determined to be a victim, that's exactly what you will be."13 Canadians, she says, are victims in the face of a hostile wilderness and an overbearing neighbor, powerless, amputating themselves in order to survive (33). They are Rapunzels trapped in towers, their fists in their mouths, when they should be Dianas and Venuses making jail-breaks from underground (210, 246).
To express this idea, Atwood picks up Orwell's image of a woman singing a song of love (which he in his turn may have found in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), coarsened like an over-ripe turnip by years of child-bearing, but beautiful (347). Alongside a tightly-woven complex of images concerning amputation, mutilation and silencing she sets another, when from Orwell's turnip-woman she evolves a subtext of hope, an imagery of eggs and bulbs and new birth into chalice-shaped, blood-red tulips. Even the torn-apart man resembles a misshapen tuber (43)--one recalls the bulbs locked up in Mr. Pumblechook's drawers in Great Expectations, awaiting their liberation day. The female Underground lives; the fertility myths prove true. Offred, who may be pregnant, will escape to Canada, just as Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin sprang across the river with her child, and was helped to safety on the other side.
The Handmaid is indeed a Rapunzel in a tower, veiled, self-silenced, long-haired like Alice in a world of distorting fish-eye mirrors. But in this version of the tale Nick has no rose, no lute (30), and she herself will break out. She is an Everywoman, the collective heroine who, says Atwood in Survival, makes a halting but authentic breakthrough even when almost hopelessly trapped (245). She does so with the help of Nick; dark, secretive, sensual Nick, Old Nick, the agent of subversion rising up from underground. He is Orwell's irrepressible spirit of Man, who says to civilizations founded on fear and hatred and cruelty, "Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you," as Winston manages to say (391-92). Both authors seem to believe that novelists disseminate critical thought and values more powerfully than teachers in formal institutions of learning, for if Orwell had meant to sound a warning by discrediting both totalitarian-minded and time-serving intellectuals, as Crick puts it (127-28), Atwood's epilogue shows that trahison de clercs in action. Here academics meeting in conference betray Offred by their obsession with form not content, their misogyny, their tolerance of evil in the name of objectivity, their triviality and their concern for their own prestige and pleasure. They are, most painfully, us.
So what is Atwood doing in The Handmaid's Tale? 1984 provided her with raw materials, simply. As Northrop Frye has argued in The Anatomy of Criticism, books are inevitably made out of other books.14 Orwell himself had worked from (among others) Swift. In the A-vocabulary of Newspeak for instance, words are ridiculously made to stand for one thing only as in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels.15 Atwood selects an epigraph from Swift's Modest Proposal for The Handmaid's Tale as if to acknowledge their common debt. Like Swift, she exaggerates and satirizes to show that our world, taken to logical conclusions, would prove insane. The mantle of Swift's saeva indignatio passes to Orwell, and Atwood calls on both their authorities to enlarge the weight of hers. If Gérard Genette writes of Proust's "palimpsest," in which "several figures and several meanings are merged and tangled together, all present together at all times, and which can only be deciphered together, in their inextricable totality,"16 Orwell's book is still visible in Atwood's palimpsest. To enhance the conviction of her own already powerful book, she makes us remember 1984.
Walter Jackson Bate's burden of the past, Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's assertion that Freudian anxiety lies especially heavily on women writers: none of these theories applies readily to Atwood. Nor is "intertextuality" accurate in telling what she does. Orwell is not simply a source, an influence, a passive and inevitable invasion of her brain and text. Not genre, not convention, not the Zeitgeist wrote this book, but Atwood. The author lives. Her active and uninhibited appropriation of a predecessor's text might be described as Renaissance inventio, or the eighteenth century's "imitation," in the sense of friendly rivalry with the past and an invitation to compare. As Howard Weinbrot explains it, recognition of the poem imitated is necessary for the reader's pleasure, or to point out new poetic directions. In his Dictionary of 1755, Johnson called imitation "a method of translating looser than paraphrase, in which modern examples and illustrations are used for ancient, or domestick, for foreign,"17 rather as Dryden has said that the translator endeavors "to write, as he supposes, that Authour would have done, had he liv'd in our Age and in our Country."18 In The Handmaid's Tale of 1984, Atwood "translated" Orwell's 1984 by recreating it in a modern context, and making it new for our time.
The Handmaid's Tale is more than a translation though; it is a metatext, a text that comments on another text. Atwood critiques Orwell for locating the origins of totalitarianism in class and among men only, and accuses him of underestimating the evil of misogyny. Mary McCarthy though Atwood's novel tamely imitative of Orwell, and could not believe that the far right was so powerful, or so destructive to women. But it is.19 The Handmaid's Tale is a re-vision, to use Adrienne Rich's word, the deliberate re-reading of old text through the lens of gender; it is taking back the power to name that Adam hugged to himself in Eden; it acknowledges the harm that patriarchy does:
Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves ... it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped us as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh.
(35)
Rich envisions utopia as woman-centered, based on women's values, and Atwood too has spoken as an essentialist feminist. She wrote once, for instance,
He said, foot, boot, order, city, fist, road, time, knife. She said, water, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood.20
But in The Handmaid's Tale she seems to re-vision Rich in her turn, for while Moira languishes in butch heaven at Jezebel's the brothel, Nick acts to rescue Offred, the Commander is to be pitied, and the fisherman sacrifices himself for Moira.
Rich thought that only women could save the world; Atwood said in a recent interview that it's time to make friends with men again.21 The matter is urgent, for as she wrote in an address for Amnesty International, we already live in a state of war "between those who would like the future to be, in the words of George Orwell, a boot grinding forever into a human face, and those who would like it to be a state of something we still dream of as freedom."22 In such a world, in such a dystopia, all hands are needed on deck.
Notes
1Geoff Hancock, "Tightrope Walking over Niagara Falls," Canadian Writers at Work (Oxford University Press, 1987), repr. in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1990), 191-220.
21984, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 291. All references will be to this edition.
3Page 390. All references are to the Fawcett Crest paperback ed. (New York, [1985] 1987).
4Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984), 169.
5Amin Malak makes this point, in "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition", Canadian Literature 112, Spring 1987, 9-16.
6Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 141.
7"Spelling," in True Stories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 64.
8Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1983), 102-03, 142.
9See my Samuel Richardson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
10On Lies, Secrets and Silences. Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
11Crick says in a note that Orwell means to show the interconnection of sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism (434).
12Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73.
13Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1973), 82.
14(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
15Crick's introduction makes a number of more general points about the Swift connection. Orwell wrote an essay on Swift in 1946.
16Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan, with an introduction by Marie-Rose Logan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 226.
17See Weinbrot's The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 14-15.
18The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), I. 184.
19New York Times Book Review (9 February 1986) I, 35. For an implicit answer to McCarthy, see Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
20"Marrying the Hangman," Selected Poems II, 23.
21Video, Once in August, National Film Board of Canada (1984).
22"Amnesty International: An Address" [1981], Margaret Atwood: Selected Critical Prose, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, 1984), 396.

Source: Jocelyn Harris, "The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984." In Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.

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