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Style in The Handmaid's Tale
Style in The Handmaid's Tale
Angel Werth
1.2K views • 33 likes
1 month ago • 1:04 min
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Transcript
[00:00]
An author's writing style frames the way
[00:01]
we see their content before we've even
[00:03]
noticed it. One of the most powerful
[00:05]
examples of this I've come across is in
[00:07]
The Handmaid's [music] Tale, which is
[00:09]
narrated by Offred, a woman trapped in
[00:11]
the theocratic regime of Gilead. Many
[00:13]
aspects of the novel's style indicate
[00:15]
something important that the author
[00:17]
never has to state. [music] A sentence
[00:19]
will be followed by a sentence fragment,
[00:21]
the second one correcting the first
[00:22]
[music] to indicate how the
[00:24]
protagonist's thoughts are being
[00:25]
reformed by indoctrination and reshaped
[00:28]
[music] by the regime. The abruptness of
[00:30]
it jars us intentionally to draw
[00:32]
attention to the correction, to show us
[00:34]
the difference between how the [music]
[00:35]
world is and how it should be or used to
[00:38]
be.
[00:38]
The protagonist's lack of mental
[00:40]
stimulation also means that her thoughts
[00:42]
are sometimes hazy and disconnected,
[00:44]
[music] and so we get sentence fragments
[00:46]
that aren't really connected to
[00:47]
anything. The effect is a little bit
[00:49]
like an impressionist painting. [music]
[00:50]
We get a vague sense of what's going on
[00:53]
or what she's seeing, but it's not clear
[00:55]
and sharp. Atwood doesn't just tell us
[00:57]
that Gilead is taking control [music] of
[00:59]
Offred's life. She lets us feel it
[01:01]
taking over her thoughts.
