The Discussion

[tangential1]

Resurrecting this thread for just a moment to share an interview bit from Margaret Atwood from the LA Times...for her new book (The Year of the Flood...which is apparently something of a companion to Oryx and Crake. Same world, different POV).

Anyway...

Jacket Copy: Your book "The Handmaid's Tale" has become a seminal feminist work taught in universities all over.

Margaret Atwood: You know you've really made it when people start dressing up like that on Halloween.

That response just killed me, first of all. ...And then I started imagining women walking around dressed in those red dresses...

[vicki]

Gad! That strikes me as way creepy and repellent. I want to say it's like dressing up in a Burka for laughs. Or maybe a concentration camp prisoner outfit, although I know those aren't actually good analogies. I'm trying to think of some sort of indicia of oppression in a fictional universe that would be as bad but can't think of any right offhand. I associate those red outfits with being robbed of the written word--even to the point where the store signs only use pictures to indicate what's within. That's particularly nightmarish to me, and to many others around here, I suspect. *Shudders*

[Pat Floyd]

What is Margaret Atwood thinking! She sounds as if she wrote the book to make a reputation for herself rather than to warn against loss of freedom. If I had written the book, I would be appalled.