Oh God, this blog seems very lonely. Anyway, the Psych I group is doing The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The group consists of Me, Olivia, and Matt. I intend to follow this up with my post. (Oh, and my group may have been Psych II, but, if so, well too bad! Totally taken.)
I love this book. It has such a plain brilliance to me. The detached mood puts me in a weird mood. Not quite sad, but really happy. Kind of empty. But in the good literature type of way. Right?
Esther’s slow breakdown is unfolding before us. There’s emptiness to the prose that gives off the feeling of absence, the lack of feelings. Esther’s first-person account comes across as detached, like everything was boring to her. Her experience in New York, which she thought was supposed to be fabulous, only made her feel like a “numb trolleybus.” (3) “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel..” (3).
I definitely tried to focus on the psychological aspects of the novel. Right now, I feel like Esther is split between two worlds. On one hand, she feels like maybe she should attempt to fit in with the other girls, shown by her leaning towards Betsy for friendship. But the times where she leans toward Doreen, Esther contemplates a riskier, more cynical lifestyle. Betsy represents the all-American, Ivy League girl, while Doreen represents the cynical, sharp, yet somewhat dirty girl. Esther doesn’t know where she falls, so she toys between these two extremes.
There’s a great memoir about depression, Prozac Nation, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. She defines depression as an absence of feeling in daily life—a vacuum. Her depression was so severe, at points she couldn’t even get herself out of bed. Using this idea of depression, depression definitely affects Esther, but to a lesser extent. While Esther knows she should feel excitement at having the opportunity of a lifetime, the enthusiasm isn’t there. But Esther does also have some of the insane kind of insane. Hint? Paraphrase: “I’m afraid of chemistry and physics! They ABBREVIATE THE WORDS!” Yeah, it was kind of weird. But also charming, while you read it.
I thought it was really clever how the scene where Buddy shows Esther the cadavers, she is un-phased, and notes her pride at being so. But in the very beginning of the novel, she mentioned how after the first time she saw a cadaver, the image of it haunted her. It’s odd; in the reality of the moment, it doesn’t really pierce Esther, but later it haunts her imagination.
On the subject of her relationship with Buddy, Esther seemed very…uninterested. When they kissed, she felt it was “dry” and “uninspiring.” Their relationship seems to convenience both of them into being what society wants them to be. Buddy’s parents approve, and people stop treating Esther like she’s a..well, loser. Isn’t it awful that people see her that way just because she wasn’t going out with a guy? That suddenly, when she gets a boyfriend, the seniors pay attention to her? I guess it’s in the times. The feeling is somewhat mutual too though. When Buddy got naked, well, nothing happened. It was quite an awkward scene.
I hate these things, i never remember what to say from when i was reading it! lol
Chapter 2 definitely shows a ton of depressing parts. She describes her drink as "wet and depressing"adn that it "tasted like dead water", which is rather blunt to her own feelings of depression if you ask me.
Another thing I picked up was the way it is written with such detail. So much detail, some that i just don't understand. One instance was when she was describing how she had been the same weight for 10 years, but she throws in a except on one occasion, but really fails to go into why. I don't get why, but this really stood out to me, btu that's probably just good writing. It makes the narrator just come more alive, knowing every little detail. I'll probably have more to say during the discussion tomorrow. =D
This section of the book was so much better than the already great first section. I’m in love. Call me a Plath-er, whatever.
Anyway, I think this section much more clearly conveys the limited role of women in this era. Esther wants to be a poet, yet society expects her to learn shorthand, be a waitress, or something along those lines. But in a way, Esther isn’t really sure what she wants to be at all. It’s like the fig tree metaphor she uses. All the figs are there, different careers to choose from, but she can’t decide. The problem is that Esther feels if she doesn’t decide soon, it’ll rot and decay.
To an extent, she was right. Esther comes back from New York, still clueless. It makes her gets stuck home, where her true decay happens. It’s where she starts to go truly numb, and slowly gets more and more open to killing herself. I think what caused it was the fear of her incompetence hanging over her. Like when she observed all the talented linguists at the UN, she feels inferior. The fact that she got rejected from a writing program really hit her. Sure, she reasons, she’s good at getting scholarships, but she knows that that time is coming to an end. Her place in the real world, outside of college, remains unknown.
I thought it was clever, the way Plath reminds the reader that Esther is like herself. Esther begins to write a novel, where the character is actually her in disguise. It’s ironic, because Esther is totally Plath in disguise.
What really affected me the most from this section was the scene where she gets electric shock treatment. The scene was so beautifully done—it truly spooked me. It’s one thing to just be depressed and lie in bed, but the moment where the world fights to make you back to normal, that’s the scary part. By the time she shallows a bottle of pills and ends up in the hospital, Esther really isn’t even Esther anymore. She’s just a shell. The worst part is I feel like she had chances to save herself, but she is too frozen, apathetic to fix anything.
The detached, almost casual mood and the terse, but thoughtful descriptions really make the language powerful. I have to restrain myself from highlighting ever other line in the book. Anyway, this book is making me so depressed that I’m going to have some ice cream. Really. When a book makes me of all people feeling sad, you know it’s a depressing book.
I liked this section a lot more than the other one as well. I felt that it flowed more to me and really touched on key things that weren't previously brought up.
One thing that i was wondering was about Ester's father. I don't really feel that we hear much or anything at all about him compared to her mother. (did i miss her mentioning him?) I think this obviously leads to a lack of a male figure in her life which reveals why she can seem a tad sad sometimes, as well as these awkward run ins with men.
I also noticed how she seems to not have much self-confidence in some way, as she would always "spoil what it was she had to do so no one would ask her to do it again" (61). of course, this could either be a lack of confidence or just her not wanting to fit into the "role" of a women, as the quote is in reference to cooking. Although as that part goes on, i get a sense that she might be having a conflict in her head of dreams vs. a reality (the fig tree helps back this up on 62). As she wants to be a writer, society doesn't want her to be. When one feels that society is holding them back from their dreams like that it can really start to depress you. I think a lot of us have been there.
Wow, this book really brought me on an emotional rollercoaster and it’s definitely one of my favorite books. Well done Sylvia Plath. The most compelling image in the book comes from the title itself, The Bell Jar. The symbol of the bell jar absolutely consumed the ending.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” It’s like a cage, blocking you from everyone else in the world, unable to communicate with anyone. Esther had problems on understanding how people perceived her, and also with her sociopathic feelings towards other people, resulting from her being in her own world. There’s a feeling of surrealism that goes along with the idea of the bell jar. After I finished the novel, I just tried to picture it, this giant upside down jar above my head, waiting to fall and trap me.
While the novel ends on a happy note, this fear, this idea that things might not always be okay, still lurks in the novel. The bell jar never disappeared from Esther’s life, it just “hung, suspended, a few feet above [her] head.” It was if at any moment, she could enter a nightmare again and lose her grasp on reality. She even expresses this fear openly, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortion, wouldn’t descend again?” It’s odd, as if the coming of the bell jar has nothing to do with the course of real life. Or has to do with anything, really at all. It was as if the bell jar came from an odd combination of everything and nothing. Perhaps the bell jar descended from the overall uncertainty in Esther’s life, uncertainty of the future, of relationships, of her femininity, her virginity, everything.
Speaking of virginity, isn’t weird how Esther wanted to cast it away from herself in such an odd, ritualistic manner? Oddly enough though, I saw it as a sign of maturity. For such a long time, Esther had held it as something of “enormous importance,” trying to make it happen at the right moment. But I get the sense that she ended up thinking she was beyond that, as if it were something trivial, so she cast the weight off of her. It affirmed her independence as a woman.
As for a universal meaning, it’s hard for me to really narrow it down. The most dramatic, present theme in the text comes from the bell jar symbol. How real life can easily turn into a surreal, bad dream: a nightmare. Sylvia Plath reveals haunting aspects of the human psyche, what can be some of our darkest moments. And even though the ending ends on a good note for Esther, knowing that we can infer many many similarities between Plath and Esther, life does not end well for Plath, who commits suicide by sticking her head in the furnace. So in the end, I guess the bell jar did indeed descend again.
This last section really brought everything together for me. I really enjoyed the ending and found it satisfying. It also brought out some key points about the story.
The first thing that really struck me was the struggle of Esther as a woman. She mentions how she has a harder time writing because she is a woman, which I think also reflects on Sylvia Plath’s feelings of being a woman writer, as this book was printed during 1971, a time where many equality movements took place. Another subtle hint that I saw of this is that Esther was surprised when she found out that her Doctor was a woman.
Another thing a realized from this section was that I don’t think Esther was as alone as she was in previous sections of the book. Even in going to the electro therapy, she had Doctor Nolan with her every step of the way, which is something that I think helped her to a recovery.
The ending of the book ended in a covering of white snow, which I thought added a nice touch. Not in imagery, but in the metaphorical sense that snow is a death of something, but also pure in its own way, covering up all that has died, preparing it for a fresh start.
This is an interesting book, in that it deals greatly with on overcontroling government. They control everything. Even what women are allowed to wear, turning everything into a moer patriarcal society.
What struck me that most was how women were assigned to men only for the sake of making children. The main character realizes that "this is not love", which is something that is obviously missing throughout the book. that wife of the man looks at the main character harshly because, obviously, he has to sleep with other people to make children.
Cliche, yes, but this book reminds me of 1984. Every kind of futuristic dystopia novel has some kind of connection to 1984, because they always seem to have a destroyed or controlling government - hence the dystopia. Yet while Big Brother isn't watching the characters in The Handmaid's Tale, they're certainly being watched. It has the usual public/private life divide that always occurs when being watched. The main character, Offred, clearly doesn't agree with or feel fit in the society, but everyone else seems to be all for it. However, she also notes that anyone observing her would probably think the same about her, so it's a tricky situation where it's impossible to converge and rebel.
An interesting part of the novel was during Offred's flashback to her training to become a handmaid. One of the Aunts (leaders) was lecturing them about their freedom. She said in the past days of anarchy, they had "freedom to," the ability to do whatever they wanted. But now, they have "freedom from," meaning they are protected for violent, discomfort, etc.
The author subtly was able to pose a complex question about how society should be run. Is it more important to protect the people or allow them to be free? Sometimes, it's impossible to have both. By creating a strict, complicated society, the world of this novel has created equilibrium out of anarchy. The sacrifice, however, is freedom to.
That doesn't mean they can't be happy, or just content. Yet, Offred doesn't seem happy. In fact, the Aunts warned them against seeming too happy, as it is deemed suspicious. This novel blurs the line between being satisfied, content, in a good state of existence, with the other side, being happy and free.
The book is staying consistent on a lot of the themes—there’s still a lot being said about gender roles in society. The ever-so growing personal relationship is the first time the book sees man/woman interaction as something other than sex. Their tentative, personal relationship is so foreign and shocking to Offred that it shows the horribleness of the society she lives in.
This absurd world that Atwood crafts is certainly meant to be seen as wrong. But Atwood draws parallels between her created world and the real world to attack less extreme values. Atwood analyzes the restraints and benefits of a more conservative, Puritan-like view on sex.
I really like the way imagination functions in the text as catharsis for Offred. The statement “I believe” is often used by her, asserting things she wishes to be true. She dismisses the idea of hypocrisy—“ This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything.” In her imagination, anything can exist as a comfort to her. It soothes her, comforts her, to image alternate realities.
While reading this section, it makes me think that there is a bit of hope for Offred, a way for her to escape. It especially gives a kind of foreshadowing with the flashback type thing with Nick, then the whole situation with Serena.
Another thing I noticed that was really ironic was the whole view of sex in this story. Sex is supposed to be the thing that brings two together, emotionally and physically. however, in this story, sex is seen as something that does neither. In fact, sex is almost the opposite in the eyes of Offred. Sex is the most intimate thing that happens with her. As terenzi said, the most intimate thing that has been happening wasn't with sex.
I think the rest of the book will be pretty obviously a good ending. It just gives me those vibes.
In the spirit of the arrival of Valentine's Day, I'm going to focus on a specific passage about love.
pg 225 "Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh."
I really love the enormous complexity squeezed into this passage. Yes, love is seen as positive, "lovely", but the connotation of it being a "downward motion" gives this idea of limpness. Natural, but dangerous: weak? This passivity of emotion is repeated at the end, they were "waiting" to fall in love, rather than seeking it.
"Like flying" gives off the sense that love is freedom, but the yet makes an abrupt shift. "Dire," "Extreme," and "Unlikely": all the words have different meanings but all seem to connect. Love is chaotic and dangerous.
I'm a little confused by the line, "God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner." The reversal would be Love is God? But around the corner? I'm a bit confused about that point.
I love the characterization towards the end where it calls love "abstract and total." I mean, they're simple words, but here they command a lot of power. In what ways are abstract things more consuming, more total than the flesh? Here in The Handmaid's Tale, we see a huge role of imagination. There's a great quote from a Palahniuk book I love that says that "The unreal is more powerful than the real"--I definitely see that here.
Terenzi picked an interesting passage to write about. Here's my two cents about it. The line, "God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.", i think has much to do with there not being love. Everything that should have love is absent from it, also alluding to an absence of God possibly? I know the lines, "That word, made flesh", seems like a line from John in the New Testament. so maybe that part of the passage was more religious. God being love is a very common religious kind of metaphor as well.
Another thing I found funny (religiously) was the "Prayvaganza", obviously being prayer and extravaganza together, but for some reason, it seemed a bit ironic to me. I just pictured an extravaganza being something of almost a party, where as prayer (not always) is more of a quiet personal thing. Here it's almost like a holiday.
The ending of the book is really crazy though. I loved it, as it leaves the reader guessing and wondering what is going to happen to Offred, Are The Eyes real or not? The eyes again obviously represent the government in a totalistic society, how they can see everything. I think that the book would make a good movie, minus all the sex. What does anyone else think of the ending?
13 Comments:
Oh God, this blog seems very lonely. Anyway, the Psych I group is doing The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
The group consists of Me, Olivia, and Matt. I intend to follow this up with my post.
(Oh, and my group may have been Psych II, but, if so, well too bad! Totally taken.)
I love this book. It has such a plain brilliance to me. The detached mood puts me in a weird mood. Not quite sad, but really happy. Kind of empty. But in the good literature type of way. Right?
Esther’s slow breakdown is unfolding before us. There’s emptiness to the prose that gives off the feeling of absence, the lack of feelings. Esther’s first-person account comes across as detached, like everything was boring to her. Her experience in New York, which she thought was supposed to be fabulous, only made her feel like a “numb trolleybus.” (3) “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel..” (3).
I definitely tried to focus on the psychological aspects of the novel. Right now, I feel like Esther is split between two worlds. On one hand, she feels like maybe she should attempt to fit in with the other girls, shown by her leaning towards Betsy for friendship. But the times where she leans toward Doreen, Esther contemplates a riskier, more cynical lifestyle. Betsy represents the all-American, Ivy League girl, while Doreen represents the cynical, sharp, yet somewhat dirty girl. Esther doesn’t know where she falls, so she toys between these two extremes.
There’s a great memoir about depression, Prozac Nation, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. She defines depression as an absence of feeling in daily life—a vacuum. Her depression was so severe, at points she couldn’t even get herself out of bed. Using this idea of depression, depression definitely affects Esther, but to a lesser extent. While Esther knows she should feel excitement at having the opportunity of a lifetime, the enthusiasm isn’t there. But Esther does also have some of the insane kind of insane. Hint? Paraphrase: “I’m afraid of chemistry and physics! They ABBREVIATE THE WORDS!” Yeah, it was kind of weird. But also charming, while you read it.
I thought it was really clever how the scene where Buddy shows Esther the cadavers, she is un-phased, and notes her pride at being so. But in the very beginning of the novel, she mentioned how after the first time she saw a cadaver, the image of it haunted her. It’s odd; in the reality of the moment, it doesn’t really pierce Esther, but later it haunts her imagination.
On the subject of her relationship with Buddy, Esther seemed very…uninterested. When they kissed, she felt it was “dry” and “uninspiring.” Their relationship seems to convenience both of them into being what society wants them to be. Buddy’s parents approve, and people stop treating Esther like she’s a..well, loser. Isn’t it awful that people see her that way just because she wasn’t going out with a guy? That suddenly, when she gets a boyfriend, the seniors pay attention to her? I guess it’s in the times. The feeling is somewhat mutual too though. When Buddy got naked, well, nothing happened. It was quite an awkward scene.
I hate these things, i never remember what to say from when i was reading it! lol
Chapter 2 definitely shows a ton of depressing parts. She describes her drink as "wet and depressing"adn that it "tasted like dead water", which is rather blunt to her own feelings of depression if you ask me.
Another thing I picked up was the way it is written with such detail. So much detail, some that i just don't understand. One instance was when she was describing how she had been the same weight for 10 years, but she throws in a except on one occasion, but really fails to go into why. I don't get why, but this really stood out to me, btu that's probably just good writing. It makes the narrator just come more alive, knowing every little detail. I'll probably have more to say during the discussion tomorrow. =D
This section of the book was so much better than the already great first section. I’m in love. Call me a Plath-er, whatever.
Anyway, I think this section much more clearly conveys the limited role of women in this era. Esther wants to be a poet, yet society expects her to learn shorthand, be a waitress, or something along those lines. But in a way, Esther isn’t really sure what she wants to be at all. It’s like the fig tree metaphor she uses. All the figs are there, different careers to choose from, but she can’t decide. The problem is that Esther feels if she doesn’t decide soon, it’ll rot and decay.
To an extent, she was right. Esther comes back from New York, still clueless. It makes her gets stuck home, where her true decay happens. It’s where she starts to go truly numb, and slowly gets more and more open to killing herself. I think what caused it was the fear of her incompetence hanging over her. Like when she observed all the talented linguists at the UN, she feels inferior. The fact that she got rejected from a writing program really hit her. Sure, she reasons, she’s good at getting scholarships, but she knows that that time is coming to an end. Her place in the real world, outside of college, remains unknown.
I thought it was clever, the way Plath reminds the reader that Esther is like herself. Esther begins to write a novel, where the character is actually her in disguise. It’s ironic, because Esther is totally Plath in disguise.
What really affected me the most from this section was the scene where she gets electric shock treatment. The scene was so beautifully done—it truly spooked me. It’s one thing to just be depressed and lie in bed, but the moment where the world fights to make you back to normal, that’s the scary part. By the time she shallows a bottle of pills and ends up in the hospital, Esther really isn’t even Esther anymore. She’s just a shell. The worst part is I feel like she had chances to save herself, but she is too frozen, apathetic to fix anything.
The detached, almost casual mood and the terse, but thoughtful descriptions really make the language powerful. I have to restrain myself from highlighting ever other line in the book. Anyway, this book is making me so depressed that I’m going to have some ice cream. Really. When a book makes me of all people feeling sad, you know it’s a depressing book.
I liked this section a lot more than the other one as well. I felt that it flowed more to me and really touched on key things that weren't previously brought up.
One thing that i was wondering was about Ester's father. I don't really feel that we hear much or anything at all about him compared to her mother. (did i miss her mentioning him?) I think this obviously leads to a lack of a male figure in her life which reveals why she can seem a tad sad sometimes, as well as these awkward run ins with men.
I also noticed how she seems to not have much self-confidence in some way, as she would always "spoil what it was she had to do so no one would ask her to do it again" (61). of course, this could either be a lack of confidence or just her not wanting to fit into the "role" of a women, as the quote is in reference to cooking. Although as that part goes on, i get a sense that she might be having a conflict in her head of dreams vs. a reality (the fig tree helps back this up on 62). As she wants to be a writer, society doesn't want her to be. When one feels that society is holding them back from their dreams like that it can really start to depress you. I think a lot of us have been there.
Wow, this book really brought me on an emotional rollercoaster and it’s definitely one of my favorite books. Well done Sylvia Plath. The most compelling image in the book comes from the title itself, The Bell Jar. The symbol of the bell jar absolutely consumed the ending.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” It’s like a cage, blocking you from everyone else in the world, unable to communicate with anyone. Esther had problems on understanding how people perceived her, and also with her sociopathic feelings towards other people, resulting from her being in her own world. There’s a feeling of surrealism that goes along with the idea of the bell jar. After I finished the novel, I just tried to picture it, this giant upside down jar above my head, waiting to fall and trap me.
While the novel ends on a happy note, this fear, this idea that things might not always be okay, still lurks in the novel. The bell jar never disappeared from Esther’s life, it just “hung, suspended, a few feet above [her] head.” It was if at any moment, she could enter a nightmare again and lose her grasp on reality. She even expresses this fear openly, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortion, wouldn’t descend again?” It’s odd, as if the coming of the bell jar has nothing to do with the course of real life. Or has to do with anything, really at all. It was as if the bell jar came from an odd combination of everything and nothing. Perhaps the bell jar descended from the overall uncertainty in Esther’s life, uncertainty of the future, of relationships, of her femininity, her virginity, everything.
Speaking of virginity, isn’t weird how Esther wanted to cast it away from herself in such an odd, ritualistic manner? Oddly enough though, I saw it as a sign of maturity. For such a long time, Esther had held it as something of “enormous importance,” trying to make it happen at the right moment. But I get the sense that she ended up thinking she was beyond that, as if it were something trivial, so she cast the weight off of her. It affirmed her independence as a woman.
As for a universal meaning, it’s hard for me to really narrow it down. The most dramatic, present theme in the text comes from the bell jar symbol. How real life can easily turn into a surreal, bad dream: a nightmare. Sylvia Plath reveals haunting aspects of the human psyche, what can be some of our darkest moments. And even though the ending ends on a good note for Esther, knowing that we can infer many many similarities between Plath and Esther, life does not end well for Plath, who commits suicide by sticking her head in the furnace. So in the end, I guess the bell jar did indeed descend again.
This last section really brought everything together for me. I really enjoyed the ending and found it satisfying. It also brought out some key points about the story.
The first thing that really struck me was the struggle of Esther as a woman. She mentions how she has a harder time writing because she is a woman, which I think also reflects on Sylvia Plath’s feelings of being a woman writer, as this book was printed during 1971, a time where many equality movements took place. Another subtle hint that I saw of this is that Esther was surprised when she found out that her Doctor was a woman.
Another thing a realized from this section was that I don’t think Esther was as alone as she was in previous sections of the book. Even in going to the electro therapy, she had Doctor Nolan with her every step of the way, which is something that I think helped her to a recovery.
The ending of the book ended in a covering of white snow, which I thought added a nice touch. Not in imagery, but in the metaphorical sense that snow is a death of something, but also pure in its own way, covering up all that has died, preparing it for a fresh start.
This is an interesting book, in that it deals greatly with on overcontroling government. They control everything. Even what women are allowed to wear, turning everything into a moer patriarcal society.
What struck me that most was how women were assigned to men only for the sake of making children. The main character realizes that "this is not love", which is something that is obviously missing throughout the book. that wife of the man looks at the main character harshly because, obviously, he has to sleep with other people to make children.
Im really excited to see how this book plays out.
Cliche, yes, but this book reminds me of 1984. Every kind of futuristic dystopia novel has some kind of connection to 1984, because they always seem to have a destroyed or controlling government - hence the dystopia. Yet while Big Brother isn't watching the characters in The Handmaid's Tale, they're certainly being watched. It has the usual public/private life divide that always occurs when being watched. The main character, Offred, clearly doesn't agree with or feel fit in the society, but everyone else seems to be all for it. However, she also notes that anyone observing her would probably think the same about her, so it's a tricky situation where it's impossible to converge and rebel.
An interesting part of the novel was during Offred's flashback to her training to become a handmaid. One of the Aunts (leaders) was lecturing them about their freedom. She said in the past days of anarchy, they had "freedom to," the ability to do whatever they wanted. But now, they have "freedom from," meaning they are protected for violent, discomfort, etc.
The author subtly was able to pose a complex question about how society should be run. Is it more important to protect the people or allow them to be free? Sometimes, it's impossible to have both. By creating a strict, complicated society, the world of this novel has created equilibrium out of anarchy. The sacrifice, however, is freedom to.
That doesn't mean they can't be happy, or just content. Yet, Offred doesn't seem happy. In fact, the Aunts warned them against seeming too happy, as it is deemed suspicious. This novel blurs the line between being satisfied, content, in a good state of existence, with the other side, being happy and free.
The book is staying consistent on a lot of the themes—there’s still a lot being said about gender roles in society. The ever-so growing personal relationship is the first time the book sees man/woman interaction as something other than sex. Their tentative, personal relationship is so foreign and shocking to Offred that it shows the horribleness of the society she lives in.
This absurd world that Atwood crafts is certainly meant to be seen as wrong. But Atwood draws parallels between her created world and the real world to attack less extreme values. Atwood analyzes the restraints and benefits of a more conservative, Puritan-like view on sex.
I really like the way imagination functions in the text as catharsis for Offred. The statement “I believe” is often used by her, asserting things she wishes to be true. She dismisses the idea of hypocrisy—“ This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything.” In her imagination, anything can exist as a comfort to her. It soothes her, comforts her, to image alternate realities.
While reading this section, it makes me think that there is a bit of hope for Offred, a way for her to escape. It especially gives a kind of foreshadowing with the flashback type thing with Nick, then the whole situation with Serena.
Another thing I noticed that was really ironic was the whole view of sex in this story. Sex is supposed to be the thing that brings two together, emotionally and physically. however, in this story, sex is seen as something that does neither. In fact, sex is almost the opposite in the eyes of Offred. Sex is the most intimate thing that happens with her. As terenzi said, the most intimate thing that has been happening wasn't with sex.
I think the rest of the book will be pretty obviously a good ending. It just gives me those vibes.
In the spirit of the arrival of Valentine's Day, I'm going to focus on a specific passage about love.
pg 225 "Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh."
I really love the enormous complexity squeezed into this passage. Yes, love is seen as positive, "lovely", but the connotation of it being a "downward motion" gives this idea of limpness. Natural, but dangerous: weak? This passivity of emotion is repeated at the end, they were "waiting" to fall in love, rather than seeking it.
"Like flying" gives off the sense that love is freedom, but the yet makes an abrupt shift. "Dire," "Extreme," and "Unlikely": all the words have different meanings but all seem to connect. Love is chaotic and dangerous.
I'm a little confused by the line, "God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner." The reversal would be Love is God? But around the corner? I'm a bit confused about that point.
I love the characterization towards the end where it calls love "abstract and total." I mean, they're simple words, but here they command a lot of power. In what ways are abstract things more consuming, more total than the flesh? Here in The Handmaid's Tale, we see a huge role of imagination. There's a great quote from a Palahniuk book I love that says that "The unreal is more powerful than the real"--I definitely see that here.
Terenzi picked an interesting passage to write about. Here's my two cents about it.
The line, "God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.", i think has much to do with there not being love. Everything that should have love is absent from it, also alluding to an absence of God possibly? I know the lines, "That word, made flesh", seems like a line from John in the New Testament. so maybe that part of the passage was more religious. God being love is a very common religious kind of metaphor as well.
Another thing I found funny (religiously) was the "Prayvaganza", obviously being prayer and extravaganza together, but for some reason, it seemed a bit ironic to me. I just pictured an extravaganza being something of almost a party, where as prayer (not always) is more of a quiet personal thing. Here it's almost like a holiday.
The ending of the book is really crazy though. I loved it, as it leaves the reader guessing and wondering what is going to happen to Offred, Are The Eyes real or not? The eyes again obviously represent the government in a totalistic society, how they can see everything. I think that the book would make a good movie, minus all the sex. What does anyone else think of the ending?
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