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Description:
This video discusses Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a negative utopia in which women have no control over the government or their lives. Why does the narrator have no name? Life is tough under a totalitarian government that doesn’t see women as human beings.
Transcript
- 00:00
The Handmaid’s Tale, a la Shmoop. Ooh, ooh, ooh… wipe your feet on the mat
- 00:14
before you take one step in this house!
- 00:16
That’s better. Now you can make yourself at home.
- 00:21
Okay… here’s the deal. I’m the title character from Margaret Atwood’s famous
- 00:26
novel.
Full Transcript
- 00:27
I’m on every page, and I get all the good lines.
- 00:30
So, not that I’m complaining, but… why in heavens don’t I get a name?
- 00:36
Why do I have to be just the “narrator” or “the handmaid?”
- 00:38
Is that all I am to you, Margaret? My first instinct tells me that she left me
- 00:45
nameless because she wanted the reader to… be me.
- 00:50
In other words, she was hoping they’d step into my shoes…
- 00:53
…while filling in their own name…
- 00:55
…making all of my trials and tribulations seem more personal.
- 01:00
If I were given my own name, it might have kept readers at a slight distance…
- 01:05
…because then I would have just been… some woman all this stuff happened to.
- 01:10
Or perhaps I didn’t get a name because Margaret didn’t want me to represent just one person.
- 01:16
Although the book tells an individual story…
- 01:18
…it could be that she wanted me to symbolize women everywhere who are oppressed, discarded
- 01:25
or disregarded…
- 01:25
…so that I’m sort of the poster child for… gender equality.
- 01:29
Yeah, I know… I’m too old to be a poster child. Poster “woman,” then. Sounds more
- 01:31
official anyway.
- 01:31
Hold on though… maybe Margaret was just trying to do to me… what the men in her
- 01:36
book were doing to women.
- 01:38
In her world… and, okay, in my world… men treat women as complete inferiors.
- 01:43
To them, women are basically… love-making, baby-producing machines.
- 01:49
Lucky for the men, most of us are pretty low-maintenance. But you get the sense that the men don’t
- 01:54
even look at us as people.
- 01:55
They just look at us like one vast, collective group of kid incubators.
- 01:57
And if we’re not people… then we don’t need names.
- 02:00
I’m not sure of Margaret’s reason for leaving me nameless…
- 02:04
…but I’m sure she had a good one.
- 02:07
Was it to allow the reader to step into my shoes?
- 02:09
To use me as a symbol to represent women everywhere?
- 02:13
Or to show how callous and cruel the men in her negative utopia really are?
- 02:19
I don’t know about you, but I’m leaning toward that last one.
- 02:22
But then… I naturally have a bias against the… unfairer sex.
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