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The Handmaid's Tale and War of the Worlds - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The New Right: right-wing Christian movement and looked back to America's Puritan inheritance
      - Phyllis Schlafly - key promoter of the New Right
      - Moral Majority: televangelists, Christians and republicans in 1970s-80s, the Moral Majority existed to fight what thye saw as the secularisation of American society
      - US President, rise of religious fundamentalism, traditional values, debates around abortion and the female body
- - - - Handmaids: not allowed to have human connections, constant surveillance, loss of identity
        Women: every woman in the Handmaid's Tale is oppressed to a certain degree by the patriarchal society
        Nick: forced to have sex with Offred
    - - Society is oppressed under the Martians
        
        respond to oppression by fighting each other - narrator kills curate
        
        humans oppress minorities and animals
  - - - Moira is a symbol for hope for Offred - her unknown fate makes her their 'fantasy'
        
        The letter from the previous Offred gives her hope as it shows an act of rebellion against the regime
        
        She then finds a lack of hope as she discovers Moira's fate and Gilead's true power
    - - curate doesn't bring hope despite being religious
        
        artilleryman brings hope as he makes the narrator realise that he is not alone but then the narrator realises he is lazy
        
        lack of hope in book 2, chapter 8 as London appears to be dead
        
        epilogue - lack of hope, no one has learnt
  - - - Offred's use of language to rebel and gain power
        
        tries to gain power over Aunt Lydia as she mocks her
        
        sarcastic, witty female voice
        
        power over the Commander - calls his penis a 'slugs eye'
        
        ultimately powerless but tries to find ways she can rebel
        
        lacks power over her autonomy and body
    - - narrator tries to gain power over everyone else, using his intelligence, criticising everyone else so he can detach
        
        Martians have complete control over society for the majority of the book
        
        curate has little power as a representation of the fragility of religious institutions
        
        failure of the army and military failure
  - - - Gilead is based on Puritan ideals, with the epigraph from Genesis, 30:1-3 about Rachel and Jacob
        
        Red Centre is called the Rachel and Leah Centre
        
        written at the time of a rise in religious fundamentalism/extremism in America
    - - curate is a representation of Wells' opinion of religious institutions
  - - - Offred's account is a story of survival
        
        every day Handmaid's try to survive in a world that forces them into complete submission
        
        at risk if they do not produce a baby
        
        uses her story as a way to deal with the trauma of losing her husband and child
    - - Narrator's 'miraculous' knowledge of knowing what to do when the Martians attack
        
        The book is a fight for survival, many lose their fight
        
        Humans were not equipped to survive the Martians attack as evident from the beginning of the novel
  - - - nature and women are connected and linked often
        
        fertility
        
        Serena Joy's garden
        
        environmental movement contemporaneous with the feminist movement
    - - red weed
        
        Martians easily defeat humans but are unable to defeat nature as bacteria destroys them
        
        power of nature over humans
  - - - Gilead is an extremely hierarchal society based on social class and gender
    - - Martians hold dominion over humans - would've replaced them as the top of the pecking order - humanity's sense of order and control is more fragile than people think
        
        people still try to preserve social structures
- - - - Handmaids Tale: hierarchical organisation of female characteron the colouration of clothes
        
        chapter 2 'Everything except the wings if red: the color of blood, which defines us'
        
        red, nun-like uniform symbolises imprisonment
        
        number of connotations: fertility, blood, violence and death
      - War of the Worlds: proliferation of red weed
        
        book 2, chapter 6 'I found the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet'
        
        red weed is symbolic of the formidable power and aggressive conquest of the Martians
        
        omnipresent red weed overwhelms the narrator as it disorientates his familiar surroundings