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So Apropos
Saw death on a sunny snowFor every life, forego the parable. Seek the light, my knees are cold. (Running home, running home) Go find another lover; To bring and- to string along. With all your lies, you're still very lovable. I toured the light, so many foreign roads For Emma, forever ago. |
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Art is what you can get away with.
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HMT
Handmaid's tale is such a beautiful, haunting, and complex tale that it seems almost unfit to be wriggled into the syllabus of an Alevel Literature paper, where everything's reduced to the mundanity and euphemism of "how to get an A for your literature paper and secure a future as a lawyer". Its sad. Texts like this should be appreciated as a whole artwork, a complete masterpiece. Even in films, that are wellknown for killing classic texts (though arguably they are occasionally able to grasp the beauty and the beauty alone) water the text down to something completely meaningless. The summaries I read have been disappointing, and it makes me wonder on how accurate the film may be. To not take the complex characterization and significance of even the smaller characters, Serena Joy, Nick, Luke. The TIME BEFORE was never a paradise, but an ordinary illicit lifestyles full of protests, affairs, haunting memories. Yet, in Gilead, Offred continues to yearn for that imperfect past. We can see she's not fighting for feminism (as some critics have said). The time before is filled of contradictions in the protest of feminism - the way Offred submits to Luke, her acceptance of a diminished female role in society, and her yearning to be touched, to give herself to a man - she does not think like a feminist. What she is fighting for, however, is life. She struggles to live, to survive, to keep sane amidst the confusion of Gilead. Yet this struggle with self is downplayed as well. Though she may not show physical rebellion, outward protest, she is the only one showing the most genuine resistance to the Gilead movement. Moira, for example, resists but is ultimately entrapped into a role assigned by the state. Offred's mother, a pure feminist, still shows signs of female weaknesses. Ofglen, when it is realized that her resistance is lost, takes her own life, as the previous Offred had. Had Offred's rebellion of the mind been most true? She has kept the most of her own identity, her hopes and dreams and loved ones by her side, but yet she fights with the influence of the state, a place where there is NO alternative, where signs of suicide and death are hung in the only place she is allowed to call her own. The strength of what certain teachers call "futile signs of rebellion" is what I call reality. To preserve one's desires and hopes, to dangle like a "dogbone" because it makes you feel empowered. Offred has never professed to be a feminist, she isn't one, and she takes her flaws and her weaknesses and PRESERVES THEM within her identity, even from a world where female inequality still remains (where the male gaze still takes power), because she's fighting to remember who she is, rather than what they name her to be. I especially love that her name isn't revealed. Its like preserving a piece of herself from the public, like a little bit of candy that she owns for herself. She doesn't give herself away. Literally. |