Significance

1. Quotation #1 from The Handmaid’s Tale Quotation“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. (…) I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls (…). Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound (…). (Atwood, 3)”. Significance The above quotation is the opening of the novel and is of extreme significance because it is the narrator’s memory, a memory of a time that no longer exists but with which we are very familiar as readers. If where they slept had “once been the gymnasium”, we can assume that the novel is situated after a major societal change has occurred, where things are no longer used for their original intentions. The quotation continues in this vein and the narrator’s memories are expanded to include what we would normally associate with high school gyms. I’m left with a few questions inspired by the genre of speculative fiction. We are in a new world and based on the genre, it is a world with a new political regime. My questions are: What kind of political regime? Who is running the show and who are the victims of the new regime? Who benefits? Will there be any historical information as to when and why the shift occurred? What are the exaggerated present day realities that Atwood is attempting to expose as potentially dangerous?

2. I wonder if the narrator’s memories suggest a sense of innocence. When I read them, I was reminded no so much of Park View and real high school but of high school as it is portrayed in various teen films. My high school gym didn’t actually host dances, nor does Park View’s, but almost every teen movie I’ve seen where a dance is portrayed, it is always in the school gym. Also, these movies often portray high school as an innocent time where innocence is lost, such as the classic Francis Ford Coppola film “American Graffiti “. I suspect that the narrator is indeed thinking of more innocent times where certain freedoms were perhaps taken for granted. Based on my previous knowledge of speculative fiction, I think it is a safe bet to assume that all of the things we associate with high school, such as sports and dances, are indeed freedoms that have disappeared since an assumed new regime has taken over the world. Is an old high school were she actually lives? Link to Quotation #1