@article{hooker_2006, title={(Fl)orality, gender, and the environmental ethos of Atwood's The 'Handmaid's Tale'}, volume={52}, DOI={10.1215/0041462x-2006-4001}, abstractNote={Before the revelation in the "Historical Notes" that what we've been reading is a transcript of tapes discovered in a footlocker in Bangor, Maine (301), most of us attend to the words of Atwood's protagonist innocently enough: our familiarity with the ways of the first-person narrator largely annuls any sense of the paradox involved in reading the signs of Offred's putative orality; that is, until the epilogue pointedly reminds us that we have been reading. Those "Historical Notes" also resolve an issue that might never have been raised in their absence: how the words of a character denied books and writing end up on the page. Thus, like Gilead's oral/literate divide and Offred's suggestive name, the epilogue also asks us to consider the spell of the printed word under which we have been and are proceeding. That spell has been discussed at length by scholars like Walter Ong and Eric Havelock. In his reading of Atwood's novel, Mario Klarer draws on their work to demonstrate how the oral/literate divide serves Gilead as a "gender-supporting" device (129). If, as Ong and Havelock contend, the capacity for abstract thought and a potentially revolutionary historical perspective depend on the "perspectival distance" provided by the written word, then an imposed orality atrophies both in Gilead's women. By creating the sense of existing in a "permanent present" or within the bounds of cyclical time, orality also diminishes any impetus for altering the regime's oppressive gendered arrangement (Klarer 133). (1) In the context of Gilead's political hierarchy, then, literacy confers a specifically male agency, and orality contributes to a feminine subjugation to that agency. While Klarer is undeniably correct about the liabilities of nonliteracy, his reading nevertheless tends to reduce Offred's richly nuanced narrative to little more than a declaration of gendered sociopolitical inferiority. Given that Offred is on the side of the good and the poetic, I would argue that her orality serves as an equally emphatic topos for exploring some of the liabilities that have accrued as we have interiorized writing and print, and for speculating on what the future interiorizing of electronic inscription might mean. (2) Moreover, when Offred identifies flowers as the "good things" in an otherwise "sad ... and sordid" story and asks "Where would we be without them?" (267) she points to the crucial narrative element organizing this exploration of a changing linguistic imaginary. (3) The centrality of flowers to a thematics of literacy and orality is signaled in what Marta Carminero-Santangelo identifies as Offred's "first true verbal transgression" (30), an act that gathers the handmaid into the resistance movement's fragile coalition. In front of the Soul Scrolls, the twined emblem of Gilead's commercial and theological rigor, Offred risks a heretical "No" to Ofglen's question: does she believe that "God listens ... to these machines?" (168). In response, Ofglen reveals the subversive connotations of a word she had offered up in conversation before--May Day. This bilingual signifier collates the French imperative m'aidez (help me) with the English for a pre-Christian celebration of spring's floral profusion and the cyclical fertility those blossoms represent. Invoking this pagan gestalt and the flowers so essential to its polytheistic rituals signals May Day's challenge to Gilead's autocratic Old Testament monotheism. But if monotheism is, as Ong and Havelock imply, at least in part an effect of protoalphabetic literacy, (4) then by subversively invoking a largely preliterate world, May Day also points to the novel's flowers as a significant topos for exploring the oral/literate divide. The abundant floral imagery in The Handmaid's Tale, in fact, constitutes an allusive metanarrative that comments not only on the novel's construction but also on what Marshall McLuhan calls the "unconscious effects" of the technologized word (6). …}, number={3}, journal={Twentieth Century Literature}, author={Hooker, D.}, year={2006}, pages={275–305} }