35 years ago came out “the handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood — the main feminist dystopia in literary history. Written in response to attempts by the American government to abolish the right to abortion in the early 80s, after the release in 2017 the film adaptation of the series, he became the main symbol of the protest era #metoo. While dressed in the uniforms of maids of white bonnets and red cloaks — women continued to protest worldwide against the ban on abortion, harassment and inequality in the workplace and domestic violence, the Weekend talks, in the works of fiction were born, feminism and why the writer chose this genre to talk about women’s promotext: Nikita Sadatoglu the first in which an English Duchess describes the magical world of matriarchy, and its nicknamed crazy whore Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) Genre: utopiate: Abraham van DiepenbeeckМаргарет Cavendish (nee Lucas) was born in the midst of the scientific revolution in Europe when inventions such as the microscope and the telescope become the most favorite toys of the aristocracy, natural philosophy — the main topic at all social events, and mathematicians, astronomers and philosophers of international pop stars, which wanted to rewrite almost every monarch. For women this fashionable world of science was closed: the language of the academic community was Latin, which were only in “male” subjects and until nauchpop like “Newtonians for ladies” Francesco Algarotti (the man who called St. Petersburg the window to Europe) remained for another 100 years. For a long time women were considered unworthy of science because they wrote the scientists were men, “irrational nature”, but in the Wake of General scientific insanity women began to allow, in the words of Rousseau, “touch of science”: of course, not to participate, but to be present at the conversations of men pseudo-scientific topics — as he wrote the same Rousseau who still “remember they are little”.Margaret Cavendish was present, remembered and, in the end, I wanted to participate. She received a typical for women of that time education — reading, writing, dancing and singing, but after listening to the conversations of men about science, to educate ourselves, fortunately she allowed to use the home library, where it was translated into English classics, like Aristotle and the English comments and additions to new academic texts. Besides, the elder brother, who later became one of the founders of the Royal society, recounted to her all that she had learned from tutoring in philosophy and science. It is the lack of systematic education, then said Margaret, prompted her to write scientific treatises, but what now would be called science fiction.In 1642, after the victory of antiroyalists in civil wars�� in the UK, Margaret, being a maid of honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, he went along with the court in exile in Paris, where he soon married the future Duke of Newcastle William Cavendish. Warlord Cavendish was scientist-lover, passionate about philosophy, and knowledge of his wife struck. So much so that he introduced her to his friends-philosophers — Thomas Hobbes, with whom Margaret began a multi-year correspondence to rené Descartes, which for her translated into English excerpts of their works. William Cavendish not only shared the interests of his wife and supported her when she began to write, and then decided to publish his work. And not just publish, but publish under his own name.First, women prefer not to publish under his own name, at least in English: some wrote in the table like contemporary Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, English philosopher, which subsequently admired Leibniz and whose only work was published in Latin translation in the Netherlands 20 years after her death. Other gallant published novels and poetry in small editions of about the size of a pamphlet, hiding under pseudonyms or an anonymous “Madame”. Cavendish also shocked the audience that openly went into the men’s area of science and philosophy, published his works in folio size — as Aristotle and the Bible— and even with their own image on the frontispiece.In “Poetry and imagination” (1653) Cavendish told atomistic theory in verse, in the “Worlds’olio” (1655) declared that fantasy and imagination are equally common in men and women, and in the “Philosophical letters” (1664) addressed to an imaginary woman, criticized the materialism of Hobbes, the dualism of Descartes and unclear syllable of Jan van Helmont. Just in contrast to the vanity style most part of scientific works, which, without special education, unavailable women, it was nearly indecipherable, Cavendish wrote his magnum opus — the novel “the Blazing world” (1666), in which “combined the romantic, the scientific and the fantastic” to “Express complex philosophical truths in simple language”.The plot of the novel, reminiscent of the classic utopia in the spirit of the Campanella, and fiction, and even a little steampunk, the main character, is kidnapped in love with her sailor, shipwrecked at the North pole falls through a magic portal into an alternate reality, where a half human-half, struck by her beauty and wisdom, appointed her as his Empress. The first thing she removes the prohibition for women to visit churches and government offices, hires a woman as a counselor and court scribe and collects local philosophers to discuss scientific news. In the Preface to the novel the Cavendish wrote, ��only in a fictional world she could show that women can be a great ruler. Ibid. Cavendish declared that women are intellectually inferior to men only due to the lack of education that “a bad husband is worse than no husband” and that she wants to achieve literary fame, and that in the prevailing ideas about women’s ambitions were not. From the social stigma it defended the status of the Duchess, but from ridicule and gossip could not defend any titles: over the blasphemous ideas Cavendish declared insane, a whore and a traitor of the floor. As he wrote later Virginia Woolf, Cavendish was a “giant cucumber” among the gallant rose of the XVII century, whose example frightened generation of “smart girls”. And frightened successful, the next call women into the territory of science fiction had to wait another 100 years.”No matter what I cannot be Henry the fifth or Charles II; however, I can be Margaret I: and although I have neither power, time nor possibilities to become a great conqueror, like Alexander or Caesar, despite the fact that I can’t be the mistress of the world, because it is decided by fortune or Moira, can I create my own world” by Margaret Cavendish. The Preface to the novel, “Blazing world”, 1666Глава two, in which the daughter of a haberdasher makes a woman the main character of the Gothic novel and becomes the highest paid writer of the Victorian era Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) Genre: Gothic of romante: wikipedia.agapella superstar British prose, which Byron put on a par with Shakespeare, and whose novels of Walter Scott compared with opium, Ann Radcliffe (nee ward) was born in the family of a wealthy haberdasher in the same year, when he published “the Castle of Otranto” of Horace Walpole, first Gothic novel literature. After Walpole to write novels with family curses, ghosts, mysterious deaths, mysterious hatches, weak women and Gothic castles took a dozen writers throughout the UK — one of them in 30 years was Anne Radcliffe.By the time Radcliffe began his literary career in literature began to appear the first signs of professionalization. Although women actively interested in literature, intellectual matters, and especially writing, was still perceived as a dangerous anomaly (later Vyazemsky called them “degenerates, ceasing to be a woman and unable to be a man”), the emergence of women authors of Gothic novels, the particular scandal has not caused. In the first place, because such novels were not considered real literature, and entertainment for the crowd, “paper debris”, in the words of one critic, and their writing — no elevated and not unlike other forms of earnings that were availables for women who find themselves in difficult financial situation. This attitude ensured Walpole many followers among women, the most famous of whom was Clara Reeve. For Radcliffe, however, all these circumstances had no relationship: literature in General and the Gothic novel in particular was interested in her not as a source of income.On the background of the writers-contemporaries Radcliffe looked revolutionary: provided, married the owner and chief editor of the liberal newspaper, the English Chronicle, who encouraged her writing ambitions, she not only repeated Walpole in his novels, and frankly they undermine the established Canon. To Radcliffe, almost all the heroines of Gothic novels were virgins in distress: infinitely faint from fear, they were passed from hand possessed by the ancient curse of the Lord into the hands of sold his soul to the devil to a monk as long as any peasant caught lost in his childhood the son of another Lord, came to the rescue. Radcliffe was one of the first felt floating in the air the idea of emancipation and taking all the main components of Gothic literature, has shifted emphasis on the woman. In “Wolfskin mysteries” (1794) a young and tender orphan Emily St. Aubert, from childhood, possessed the “too subtle sensitivity” and fearfulness, learns to control himself and instead, like its predecessor in the “Castle of Otranto”, burst into tears, listening to “persuasion”. In the end, she not only exposes all the ghosts and independently runs away from his uncle, planning to Rob and rape her, but also refuses to marry, instead going to Paris for independence and inheritance.To bring such a heroine in the late eighteenth century was only possible in Gothic literature, with its emphatic unrealistic, castles and ghosts. At least, no damage to reputation: after the publication of the novel “Memoirs of Emma Courtney” (1796), in which the plight of women in modern Britain was presented from the first person in the genre of philosophical letters, the author Mary Hayes due to a devastating criticism became a pariah and was forced to leave London.From the fate of Hayes Radcliffe rescued the conventions of the genre — despite the fact that all supernatural phenomena and demonic forces, a toy which became the heroine of the other writers, Radcliffe always found a rational explanation: a variety of ghosts, living corpses and howling spirits were bats, wax figures, and the antics of the intruders. Without reducing the level of suspense that many readers, among whom were then and Dostoevsky, admitted that after the Radcliffe afraid to go to sleep— Radcliffe showed that the sources of these nightmares for women are not rebels dead, a family male floor abuser and sociopaths, “reveling in their despotism.” It’s already in the 1970-ies, when the first works of feminist literary theory, Radcliffe will be named the mother of all literary feminists.Bet on strong female figures made his case during the life of Radcliffe: if other books can withstand a maximum of two editions of her novels were reprinted each year and transferred almost all European languages, including Russian. This popularity has ensured Radcliffe’s fabulous fees: for the “Wolfskin secrets” paid her £500 — twice the annual salary of her husband and ten times more than the average writer’s fee (£10-20). Publisher Thomas Cadell then said that it was impossible to pay so much, but still a woman — and in three years paid Radcliffe for her next novel “the Italian” has already £800.On the wave of popularity Radcliffe in the UK had a surge of “women’s literature”: dozens, if not hundreds of women started writing — and very successfully — in Gothic novels, which were later combined into the “Radcliffe school”. One of these writers was Mary Wollstonecraft, three years after the debut of the Radcliffe published an essay, “In defense of women’s rights”, which is called the first feminist text in English: Wollstonecraft openly argued with the stereotype of woman as a hypersensitive being, relying solely on their emotions and therefore do not need education on equal terms with men. For example Radcliffe, linking the Gothic style with the women’s question, Wollstonecraft conceived Gothic novel with an even more blatant removesthe, denouncing the Patriarchal institution of marriage: the heroine is imprisoned in a mental hospital husband abuterol starts daydreaming under the influence of drugs. His novel she never finished: in 1797, 10 days after the birth of her daughter Mary, the future Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft died.In the same year, after the publication of “Italian” Radcliffe stopped writing. It was rumored that she too plunged into the horrors and mad that her as a British spy caught in Paris and that she died of a poisoned pork chops. Modern biographers believe that she was just tired from the endless accusations that she taught women to write and now need to clean them from the dominance of British literature that her novels are not “masculine”, that is cruel, but the main thing is that she always explains ghosts.”She tried to support myself with the thought that a marriage may not be valid if she does not agree to speak in front of a priest set the words of the wedding rite. However, as approaching the time of testing, her tortured soul was more and more shaken. She wasn’t even sure that her stubborn resistance in front of the altar last��lies to her salvation; she knew that Montone would not hesitate even to break the law if necessary to achieve his goals,” Ann Radcliffe. “Wolfsie secrets” 1794 Chapter three, in which the American liberal describes the horrors of marriage and motherhood and becomes the icon of the suffragette Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) Genre: masticate: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Sophageal Perkins Gilman (Perkins — the name of the father, Gilman — second husband), niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote the famous “uncle Tom’s Cabin” — a novel that started the Civil war in the United States, was born in a poor liberal family. Gilman childhood challenged the Patriarchal society did not wear the corset and sewed herself comfortable clothing, including a “normal bras”, went to the public library to read about ancient civilizations in 17 years vowed never to marry, not to be distracted from conquering the world.Gilman long was faithful to the teenage oath, but after a failed affair with the woman in the end accepted the proposal of the artist Charles Walter Stetson, who asked her to marry for two years. In 1884 they married, a year later they had a daughter, and this event was a turning point in the fate of Gilman. Due to the severe postpartum depression she had to yourself to learn how does modern psychiatry and what place it assigns to the woman. The impression was so strong that it forced Gilman to engage in literature.At the end of XIX among doctors, there is a widespread notion that women more than men, are prone to nervous exhaustion because of the “biological weakness and reproductive cycles”. The first risk was a “creative and ambitious” women, “who wish to take roles that do not correspond to their sex and natural functions of motherhood,”— higher education and political activity was considered destructive mentality factors. The main fighter for women’s mental health was a famous American neurologist Silas Mitchell, who was considered the root of all diseases for a long period of tension and as a medicine prescribed compulsory vacation.It to him and asked for help Gilman in the hope to get rid along with “dragging fatigue” and “boundless inner pain.” The recipe of Dr. Mitchell, which is then treated Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf and which both recalled with horror (and Woolf famously described in “Mrs. Dalloway”), was: “Devote yourselves home and spend all the time with the child. Lie down to rest for an hour after each meal. Pay on the day only two hours of intellectual life. And never in my life never to touch pen, brush or pencil.” In the case of Gilman treatment had a paradoxical effect: a few months sitting locked up she began to seriously think about where to get a gun or chloroform, and after some time decided to run away. In 1888 she left her husband, and in 1890 wrote about his life in a monotonous hell story “the Yellow Wallpaper”. In 1892 it was published The New England Magazine.A young family moves into a first empty family estate. The heroine after the birth of a child upset nerves, and in the old house she seems to see ghosts. To cure a character from “easy a nervous hysteria”, the husband-the doctor forbids her to leave home to write, read and meet other people — he prescribes her on bed rest and orders to spend days in a room with yellow Wallpaper, in the picture where she sees the “broken neck”. Some time later, the heroine discovers that the Wallpaper is locked and try to escape women, and in the end she sneaks them into the Wallpaper, being released from imprisonment in the room.Photo: Atlanta ConstitutionНаписание story had a therapeutic effect, but for Gilman it was more important to warn future patients Mitchell, telling them about the impact of his method. Turning to the traditions of Edgar Allan PoE and Ann Radcliffe was to help better describe the nightmare and horror of such treatment. Immediately after the publication of Gilman sent the story Mitchell: although he did not answer, saying it was after reading “the Yellow Wallpaper” Mitchell ceased to be a “intellectual activity” harmful to women.In the same year, Gilman got a divorce, and after sending 11-year-old daughter to live with her husband, began to fight for women’s rights. “The yellow Wallpaper” Gilman made a star among the suffragettes: they praised her for denouncing the repressive and discriminatory medical practices, and encouraged to continue studying literature.Over the next 40 years, Gilman wrote fantastic stories, where women on the day turned into men, or sold his soul to the devil in exchange for gender equality around the world, and journalistic work, in which he called to abandon the construction of houses with kitchens (“they created just for the enslavement of women”), to enter widespread service, to start the production of gender neutral toys for kids and adopt a law on compulsory General education. The quintessence of her feminist ideas became the fantasy novel “the earth” (1915), in which three men find themselves in a world where only women. Ironically on sexist stereotypes— the characters are, for example, do not understand why the care of children and home is considered real work, Gilman describes how the absence of men contributes to the construction of an ideal world in which there is no war, child-rearing professionals, not “unqualified” parents, wear comfortable, food is useful, and laws are reviewed every 20 years.In 1916, Gilman has taken the first steps to implement their ideas and became one of the organizers of the National women’s the party, whose aim was to draw attention to women’s issues and to achieve voting rights for women. The goal was achieved in 1920, when the efforts of the National women’s party and personally Gilman was adopted the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution which established suffrage for women.”There is no female mind. The brain is not a sexual organ. With the same success it is possible to speak of a female liver” Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “Women and Economics”, fourth 1898Глава in which a specialist in French poetry encourages fiction writers to fight for women’s rights and argues that the fiction — serious literature Ursula Le GUIN (1929-2018) Genre: fantasitco: National Endowment for the Humanities, California Humanities, Berkeley Film FoundationОдна of the most influential writers of the XX century, which managed to translate American fiction of the entertainment ghetto in the category of “real literature”, Ursula Le GUIN (nee Kroeber) was born in the family of the famous anthropologist Alfred Creber and since childhood have planned to do a big literature. And the father, an expert on indigenous peoples of California, and the mother who wrote the biography “the last wild Indian”, constantly peddling Ursula literature not for years — from the old Icelandic epics and the Iliad to Kafka and Tolstoy. Desire to read is not repulsed, quite the contrary: in 1948, Le GUIN came to Berkeley to study medieval French poetry. She tried to publish the first story in the student magazine, but was refused: the editors said that women have no place. Such waivers will chase Le GUIN the next 15 years.American literature of the late 1950s and 1960s experienced a fascination hemingwayesque machismo: the role of the famous writer preferred to see the white cisgendered heterosexual men. Exceptions like Harper Lee, Truman Capote and James Baldwin only prove the rule. Of all the writers included in the list of bestsellers The New York Times during the 1950s and 1960s, only 20% were women: breaking through institutional sexism serious American publishers Le GUIN could not.Convinced that “a small rocky clearing, and realism” it has no place, Le GUIN decided to try himself in fiction — marginal genre that she considered neoliterates. A specialist in French poetry of the middle Ages who won Fulbright “grant for geniuses” for writing his thesis, Le GUIN, like other intellectuals of the time, I thought that fiction is about a shootout in space, and not about people. Although these ideas were not altogether groundless, fiction was an unexpected advantage over the literary mainstream: the fact that the author was a woman here does not bother anyone — publishers interested in fantastic novels Le GUIN and even suggested that she take a male pseudonym. And this despite the fact that fiction, Le GUIN wrote a kind.In “the Wizard of Earthsea” (1968), his first fantasy bestseller, Le GUIN, rather than to describe another great battle with the dark Lord, wrote a story about the young wizard from the magic school. The magician was black, and the main antagonist of white, which after the assassination of Martin Luther king in the same year 1968 was seen as quite anti-racist statement.Le GUIN took a worrying current phenomena — from the remnants of McCarthyism to the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution — and Packed them into fiction. It turned out the ants with political manifestos, sebenarnya people, each season changing the gender and women dragons. What Le GUIN was one of the first with the beginning of the movement for gender equality in the 1970s, spoke about women in fiction: “the Women’s movement finally made us realize the simple fact that with rare exception fantasy authors either totally ignored women or presented them squeaking dolls, which permanently threatened to be raped by a space monster, if the alpha male will not save. Where is the fantasy, where’s the imagination? Colleagues it is time to think seriously about such a scary radical, futuristic concepts, such as freedom, equality and fraternity”.The Le GUIN is actively promoted their radical ideas in the novels. In the novel “Always coming home” (1985) the main character by the name of the Talking Stone, some time after living in a male totalitarian society the rigidity and violence, runs home to the people women who preach anarchy, equality, and Sisterhood. In the parable, “It deprives them of the names” (1985) Le GUIN spoke against the secondary role of women: after Adam names all the animals, eve, also received its name from him, deprives of all names, saying that Adam couldn’t impose like to be called (i.e. how to live). In the novel “tegana” (1990), the sequel to “Wizard of Earthsea”, the main character becomes sorceress rising against the ban on women to practice magic.Photo: “tegana”, 1990Хотя ferrowest promoted and other writer-fantasti (and some even more radical than Le GUIN), but she has become since the mid-1970s, the main fiction of the United States, was so wide-ranging audience, to really communicate their ideas to the General reader. Publishers began to publish more women, women who wrote under male pseudonyms, began to make the coming-outs, and the old sexist like Isaac Asimov, from the 1930s which said that science fiction is only for men and should not be allowed in the genre of “female trouble” steel vengeance to expose the horrors of male chauvinism, but would not discourage new progressive fans.In parallel, communities�� literary critics persistently ignored fiction for many years, began to pay attention to Le GUIN. Already in the 1980s, when science fiction was still considered a marginal genre, The New Yorker began to publish short stories Le GUIN, declaring it a destroyer rather complicated boundaries, and in the early 1990s, the famous literary snob Harold bloom and all have announced that Le GUIN, not Tolkien transformed the fiction into art. Came in fantastic literature because it was not allowed in “real”, Le GUIN was finally introduced to the rank of great American writers, not least due to the fact that continued this is an easy genre to talk about serious things. Finally, this status was approved in 2010-e, where Le GUIN was the first science fiction writer whose works during the life of released in the most prestigious literary series, the U.S. Library Of America, which was published all the books of the American literary Canon. In 2014, taking the medal “For distinguished contribution to American literature” — the highest literary award of the United States, Le GUIN said she receives it on behalf of “all of science fiction, women and men, who were so long ignored by the literary establishment”.”Hello, my name is Ursula, I’m a woman and I write science fiction. Yes, we actually exist, although for a long time, scientists rejected this fact, calling women-fiction fiction, like unicorns and aliens” Ursula Le GUIN. From the film “Worlds of Ursula Le GUIN”, 2018Глава five, in which the canadian writer describes the terrible Patriarchy and call it wrong feminist Margaret Atwood (1939–) Genre: anticipiate: Canadian Press/Shutterstock/FotodomАвтор main feminist dystopia in history, Margaret Atwood refused to identify themselves and feminists, and antiutopian, and even to science fiction writers. This despite the fact that already the first published novel by Atwood “the Edible woman” (1969) about a young bride who, considering that the groom was devouring her from the inside, begins to sympathize with the steak and vegetables and stopped eating, immediately proclaimed the benchmark of feminist fiction. Atwood has distanced itself from feminism, saying that “in the late 1960s was living in new York, where he began the movement for equality, and in canadian provinces where no feminism was not in sight,” and from the fiction — “I have no spaceships or monsters, what kind of fiction”. Subsequently, the explanation is complicated.By the time Atwood, the daughter of two canadian biologists, since childhood, dreamed of becoming a writer, has already managed to win several prizes for his poetry, almost emigrated to France (“to draw, to drink absinthe and die young”) and graduated from the Harvard University faculty of arts and Sciences. Due to the fact that during the study she — like all women — would��prohibited to visit the library of Widener, where he kept modern literature dissertation, she decided to write in the Gothic novel. The thesis, however, was not written, but the knowledge of Gothic was useful in the work on the novel “the handmaid’s Tale”.The beginnings of the novel appeared during his studies at Harvard when Atwood studied the history of early American puritans and came to the conclusion that the common perception of the puritans as victims of religious persecution, forced to flee from Europe to America is wrong— in fact, the leaders of the puritans dreamed of a rigid theocracy, and was looking for a way to create a society in which any departure from the faith and righteousness worthy of punishment. With the puritans Atwood linked family history: according to legend, her distant ancestor was Mary Webster, or Polupoltina Mary, which in the XVII century, the inhabitants of the Puritan colony in Massachusetts hanged on suspicion of witchcraft. Hung badly sagged all night, Mary never died, and the next morning the amazed villagers let her go.Interest in the puritans superimposed on the actual agenda — the attempt of Ronald Reagan to abolish the right to abortion and in 1984, when Atwood took over writing “the handmaid’s Tale”. As the once-Anna Radcliffe, Atwood took as the basis of an existing genre, but shifted the attention to the woman and brought the whole fantasy to the maximum likelihood. As a result of the dystopian turned “a realistic forecast for the future” as he outlined the genre itself Atwood.In the near future, the world starts falling fertility, a group of Christian extremists explains the demographic decline of the fertility problems caused by sinful behavior of women, seizes power in the USA and sets new rules: homosexuals are executed, all fertile women become “handmaids”, “walking Queens” owned by the state and distributed among men.The image of this theocratic dictatorship was collected Atwood from documentary sources, based on every detail lay information from books and Newspapers where alarmist news from Canada about the falling birth rates, the Nazi campaign to train young “racially pure” mothers for the education of “Aryan” children, public executions of opponents of the regime in North Korea and homosexuals and women in Saudi Arabia, forcing women to birth children in post-war Romania (as wrote then Newspapers, all women of childbearing age in Romania had to give birth to four children, those who have not completed the requirements could be fired from their jobs, and “otkazniki” were considered enemies of the state), the emergence of the Christian sect in new Jersey, where women were called “maids”. The main inspiration, however, was Ronald Reagan, in the early 1980s tried to cancel recently (in 1973) won a feministkami of the universal right of women to abortion. Republican government with the support of televangelists tried to introduce a law that gives unborn children rights, to cut Federal funding for clinics that provide services for termination of pregnancy. By the way, proclaiming the United States a “shining city on a hill” Reagan quoted the leader of the American puritans of the seventeenth century John Winthrop.Released in 1985, “the handmaid’s Tale” Atwood which is dedicated Popupoverlay Mary, immediately called a feminist version of Orwell’s “1984”, was awarded the first Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction novel and was banned in several States. Atwood again tried to distance itself from “feminism” and “fiction”: it was said that not writing a political pamphlet that advocated “equal rights without labels” that you can criticize the Patriarchy and not be called a feminist, but the genre was defined as “speculative prose” — no fiction, only speculation about the near future based on today’s realities. Disown did not work — Atwood continued to be called the Queen of feminist fiction, and after serial adaptation of “the handmaid’s Tale” in 2017, this title was assigned definitively: uniforms of the maids of the white cap and red coat became a symbol of protest against Donald trump, who on the first day as President signed a decree on the deprivation of Federal funds from those organizations that offer abortion.Become a new icon of feminism Atwood have not given themselves feminists: once in 2016, she signed the letter in defense of the dismissed teacher the University of British Columbia, who was accused of sexual harassment (the charges were never proven, and University check called them “unfounded”), attacked with criticism. Atwood in response criticized the movement #metoo: “It is a sign of a broken justice system. Women complaining of sexual harassment, failed to achieve justice, and they decided to use the Internet. From the sky rained stars. This proved to be very effective. But what’s next? We can either fix the justice system, or completely get rid of it as useless.” Atwood urged to consider the man innocent until his guilt is proven, and predicted that somebody will probably try to use the movement for personal gain. For insufficient radicalism and victimblaming it was declared a “wrong feminist”, as this was with Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton and other honored fighters for women’s rights, not joined to the end of the new rhetoric.Finally get rid of the status feminists and fantastci Atwood managed after the release of the novel “the Covenants” (2019), a continuation of “the handmaid’s Tale” is also written in diary format. Michiko Kakutani, a former literary critic for The New York Times and the storm of writers, which is afraid of everything from Norman mailer to Jonathan Franzen, for reviews of this novel even came out of retirement. Never used the words “feminism” and “fiction”, Kakutani took the “handmaid’s Tale” and its sequel to the genre of “literary evidence” in the spirit of Svetlana Alexievich, proclaiming the stories of heroines and women in General, saying only weapon against the regime, are trying to force women to remain silent. Encouraging to see in the novels of Atwood testimony, Kakutani fixed gap is feminist fiction: after nearly four centuries of fruitful symbiosis of feminism is no longer needed either the distant future or alternative worlds, or plaque mystics coming out of the fantasy ghetto, he finally became a mainstream.”Apparently, I’m a bad feminist. I can add it to other things in which I was accused since 1972 that I have scaled to fame for the severed heads of men that I am the dominatrix who is obsessed with subordination to men, and just a horrible person that can destroy anyone who looks askance at me at the table. I’m so scared! Now I feel like I am at war with women, because I’m a sexist who condones rape and just bad feminist” Margaret Atwood. “I’m a bad feminist?”, 2018 see also:
The dream factory and the woman question
