Week of 11/25/19
This week's topic was on Literary Speculation. In order to explore this topic, I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's novel uses elements of different types of genres but is essentially literary. The main types of genres elements I picked up while reading this novel was dystopian, historical fiction, and a memoir.
Dystopian is the main element in The Handmaids Tale due to the setting being in the near- future in a totalitarian-like state due to the decreased birthrate. This has cause the injustice of women having their basic rights taken from them. The elements of historical fiction and a memoir are not as obvious until you get to the end of novel. This is due to the big reveal of the last chapter of the book. This is where I found out that what I was reading in the previous chapters were tape recordings of Offred's account of living in Gilead,which makes it a memoir of sorts. The recordings are being reviewed at a conference years after being recorded and Gilead's fall. This creates a historical fiction element to the novel.
The combination of these elements would seem like they would mess with the flow of the story but I feel it only improved the story line. Without this surprise elements of the last chapter I think the readers of this novel would be left unsatisfied. The readers would never have gotten that sense of relief that Offred did indeed make it out of Gilead. Personally, I wasn't affected by the merging of more than one genre because the overall story and message was more important to me.
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