Texts, Culture & Values
The rubric asks students to examine this when studying texts from different periods.
What are the ways texts reflect and challenge cultural values over time?
This narrative perspective allows the reader direct access to the protagonist's increasingly fragmented thoughts.
What is first-person narration?
The name of the theocratic society in which Offred lives.
What is Gilead?
This fictional location represents an idealised female-centred society.
What is Barbie Land?
These two texts most explicitly use constructed societies to exaggerate gender expectations.
What are The Handmaid's Tale and Barbie?
This term describes the beliefs and principles regarded as important by a particular society.
What are cultural values?
The wallpaper ultimately becomes a symbol of this for the narrator.
What is female oppression/confinement?
Offred's patronymic name indicates this about her identity.
What is her association/ownership by Fred?
This causes Barbie to begin questioning her existence and identity.
What are thoughts about mortality and the disruption of her constructed world?
This shared concept connects the wallpaper, Gilead's uniforms and Barbie's constructed world.
What is the relationship between identity and social expectations?
This concept describes the ways a text is shaped by the historical and social circumstances in which it was produced.
What is context?
This nineteenth-century medical treatment confines the narrator to rest and inactivity. Also name the physician who prescribed it to Gilman.
What is the rest cure? Who is Silas Weir Mitchell?
Atwood draws upon these historical phenomenons to demonstrate that Gilead's practices have precedents.
What is historical oppression of women and other forms of religious/social control?
Barbie & Ken encounter this in the Real World that challenges her assumptions about gender.
What is patriarchy and its cultural expectations?
This common power relationship is challenged across all three texts.
What is the relationship between individual agency and social power?
This term describes the relationship between an earlier text and a later text that reworks, echoes or responds to it.
What is intertextuality?
The narrator's fixation on the wallpaper can be read as reflecting this broader struggle.
What is the struggle for autonomy and identity?
Atwood uses this to distinguish between the present events of Offred's life and her memories of the past.
What is the use of fragmented, non-linear narration?
The film explores this central concept through both Barbie Land and the Real World.
What is gender as a social construct?
This text uses satire and comedy to critique gender expectations rather than primarily using horror, dystopia or psychological realism.
What is Barbie?
This term describes the beliefs, assumptions and expectations that a society considers normal or acceptable at a particular time.
What are cultural values?
This literary technique makes the wallpaper increasingly mirror the narrator's psychological state.
What is symbolism?
Atwood uses this narrative device at the end of The Handmaid's Tale by shifting from Offred's account to a later historical analysis of her story.
What is a frame narrative?
Barbie uses this technique by presenting an exaggerated, reversed version of gender power in Barbie Land before exposing assumptions about gender in the Real World.
What is satire?
This common feminist concern links the narrator's confinement, Offred's reproductive role and Barbie's discovery of patriarchy.
What is the social construction of women's identities and roles?