The Handmaid's Tale: Three Literary Perspectives

This week I got to attend another excellent talk hosted by One Book One Northwestern: a panel discussion on the history and ongoing importance of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The panelists:

• Linda Bubon: co-founder of Women & Children First, the fantastic feminism-forward bookshop in Andersonville
• Juan Martinez: fiction writer, literature & writing professor at Northwestern
• Kasey Evans: critic, English professor at Northwestern

A very nice, insightful talk. Brief notes below:

Teresa Woodruff @ Northwestern: "History, Context, and Relevance of Reproductive Dystopias"

More One Book, One Northwestern programming, inspired by Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale! Last week, I got to catch reproductive scientist Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D., exploring some contemporary themes and issues through the lens of Atwood's novel. Very brief notes below:

• Talks about being inspired by the hatching-chickens exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry, later inventing tools to measure egg thickness as part of a science fair project.
• Warns against assuming that reproductive technology tends towards dystopia.
• Woodruff was one of the discoverers of the "zinc spark" that occurs at egg fertilization, an important new tool for evaluating viability in IVF.
• Woodruff's talk framed around 3 selections from Handmaid:
• The established order can vanish overnight.
• Atwood insisted that technology in the book had to be currently available. (Part of why Atwood considered herself "not a science fiction writer", at least for a while there.)
  Quote from the novel's coda, with men mocking an educated women.
  

Maria Dhavana Headley talk @ North Western

author photo by Beowulf Sheenan,

no really that's his name, I checked

This last Wednesday, I was lucky enough to catch Maria Dhavana Headley in a talk at North Western with Dr. Barbara Newman. Part of One Book One Northwestern (they're doing Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), Headley and Newman talked about The Mere Wife, Headley's recent novel. A modern, feminist take on Beowulf, The Mere Wife was one of my favorite reads of last year. Dream-like, nightmare-like, lyrical: highly recommended.

After some introductory remarks by Juan Martinez, they jumped into a discussion of The Mere Wife, Beowulf, and Headley's forthcoming translation. Brief notes below! Possible spoilers! Good ideas theirs, errors mine:

• Barbara Newman: Gives a brief summary of Beowulf. Talks about the play on "mere" in Headley's novel, asks about what led her to write this.
• Maria Dhavana Headley: First ideas for this novel came from reading, and not being impressed with, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. Being from rural Idaho, suburban/commuter vision of America didn't click, and unimpressed with vision of women characters as wholly subservient to male interests. Had encountered Grendel's mother before encountering Beowulf--in a kid's bestiary kind of thing. When she did read Beowulf, intrigued by women's role as peaceweavers. I thought about all the times in women's lives that we're asked to "do it nicely", and thought about women supporting Trump in the 2016 election, signing up to support their own oppression. "Mere" wife as both "water wife" of Grendel's mother, and "little wife" of "unimportant" women, wanted to write about them both as important.