(Dis)locating Aesthetics: Feeling, Retrieving, and Reconstructing The Handmaid’s Tale in a Multicultural A-Level English Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the role of retrieval practices in an urban, multicultural London classroom. With the advent of cognitive science-based approaches in recent years, retrieval has become a central tenet for testing foundational knowledge in English literature. I consider the implications of retrieval for classroom discourses concerning feeling, experience and aesthetics. I ask whether it is possible to conceptualise ‘retrieval’ differently to encompass the funds of knowledge offered by our students and contexts that lie beyond the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• High Intensity Retrieval
• aesthetics
• dystopian literature
• Margaret Atwood
• A level English literature

Heather¹ walks into my A-Level English Literature classroom six weeks after the Autumn term has started. She is a transfer to the newly opened sixth form college where I have started working from another branch of this large multi-academy trust (MAT). The classes here are smaller than what I had been accustomed to, but just as culturally diverse as in my previous workplace, a further education college in another part of London. The students are immaculately dressed in professional business attire and comply with the rigorous sixth form code of conduct with little objection. Mobile phones, headphones and junk food are nowhere to be seen and compliance is the law of the land. Detentions happen daily and the worst offenders find themselves in the ninety-minute session with the headmaster on a Friday afternoon. To them, I am Ms Hippisley: a formal title I have not used in over a decade since I last taught in secondary schools, in an era where MATs were just beginning to emerge in the educational landscape of London.

On the day that Heather arrives, we are starting Atwood’s (1986) novel The Handmaid’s Tale and the students, including Heather, have read the text independently at home. On the interactive white board is a slide which features seven different covers of Atwood’s text. They range from film tie-ins and audiobook covers to different print editions of the novel from the last four decades. ‘What does each cover make you think or feel?’ I say. ‘Write down your thoughts and annotate the covers’. I seat Heather between Souad and Latisha, both of whom are well versed in my starters which consist of writing down first thoughts in silence before paired discussion. Heather looks up sheepishly once or twice but continues to annotate the images with occasional glances at the work of her peers.

To begin the discussion, I choose Latisha, who comments on the cover of the BBC audiobook (Atwood 2000). She highlights how the lone figure in a room, clad in the Gileadean uniform, foregrounds the isolation of the protagonist, Offred. There is collective distaste for the 1990 film poster which features Natasha Richardson, semi clad, averting her gaze from the viewer as Robert Duvall’s Orwellian face looms large behind her as the Commander (Schlöndorff 1990). The adjective ‘creepy’ is used more than once and there is concern for the representation of Offred who seems both sexualised and fearful in this interpretation. The cover of the 1986 first edition fares better. Here the class is unanimous in their view that the image of the wall where ‘salvagings’ (the corpses of executed dissenters) are left on display is representative of what the novel is meant to be: dystopian fiction. The image which the class finds most unsettling belongs to the 1993 Heinneman edition (Atwood 1993) featuring two feet laid upon a bed, protruding from beneath a red cloth. There is much speculation at the way the cover hints at the aftermath of sexual violation without revealing the full extent of the horror that lies within, much like the theocratic order of Gilead itself. The remaining cover belongs to the 1986 publication by Seal books. Here, the image of a young Black or mixed-race woman’s mouth clamped shut with three ornate jewelled rings is strikingly different to the worlds suggested by the other covers. The words ‘oppression’ ‘silencing’ and ‘repression’ emerge in this discussion and yet we don’t quite manage to discuss the ethnicity of the woman in the image. I had hoped that we would begin to think about the implications of Atwood’s novel, set in North America, for women in different cultures across the world. Despite a vague disappointment that this cover has not quite initiated the discussion that I had hoped for, I think to myself that we will return to this later; at some other point we will reconnect with this image as we venture forth into the worlds that are contained within this classroom. Our discussion, nonetheless, feels pregnant with possibility; everything from patriarchal systems to race, ethnicity and religion quiver at the periphery of the lesson without quite being fully formed.

In these early tentative discussions, my aim is to grasp a sense of how students have located their feelings, thoughts and emotions about the text in relation to the personal, social and political contexts that they know. The rest, I believe, will emerge in some form during the weeks of study that lie ahead. The covers not only hint at varying interpretations but the socio-cultural and political contexts that produce and re-produce the text within its own publication history. As Yandell (2014) and Kress et al. (2005) have argued, this type of approach in an urban, multicultural classroom relies on a ‘multimodal’ reading of the text where the ‘prominence of the screen rather than the page as a site of semiotic activity’ and ‘the salience of the image, still and moving’, contribute as much to the whole discussion of the novel as the act of reading itself (2014, 108). The premise for discussing and exploring Atwood’s text in this classroom rests on the idea that reading is far from a ‘monomodal’ activity which happens in isolation; from the outset, my aim is to steer the students towards the sense that the ‘materiality of the book’ is as much an unstable entity as the contexts in which it continues to be reproduced (Yandell 2014, 108). My hope is that this will allow all of us to engage with the text without being burdened by a pre-ordained body of critical and textual knowledge; somewhere in this process, feeling, memory and reading will intertwine in ways that are peculiar to this class’s particular reading of Atwood.

HIR in the English classroom: does the teacher know you’ve read the text, though?

At the end of the lesson, I ask Heather to stay behind to find out how she felt about her new class. ‘It was good Miss’, Heather says, ‘but it was nothing like what I’m used to’. I press Heather further, inwardly alarmed that my lessons are not meeting the high expectations of her former sixth form. ‘It’s just that we normally start English lessons with High Intensity Retrieval’, Heather says matter-of-factly. Perplexed by the term, I ask Heather to explain. She tells me about a practice where each English lesson begins with twenty questions about a text that are to be answered under timed conditions. The words ‘rapid’ and ‘quickfire’ also come into this recollection. Mostly, she tells me, HIR is used to test knowledge of plot, vocabulary and key quotations as students begin to study a text. She assures me that this is the only way that the English teacher knows you’ve read the text.

It strikes me that there is a marked difference between the lesson that Heather was expecting and the one that I have delivered. And Heather is correct: despite the discussion we have had, I don’t know whether they have all read the text. Heather’s knowledge of the term ‘High Intensity Retrieval’ and her clear awareness of the pedagogy of her former classroom is unsurprising. My primary aim in the lesson was not about retrieving the information garnered through their reading process; rather, it was an attempt to recall and share the emergent ideas, thoughts and feelings that may have accompanied the reading process itself.

Heather’s prior experience of English is symptomatic of the ‘knowledge turn’ that now dominates many English classrooms (Anderson and Elms 2022, 353). In their consideration of the influence of Hirsch (1987) and Young (2008) on the development of the English curriculum since 2014, Anderson and Elms point to the ways in which the focus on ‘working memory’ has served to privilege particular teaching strategies: namely the act of depositing small chunks of knowledge ‘into the long term memory, after which pupils’ need to be given repeated opportunities, strategically ‘spaced’, to ‘retrieve’ them’ (2022, 353).

High Intensity Retrieval (HIR) belongs with several other practices such as ‘interleaving’, and ‘spacing’ under the umbrella of cognitive science which has gained prominence in recent years in education. Blakemore (2018) highlights how research on memory and cognition which originated in educational neuroscience and cognitive psychology has influenced classroom-based teaching and learning practices. However, she points out that although ‘research on cognition and memory provides valuable insights into the processes involved in learning new material’, the ‘significance of this for classroom practice is not always clear’ (Blakemore 2018). Retrieval practice, she argues, has been shown ‘to improve learning’ and yet ‘to implement it in the classroom, teachers have a range of variables to consider’ (Blakemore 2018). Agarwal et al. (2021), in their review of over fifty experiments carried out in a range of settings from primary schools to medical schools, are unequivocal that retrieval practices improve student learning. They suggest that there is ‘a wealth of evidence, based on medium to large effect sizes, that retrieval practice improved learning for a variety of education levels’ (2021, 1427). These retrieval practices consist of Kahoot quizzes, Quizlet, free recall, short answer quizzes and multiple-choice quizzes, much of which I know Heather and her peers will be familiar with.²

However, the fifty experiments which were reviewed do not include ‘non-science content areas, such as skills-based learning, mathematics, the humanities (writing, literature, essays), and foreign language vocabulary’ (Agarwal, Nunes, and Blunt 2021, 1429). Of the selection reviewed, thirty-five belonged to science and psychology. But it is now common for retrieval practices to be rolled out across the whole curriculum as part of a school’s approach to implementing evidence-based research in teaching and learning. Heather’s experience points to how widespread these practices have become in English classrooms. In the Education Endowment Fund’s recommendations to schools, ‘Putting Evidence to Work – A School’s Guide to Implementation’ (2019), retrieval practices are explicitly referred to and exemplified, so that teachers might understand ‘the evidence in terms of cognitive science and how retrieval practice, including spaced retrieval and interleaving, can support the development of memory’ (2019, 8). To access GCSEs, the EEF suggests that students need a ‘hoard’ of 50,000 words and that the acquisition of this vocabulary will address the fact that disadvantaged students perform significantly below their more advantaged counterparts (2019, 8).

Anxieties about the word gap between high and low attaining students (and the correlation of the gap with divisions along the lines of ethnicity and class) have long featured in the discourse concerning knowledge and language in the English curriculum. Yandell (2017) and Cushing (2022) have critiqued the ways in which Hart and Risley’s 2003 influential American study(“The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3’) has been cited by policy makers to suggest that this gulf must be dealt with at a curricular level despite the flawed methodology and conclusions of the study itself. In recent years, this has resulted in a focus on practices such as explicit vocabulary teaching in the English classroom.

According to the EEF’s recommendations, explicit tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary teaching can be linked to a range of outcomes including ‘increased student engagement and confidence in reading’ (2019, 1). Thus, it is suggested that retrieval practices are ideally situated to address these needs, regardless of the pedagogy which might be specific to a subject such as English. In the day-to-day implementation of this, it is suggested that retrieval activities should come to replace starters and plenaries, last no more than five minutes and be ‘closed book’ (2019, 8).

It is perhaps no coincidence then that Heather expects High Intensity Retrieval to form a significant part of her English lesson, and particularly the starter. The EEF’s suggestion that starters should be explicitly built around closed book retrieval activities suggests that all subjects are required to follow the same methods, despite the inconclusive evidence for humanities, literature and arts related subjects indicated by Argawal et al. (2021). Whilst there is significant evidence that retrieval practices produce benefits across a range of science subjects, there remain profound questions about the appropriateness of these practices for literary study – questions about how the practice reshapes the object of attention and about the way they position a student in relation to the text.

After Heather leaves, I sit in the classroom and stare at the newly painted grey walls. I am itching to pin up Atwood’s book covers, scrawled over with these preliminary musings. Then I remember that I am not permitted to decorate these walls with student work as the paint needs to seal itself in. My own sense of dislocation within this institution and this new terrain is perhaps apt preparation for the study of Atwood’s novel too. It is not a stretch of the imagination to describe this world and its reliance on restrictive, conformist practices such as HIR as Gileadean. Earlier that week I was decked in an oversized blazer, surveying the canteen for untucked shirts, clandestine knit wear, trainers, and A-line skirts before issuing detentions to repeat offenders; later that same day I stood with folded arms as a multiethnic cohort of students listened to the headmaster soliloquising for forty-five minutes at a lectern about the merits of reading Homer and Virgil to develop one’s sense of fortitude. The newly constructed building is also notable for its absence of a staff room where teachers might congregate to air a grievance or two on well-worn comfortable sofas. In its place a small, functional ‘workroom’ with a row of computers hosting a small sink and a hot water dispenser. The message is clear: collective discontent and dissent have no place in an institution of learning. I am reminded too of the chilling words of Atwood’s Aunt Lydia as she indoctrinates the handmaids into their new way of life: ‘This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will’ (1987, 43). It is a maxim that my students are more accustomed to now than I am. This institution is perhaps at the more benign end of extremes concerning surveillance and the control of behaviour that are now commonplace in some academies. For my students, silent transitions, isolation, and ‘Slanting’ (Cushing 2020; Morgan 2020) are memories of a not-too-distant past.³ Yet their coercive influence seems to infiltrate the English classroom too. Cushing (2020) in his examination of the policing of grammar and standard English suggests that some English classrooms have gone so far as to mimic the ‘fictional dystopian world of governmental surveillance and control’ seen in texts such as Orwell’s 1984. He argues that such a ‘surveillant landscape’ is ‘representative of macro-level curriculum policy in the way that it serves a regulatory function in controlling young people’s non-standardised language’ (2020, 435). However, it is not only language but thought too which stands to become reshaped and reframed through such practices. If the entry into a text, a first encounter within a whole class context, is determined by testing a student’s ability to recall instances of plot, quotations or vocabulary, where might we locate our thinking, feeling selves that have undergone the process of reading?

The politics of aesthetic knowledge

Whilst there are differences between reading for pleasure and reading a novel for an A-level English literature exam which will determine thirty percent of your final grade, one might hope that there would also be some continuity between these forms of engagement with a text. The shared reflection that may emerge might play an important part in mediating between these different purposes. To prioritise the retrieval of knowledge about the text and the analysis of language, form and structure or social/historical context at this early stage would be a denial of the aesthetic experience that the reader has (perhaps) already had. What I am attempting to argue for here is what Yandell (2023, 93) has called the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of our engagement with a literary text. In his critique of Helman and Gibbs (2022), Yandell argues that the process of literary study cannot be simply equated to the transcendence of a ‘disciplinary’ schema over a ‘narrative’ schema in which the reader’s personal experience of engaging with a text is discarded along the way. The social, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of a text compete for equal attention in the reader’s consciousness. And the concept of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ is more complex than a mere appreciation for the author’s craft. It invites different and competing versions of ourselves to coexist as we enter into a dialogue between text, world, author and self.

However (Ofsted’s 2022), Subject Research Review of English defines ‘aesthetic knowledge’ in the following way:

This knowledge enables appreciation and thus enjoyment of a literary work. For example, knowing that, in Shakespeare’s time, a nunnery was also slang for a brothel means that Hamlet’s command to Ophelia, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’, is even more heart-breaking and emotionally charged. Enjoyment and knowledge can grow through text-based conversations, discussions and debates. (Ofsted 2022, 37)

Ofsted’s consideration of the term ‘aesthetic’ is closely aligned with their definition of knowledge; as a concept which can be accessed, transmitted and is perceptible to all learners rather than a process which emerges from an individual’s unique engagement with a text. In their assertion that the semantic knowledge of the word ‘nunnery’ is somehow essential to an aesthetic appreciation of Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia, we are led into rather curious territory. First, it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between semantics and what is involved in any aesthetic appreciation of a work of art: the latter invokes something which transcends simple lexical definitions of words. Secondly, its suggestion that semantic knowledge has to precede the emotional and personal dimension of reading or indeed watching a play is hardly representative of what we know as teachers, learners and human beings who constantly draw on lived and imagined experience to make sense of the world. It is an assertion which is ill conceived if we even momentarily consider the complex experiential dimension of reading or being in an audience that is drawn into the midst of a highly charged emotional drama. The historical relevance of the brothel and the nunnery somehow pale into insignificance if we engage in any meaningful way with the feelings of a young woman who is being emotionally abused by her first love. Aesthetic appreciation, Ofsted seems to suggest, can only emerge if externally imposed knowledge of language determines the reader’s response; as though the discourse of feeling that might emerge from Hamlet’s cruelty is not the stuff of serious consideration for an English classroom.

Ofsted’s mangled notion of ‘aesthetic knowledge’ shapes a particular version of what it means to enable ‘text-based conversations, discussions and debates’ in the English classroom (2022, 37). It fosters a classroom culture in which an open ended and nuanced approach to reading, debate and discussion is no longer the substance of an English lesson. ‘Enjoyment’ is carefully steered by the teacher’s decoding of language and only permitted once knowledge has been established. It creates fertile ground for practices such as HIR being given a prominent place in the English classrooms where knowledge of socio-historical context, plot and etymology are deemed more salient that a student’s initial response to a text. Needless to say, what appears to be misplaced in this discussion is a recognition that student experiences and feelings are vital to any aesthetic response to a text; without them, ‘Enjoyment’ is likely to be left at the door for all involved. This is particularly important for a text such as Atwood’s where the aesthetic and the corporeal are inextricably linked. The reader has access to the deepest recesses of Offred’s physical and psychological states as she negotiates the relationship with her body as a site of state control:

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will […] Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am glows red within its translucent wrapping. (Atwood 1987, 84)

To access ‘aesthetic knowledge’ in this instance, we need to go beyond our understanding of language or metaphor to the physical and sensory experiences of the body that is embedded in Offred’s narration. This process becomes a political tool of self-realisation which Offred uses to resist the state’s recurrent violation of female bodies. As Madeline Davies (2006) has argued, ‘Atwood’s female bodies are socio-cultural documents, psychological maps’ and ‘the bodies at work are never neutral sites but are always active articulations of territorial disputes; to understand Atwood’s writing fully we have to understand how these disputes are figured and what the terms of combat are’ (2006, 58). Our understanding of the body as a site of ‘dispute’ and ‘combat’ is central to the way in which Atwood shapes her narrative voice; these are two inseparable demands that the reader is confronted with. The discovery of this complexity between the physical and aesthetic relies on the affordances that emerge from reading as a personal act, particularly in this diverse classroom where there are different social, cultural, and religious beliefs concerning the female body. Such a private and deeply personal dimension of reading is not something that I referred to explicitly in my teaching of Atwood’s novel. However, a brief glance at some of the writing produced in response to the novel suggest that the young women in this multicultural all-female class classroom have a profound sense of how the aesthetic and the personal interact. Sixteen-year-old Rabia’s interpretation of Offred’s clandestine encounter with the commander in his room perhaps sheds some light on the complex process of negotiation that this entails:

Furthermore, the relationship between Offred and the commander can be viewed as ambivalent. This can be highlighted when Offred says ‘invite something further … drive the sharp end into him’ which suggests that she feels a hatred or yearns for some vengeance. However this is contrasted by the simile ‘hot as soup, sexual over my hands’ which then insinuates that she feels some attraction towards him, an illicit allure towards the commander. Atwood does this to highlight how torn Offred is. She could utilize his power and take advantage or take revenge, a risk and show her rebellion. This links to a typical Dystopian novel as Atwood uses features of coercion and suppression of emotions to illustrate Offred’s dilemma. This evokes confusion from the reader. Atwood utilizes this confusion to show the effects of control over bodies, sexual and reproductive rights and psychological control on the handmaids.

Rabia maps Offred’s motivations in this moment through the realm of the narrator’s feeling (‘yearns’ ‘hatred’ ‘vengeance’ ‘confusion’) and yet she has a sophisticated grasp of the power dynamics that are in effect during the encounter too. Both ‘attraction’ and ‘allure’ suggest that she is keenly aware of Offred’s reading of her own physical body as a weapon of resistance to use with the commander. In her study of Offred’s ambivalence, Rabia examines the simile ‘hot as soup’ as a point of departure before undertaking a far more nuanced exploration of how desire and contempt might coexist in a woman whose sense of agency is being compromised at every turn. Her use of modality here, ‘can’ and ‘could’, suggests that Rabia too is willing to occupy something of Offred’s distorted state to comprehend the moment. It is a deeply embodied venture into the mind, world, and body of the narrator. As she argues at the close of her paragraph, ‘coercion and suppression of emotions’ might halt the narrator’s outward expression of feelings, but it is a necessity and an act of political significance for readers to trace this via Offred’s interiority. Rabia’s recasting of Offred’s physical and psychological responses in her own terms constitutes the aesthetic knowledge she needs to access Atwood’s narration. We might view this as an ‘active articulation’ of the ‘territorial disputes’ that Davies argues drives the agenda of the novel itself (2006, 58). However, this is not all. Towards the end of the paragraph, there is a marked shift in how Rabia positions herself in relation to the text. ‘Control’ and ‘confusion’ take on a multiplicity of meanings as she views Offred’s experience from the position of author and producer. Here she comments on the impact of a ‘reader’ more distant than herself, and the author immersed in the act of production. The text, the author and the reader become unstable entities in constant dialogue with one another. This navigation through the personal and the figurative to a consideration of authorial control suggests that feeling is not separate, but deeply implicated in the way that Rabia has arrived at her own version of aesthetic knowledge. It might be helpful to dwell here on the distinctions between the two different types of reading that Louise Rosenblatt ([1938]1995) draws on, namely the ‘efferent’ and the ‘aesthetic’ (cited by Yandell and Roswell 2020, 25). Whilst the ‘efferent’ might refer to extracting information from a text, the ‘aesthetic’ implies an altogether different set of purposes that include ‘pleasure’ and an interest in ‘the formal properties of a text: to how its meaning-potentials are organized, not just to what it might mean’ (Yandell and Roswell 2020, 25). For Rabia, feeling, (whether this is her own or a character’s) acts as a fundamental gateway to the ‘meaning-potentials’ that are contained within and beyond the text. Whilst Ofsted’s definition of ‘aesthetic knowledge’ is perhaps more representative of ‘efferent readings’, it does little to suggest how students such as Rabia develop complex interwoven dialogues that expand their thinking about texts that are as rich as Atwood’s.

Aesthetic learning and discourses of feeling

Gilbert (2016) and Anderson and Elms (2022) offer different ways in which teachers might advocate for ‘aesthetic learning’ and the discourses of ‘feeling’ as constitutive of the work of the English classroom. In his consideration of ‘aesthetic learning’ Gilbert reflects on classrooms in which students enter creative writing practices through memory and sensory experience: the tasting of a sweet first encountered in childhood holds as much relevance for autobiographical writing as the mechanics of writing itself (2016, 258). By engaging his students with the full spectrum of their experience, their ‘desires’, ‘relationships’ and ‘treasured memories’, Gilbert suggests a pedagogy in which ‘aesthetic learning’ requires the self-conscious recognition of all that they bring to the classroom (2016, 258). This also exposes students to the unresolved and often paradoxical nature of meaning making itself. Gilbert argues that the term ‘aesthetic’, by definition ‘disorients and intrigues students in a way that the word ‘creative’ does not; it enjoys both a degree of obscurity and also a wide spectrum of meanings, connoting ‘appreciation’, ‘beauty’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘creative’. He suggests this diverse cross-section of meanings helps them to ‘articulate experiences for which they have previously not found words’ (2016, 261). In pursuing ‘aesthetic learning’, Gilbert observes that his students are positioned in a more indeterminate space as they encounter the nuances and complexities of a text; they don’t immediately seek to ‘decipher’ meaning and the ‘cognitive/reflective’ processes which follow from this enable deeper explorations to emerge (2016, 263).

Anderson and Elms (2022) point to alternative discourses around creativity and aesthetic experience that can arise from English classrooms when students are given the agency to choose their response to a text. By situating their exploration in a classroom of students producing artefacts in response to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Valentine’, they trace the complex interplay between production, feeling and critique that comes to shape the language of the learners. What emerges here not only exposes the limitations of a knowledge-based English curriculum that relies primarily on working memory as the foundation for learning but suggests that much of what can constitute ‘meaning’ cannot be prescribed, pre-defined or determined by a singular mode of authority. They argue that this ‘kind of creative critique draws on meanings, categories and judgements from a rich mix of autobiographical and textual experiences, an aesthetic experience of Duffy’s original poem’ and the students’ ‘intertextual response to it, rather than referring to a pre-existing list of prescribed criteria’ (2022, 362). Anderson and Elms claim that students’ experience of the aesthetic dimension of English can produce rich critical discourses that can re-shape literary study. This is a timely and vital argument in the current culture which prioritises foundational knowledge as ‘knowing’ whilst also seeking to destabilise what the more primary and instinctive act of ‘feeling’ might look like in a classroom filled with complex individuals. ‘knowing’ about the text thus becomes the dominant measure for approaching the process of reading rather than truly engaging with the often disorienting and disordered way in which we experience complex encounters with beauty or feelings of tragedy. This is an argument that Bomford (2019) has also pursued. In her examination of students analysing Much Ado About Nothing, Bomford reveals the multifaceted ways in which knowledge about the socio-political and aesthetic dimensions of a text emerge and are dispersed within a classroom. For Bomford (2019, 13), ‘the unique social matrix that constitutes every class, and acknowledges the significant dimension of time in this process, will be essentially unpredictable’ when students are the agents of a lesson.

‘It could happen anywhere’: reading the Gilead within us

I want to return here to my English classroom and to a story told by Souad. We are now two weeks into our study of The Handmaid’s Tale. We read aloud the following passage in which Offred and another Handmaid are viewed in their uniforms by some Japanese tourists visiting Gilead:

I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me, and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these women. We are fascinated but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds about things like this.

Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom.

Westernized, they used to call it.

The Japanese tourists come towards us, twittering and we turn our heads away too late: our faces have been seen.

(Atwood 1986, 38)

During the discussion which follows, we speak about the ways in which clothing, in particular the dress adopted by women, is a cultural and social signifier. Souad takes this opportunity to tell a short anecdote which I paraphrase here from memory. ‘It’s like when people see me’, she says, ‘they just assume that just because I wear the hijab, I am an extremely religious person, but I’m not. I’m kind of moderate actually’. Souad is of Somali descent and has worn the hijab throughout her teenage years. This revelation exposes something striking about the way that Souad has struggled to establish her identity as a woman in relation to Western prejudices about religious dress codes. Her complex grasp of the concept of the colonial gaze that she is subject to, and the loss of subjectivity that ensues, enables her to make Atwood powerfully relevant to this classroom. In articulating her own experience of being gazed at through the narrow conception of Western and liberal democracy, Souad brings us closer to challenging the rather problematic notion of ‘freedom’ in the society that she knows and in the America of the early 1980s. I would argue that this is at the very heart of the enquiry that Atwood herself is pursuing. In interviews about the novel, Atwood has commented on the genre of the text as being ‘speculative fiction’ rather than dystopian or science fiction. She has argued that ‘anything can happen anywhere, given the circumstances’ (Geyer 2017). Her inspiration is drawn from what has already happened, from the cycles of oppression that characterise American history from the transatlantic slave trade to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. And yet, the novel also can also be read as a critique of Western attitudes to world events at the time of writing which included the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Souad’s comment however is not a simple product of empathy or the retrieval of such historical knowledge that she had received in advance of reading about the dystopian genre. By acknowledging herself as both a socially and culturally significant ‘sign’ in the wider world outside the classroom and a ‘sign maker’ in this classroom, Souad has reconfigured Atwood’s text and her relationship to it (Kress et al. 2005, 19). It tells us something important about the way that Souad’s reading of the novel formulates itself along soci-political and aesthetic lines. None of these processes seems to be fixed or pre-determined; they are as unstable as the genre of ‘speculative fiction’ itself.

A few weeks later, Souad submits an essay about the genre of Atwood’s novel. Below is an extract:

The Handmaid’s tale was written in the time of the resurgence of the New Right and religious fundamentalism and was published in 1985. The novel is riddled with religious and political references and the extreme control over women’s bodies. The reversal of women’s rights became a huge fear for women and at the time of writing the novel, Atwood experiences the uneasiness and wariness of being spied on in West Berlin. This instability and anxiety for American women and women all over the world of the constant threat of their rights could be argued that it leans more as a reflection of early 1980’s America than a science fiction Dystopia.

Atwood’s continued insistence that if ‘we’re too threatened by anarchy, we will choose authoritarianism, because we think we’ll be safer’ (Geyer 2017) suggests that she demands readers to do exactly what Souad does; that is, explore the possibility of locating themselves socially and historically within Gilead to understand how Offred’s voice could emerge. These processes are inseparable as Souad begins to make sense of the novel in her writing. The ‘uneasiness’ and ‘wariness’ that she imagines is present in Atwood’s writing process as she hears the sonic boom of the East German military drills contributes towards her understanding of the spare and restrained narrative voice that emerges. This is not a simple matter of dealing with historical context; it is an imaginative feat that is in constant dialogue with the aesthetic dimension of her reading. Unlike the definition of ‘aesthetic knowledge’ suggested by Ofsted in which teachers might drip feed morsels of etymology to expand their students’ awareness, Souad’s essay suggests to us that this process is located deep within an inner dialogue that may find its synthesis at a later stage. Her awareness of a character who is conscious of her oppression and the genre of the text being a scathing satire about Western complacency regarding attacks against women’s rights in the Reagan era all come together to shape this dialogue. Like Rabia, Souad’s position is far from being an isolated subjective response. It is more closely aligned with Atwood’s act of production as the author of the text than as a passive recipient who has benefitted from externally enforced teacher expertise. Souad’s engagement with the text is therefore alive with the continuous development of her own ideas. However, it is a near impossible endeavour to trace how Souad’s reading, our early discussions and her own personal experience might produce this very specific engagement with Atwood’s novel and its agenda. Our attempts to pinpoint a particular discourse of feeling or recollection here are perhaps rendered redundant.

A brief consideration of other students in the class and the variations in their writing also complicates how we might imagine the relationship between the social, the political and the aesthetic. Below are two extracts from essays by Latisha and Heather, both of whom are focused on analysing the relationship between Offred and the Commander:

‘I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love , show Offred’s loss of self worth. This relates to how victims who have Stockholm Syndrome attach positive emotions to their captors as a coping mechanism. From the quote when Offred says, ‘I intend to last’, we see how she desire the commander in order not to go psychologically insane. [Latisha]

Through the use of punctuated direct speech, ‘close the door behind you’, he says pleasantly enough’, this whole piece of dialogue can be deemed manipulative. The phrase ‘pleasantly enough’ shows how Offred is allowing excuses for the Commander’s behaviour and lack of manners. Due to this, Atwood hints towards how it can be seen that both Offred and the Commander could get something out of this, the acknowledgement and solving of their own desires. This can be further built upon because of Offred’s change in tenses, she shifts from past to present and from unpunctuated direct speech to punctuated. These narrative shifts allow the reader to comprehend Offred’s own account of the situation. [Heather]

Latisha’s psychoanalytical reading of Atwood is particularly interesting as I have little recollection of teaching or discussing the concept of Stockholm Syndrome with her. What I knew about Latisha herself at this time was also not substantial; I was aware that she considered English to be a hard subject to succeed at (she expressed this early on) and that she liked to talk about amusing TikTok videos that try to define the lexicon of modern dating and relationship trends such as narcissistic personality disorder and Ghosting – (the latter overheard by myself in conversation). None of this contributes to a full sense of who she is in my classroom at this point. However, the significance of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ in enabling her to unpack the relationship between Offred and the commander is not to be simplified by any means. This knowledge has offered Latisha a unique way of exploring Offred’s passivity and her willingness to comply with oppressive demands. Part of what is at stake in this analysis is Latisha’s own understanding of the power dynamics that govern relationships and her own theorising about the function of Offred’s narrative. In her closing statement that Offred’s desire prevents her from being ‘psychologically insane’, we have some insight into how Latisha’s knowledge of narrative structure emerges alongside the other social and aesthetic dimensions of her thinking.

Heather’s exploration, however, is characterised by a focus on speech and dialogue as being the mediating forces of the relationship. Her analysis of the ‘manipulative’ quality of the relationship is underpinned by a desire to understand how the shifting tenses contribute to Offred’s often self-conscious construction of her narrative voice. There is another layer of knowledge regarding power and conduct in relationships that Heather is simultaneously drawing on to pull together these strands of thought.

What I want to draw attention to is the diverse and often divergent quality of the responses that emerge from this class; they are perhaps as distinctive in their attempts to grapple with the novel as the book covers that first began this enquiry. It is here that we can contemplate the notion that the initial entry point into the text in a classroom seldom determines what might emerge in its aftermath. Even with such a brief consideration as the one I have offered here, it is possible to imagine that an unexpected personal angle or dimension comes into play as each student explores their own aesthetic process of reading and thinking.

Perhaps it is helpful to think here of James Britton’s (1966) Dartmoouth contribution, ‘What is English?’, where he argues that ‘the area in which language operates in English lessons is that of personal experience, in other words, relations with other people, the identity of the individual – the relation between the ego and the environment’ (1966, 11). In this sense, personal experience is always present as we approach a novel or any other literary text due to the worlds both internal and external that we occupy. By the virtue of its production at the hands of other thinking and feeling beings, Britton argues that the English classroom is a terrain where the personal cannot be extracted or indeed abstracted from the process of literary enquiry. He states, ‘After all the themes of literature are the human themes; they are the relationships between man and his environment; and not every type of relationship, but only the relationships in which the human quality or the emotional relationship is a part of what is afoot’ (1966, 12). In this regard, although we have a rather incomplete sense of the ‘emotional relationship’ that Souad, Latisha or Heather have established with Atwood’s narrator or the aesthetic process that underpins their reading, the writing of each student is infused with a quality that is a unique product of their own personal experience. Their thoughts about narrative and language are always intertwined with these deeply personal explorations. For Britton, the study of literature then becomes ‘the area in which, in fact, all knowledge must come together for the individual. It is, in fact, the integrating area for all public knowledge’ (1966, 12). To separate language, form, structure or indeed the etymology of words from this domain of personal experience, then, is to challenge our understanding of the ‘human quality’ that characterises what we do as learners in the English classroom. This ‘human quality’ which enables integration can hardly be reduced to teacher expertise, discrete knowledge of vocabulary or the evidence produced by retrieval practices.

Conclusion: palimpsests of meaning

I want to return to the relevance of reading Atwood in a London classroom. As that interminably long Autumn term slouched towards Christmas, the class and I sensed another darkness in addition to the one that arrived a little too soon through the shutters in our afternoon classes. By now, we were four weeks into our study of Atwood and the students and I were aware of the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran which began after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman in police custody. We begin our lessons with brief discussions of images and snippets of protests, mostly led by schoolgirls, that the students have seen on social media, supplemented by my rather clunky knowledge obtained from 24-hour news channels. These discussions are not planned or formal; often they emerged as I did the register or tracked homework on a spreadsheet or as we handed out books. However, it is against this background of political turmoil that we defined and re-shaped terms such as ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘state apparatus’ to support the reading and discussion of Atwood. Under these conditions, Atwood’s novel feels less and less like fiction or indeed a dystopia from a distant future and more like a shape-shifting entity that is in direct dialogue with our reading of the wider world. By the time we re-read Chapter 42, where Atwood describes Offred’s attendance at a ‘salvaging’, or public execution, the class and I cannot ignore the reporting of the public execution of Majidreza Rahnavard, a 23-year-old protestor whose body was hung from a crane. We ponder the way these images are used for the purpose of propaganda and how Gilead only becomes more vivid in our minds as a result. Although we are now weeks from the first opening lessons where the book covers and posters were used to gather our impressions of the text, there is now a sense in which our understanding of Atwood has been overlaid by another palimpsest of meaning. It is no coincidence that Atwood begins her novel with this metaphor too, describing how a room which was once a school gymnasium is now ‘palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style’, which speaks of both distant, historic pleasures and present terrors. I would like to conclude this discussion with the sense of the classroom too as a palimpsest – as a place where layers of feelings, meanings and historical moments might coexist all at once as we read and reconstruct texts.

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Notes on contributors

Sulaxana Hippisley

Sulaxana Hippisley taught in inner London sixth form colleges for fifteen years. She now works at UCL Institute of Education on the PGCE Secondary English and the MA in English Education. Her research interests include the teaching of writing and post-colonial literatures. She is currently working towards a PhD exploring constructions of selfhood in multicultural A-Level English Literature classrooms.

Notes

1. All students’ names are pseudonyms.

2. Kahoot is a game based learning platform which teachers in the UK often use to create quizzes for starters; Quizlet similarly allows users to create tests, flashcards and study games.

3. The acronym for Sit up, Listen, Ask, and answer questions, Nod and Track the speaker.