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The theme for Chapter Five is fantasies.
There's a memory of back when there was still America. Our main character was still June and she and her husband would walk down a well-to-do neighborhood and talk about how, some day, they would buy a house there. They knew it wouldn't happen, not on their combined income. But, it was fun to dream, to imagine.
That neighborhood that she and her husband would walk down is now this market area where she and her partner, Ofglen, are walking to shop for groceries. The markets aren't marked by lettered signs, but by things like a wooden porkchop or pictures. Reading is tightly controled in Gilead.
Offred notices a lack of whistling and catcalling, what we now call street harassment and that sparks a different memory of an Aunt saying "There is freedom to and freedom from". This is the Aunt acknowledging that, yes, women are not free in this country. But, allegedly, they're safer. "Freedom from"
The lack of street harassment would seem to be the fulfillment of that "Freedom From", the claim that the lack of freedom at least offers them safety... And that leads down a couple lines of reasoning.
( Read more... )
There's a memory of back when there was still America. Our main character was still June and she and her husband would walk down a well-to-do neighborhood and talk about how, some day, they would buy a house there. They knew it wouldn't happen, not on their combined income. But, it was fun to dream, to imagine.
That neighborhood that she and her husband would walk down is now this market area where she and her partner, Ofglen, are walking to shop for groceries. The markets aren't marked by lettered signs, but by things like a wooden porkchop or pictures. Reading is tightly controled in Gilead.
Offred notices a lack of whistling and catcalling, what we now call street harassment and that sparks a different memory of an Aunt saying "There is freedom to and freedom from". This is the Aunt acknowledging that, yes, women are not free in this country. But, allegedly, they're safer. "Freedom from"
The lack of street harassment would seem to be the fulfillment of that "Freedom From", the claim that the lack of freedom at least offers them safety... And that leads down a couple lines of reasoning.
( Read more... )
