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In The Handmaid ’s Tale Atwood questions why people so often cooperate with totalitarian regimes, and she draws on the history of the Third Reich to demonstrate that visual culture can help create a climate that suggests that resistance to the regime is futile.

Atwood reveals the danger of using visual culture to create a "glossy surface image" (Chow 24) that simplifies complex ideologies and social relationships, and she suggests that individuals can resist visual manipulation by learning to "read beneath" images (Handmaid’s 105).

Fascist Style in Gilead

language of "protection of women" could slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, to a kind of neo-Victorianism.

The language is feminist, but the result can be deeply patriarchal, as in this novel

Without some sense of the varying agendas of mid-20th-century feminists and the debates among those agendas this novel will not make much sense. Women who participated in the movement from the late sixties and early seventies responded to this novel strongly, often finding it extremely alarming. Younger women lacking the same background often found it baffling. Ask yourself as you read not whether events such as it depict s are likely to take place, but whether the attitudes and values it conveys are present in today's society.

Androgyny

In essence, white Australians attempted to deal with the “Native Question” by systematically destroying the cultural identity of the Nyoongah peoples, first by using violent action to subdue Aboriginal rebellion and then by absorbing Aboriginal children into white culture or marginalizing Aboriginal families on isolated settlements.

It is also clear that A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, does not protect the Nyoongah peoples, but rather encourages their absorption and marginalization.

Joe Millimurra reads aloud an article from an Anglo-Australian newspaper, which recounts a celebration for the first white settlers in Australia who faced dangers “in the shape of three lorries…carrying Aborigines.”

This essay is thought to be the truest “borderline” A/B essay in the booklet

As a timed essay it displays good control of paragraphing and quite sound sentence structure along with a fine grasp of the text and the concepts of the syllabus.

In each paragraph, the writer of this essay draws attention to particular aspects of the text, particularly characterisation, to show the means by which a text can influence our view of life, and the concluding sentences attempt to relate these techniques to specific ideas which the text encourages.