117 How does the room strike you? What is missing in it? What could Offred want? Why doesn’t the window open properly? Why is there no place you can attach a rope to? On the wall above the chair, a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of flowers, blue irises, watercolour. Flowers are still allowed. Does each of us have the same print, the same chair, the same white curtains, I wonder? Government Issue? […] A bed, single, mattress medium-hard, covered with a flocked white spread. Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep, or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last. I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass is shatterproof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge. I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, pull them onto my hands, finger by finger. Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which defines us. […] The white wings […] are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen. […] The door of the room – not my room, I refuse to say my – is not locked. In fact, it doesn’t shut properly. 2 Why do you think Handmaids should not see but also not be seen? What do you associate with the colour red? Which colour could the Commanders be wearing? And their wives? Later in the book, Offred recounts what she remembers about the transition from a relatively normal life to life in a totalitarian state. I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves. We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours. […] All those women having jobs: hard to imagine, now, but thousands of them had jobs, millions. It was considered the normal thing. Now it’s like remembering the paper money, when they still had that. My mother kept some of it, pasted into her scrapbook along with the early photos. It was obsolete by then, you couldn’t buy anything with it. Pieces of paper, thickish, greasy to the touch, green-coloured, with pictures on each side, some old man in a wig and on the other side a pyramid with an eye above it. It said In God We Trust. My mother said people used to have signs beside their cash registers, for a joke: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. That would be blasphemy now. You had to take those pieces of paper with you when you went shopping, though by the time I was nine or ten most people used plastic cards. Not for the groceries though, that came later. It seems so primitive, totemistic even, like cowrie shells. I must have used that kind of money myself, a little, before everything went on the Compubank. I guess that’s how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. 3 Give some reasons why a transition to a totalitarian state would have been “more difficult” with paper money instead of plastic cards. Can you think of other things that a totalitarian government might want to control? How could they do this? Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des V rlags öbv
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