Control and Subversion in Margaret Atwood's Feminist Dystopia The Handmaid's Tale

• Main Authors: Mei-lan Li, 李美蘭
• Other Authors: Rose Hsiu-li Juan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70219832048142271946

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系 === 87 === Margaret Atwood often explores the predicament of women and the relation of power structure in the society through her fiction. In The Handmaid’s Tale she presents issues she perceives prominent in the world─the oppression on woman’s body and reproduction as well as environmental disasters─through the projection of the dystopian Gilead. The aim of this study is to examine the system of control in the patriarchal society of The Handmaid’s Tale, to view its influence on women, and the means of subversion in such a totalitarian regime. In the first chapter of my thesis, I examine the dystopian society’s strict regulation on woman’s body, especially the Handmaids’ bodies. In Gilead’s institution of motherhood, women’s bodies are reduced to parts, according to their biological functions, with the only goal of serving the state. In addition to the control of body, the second chapter discusses how this dystopian society operates through ideological formation to induce its subjects to comply with the reproduction system. Among the various methods of resistance, the narrator-protagonist Offred empowers herself with language. In the third chapter, I discuss the significance of language in the society and how Handmaid Offred’s storytelling functions to subvert the monolithic system of Gilead. As a mosaic of alternative female voices, hence the record of collective “herstory”, Offred’s narrative leaves traces in history and successfully fights against forgetting.