Examine close reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with critical perspectives and textual references.
Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a phenomenal dystopian speculative fiction of contemporary totalitarianism and authoritarianism “within Western society and within Christian tradition itself”. Old Testamentary militarized hierarchy disempowers women’s emancipation and dismantles womanhood into the closetted fetters of patriarchalism and misogyny as encountered by the tragic handmaids Offred and Ofglen. The worldview of casually held attitudes about women is a real life problem exposition of social commentary critiquing antifeminism and gender treachery, ecological disasters like nuclear radiation and chemical pollution, civil war and political turmoil, widespread sterility/ infertility and sexually transmitted diseases (HIVs and AIDs) contagion. New England Puritanism of Gileadean microcosm is a metafictional epilogue of post futuristic dystopian society purporting to be the premise of international historical association conference 2195. “Loving neighbours while harbouring animosity for the arbitrary adversaries reflect stranding of beleaguered populace within the communion and community. Offred is otherized as a concubine and wanton woman of the preGileadean regime. Offred’s reproductive machinery emblematically symbolizes sacrificial offering as a two legged womb fertility and/or surrogacy despite her malicious victimhood vulnerable to the vicious status quo as adulteress and strumpet. Mooning and Juneing of the coterie damsels and brothel courtesans reflect the objectification of commodified property of male gaze as extrapolated by the novelist. Gileadean feminization refrain and restrain from womanizing creatures of male power fantasies. Sexuality and gender stereotyping apartheid of womanhood is subversively challenged by subalterns and marthas, Rita and Nick, harbouring solidarity with the Mayday Resistance movement. Nick is hired by Serena Joy to cuckold Offred in return of heir to eclipse sexual impotency and emasculative effeminacy of her masterly lord husband, the commandant. However, Nick embodies humanness and philanthropism through espousal of escapade for the entrapped maiden’s absconsion to Canada.
Atwood’s feminist utopian idealism pontificates that masculine system is the major cause of social and political problems and showcases women as not only as the least equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions. The novel is detrimental to Christian tradition because of being sexually explicit, violently graphic and morally corrupt. Anti Biblical teachings pertaining to sexuality and gender education are preached within the domain of The Handmaid’s Tale. However, the novel is a masterpiece of dystopian speculative fiction that espouses the exploration of “the most insidious and violent manifestations of power in Western history”. Jezebels and handmaids are iconoclastic milestones and cornerstones of enforced sexual captivity sanctioned by the Gileadean regime. Furthermore allegorical satire of the en masse non white African Americans rehabilitation and/or en route of Jewish diasporic exodus community repatriation to New Jerusalem have been depicted by the novelist. This dystopian nightmarish speculative fiction anchors barren wives of the elite class as royalists and depersonalizes the subjectivity of the subaltern other gender as fertility machines in accord with their reproductive agencies. Moreover, segregationist and separatist abortion rights and declining birth rates in Romanian and Canadian territorial context are allegorized. The universalistically spectacular appeal of the novel distinctively intertwines interlacing of feminist survivor characters’ destinies with ideological absolutism of the tyrannical apartheid. Racial persecution and ethnic cleansing cast vulnerable survivalists as prey into the cascade of fanaticism, extremism and fundamentalism.
Regressive and repressive state policies of conservative Gilead disfavours women’s rights movement including sapphic individuals, abortionists, abolitionists, religious sects and banishing Jews, elderly females and non white populace to the territorial outskirts of radioactive fallout colonies. As a feminist activist Margaret Atwood voices for women’s education and property power of attorney as manifested through the caricature of Mayday Resistance. Mayday Resistance is bolstered by radical feminist activist Ofglen to overthrow the republic of Gilead. However, the antifeminist traits of the novel marginalizes and otherizes handmaids as mere breeders of reproductive machinery and /or reproductive agencies. These womenfolk relegates themselves as inferior and subservient to social, religious and cosmic roles, duties, obligations and errands sanctified and decreed by state sponsored right wing fundamentalism, rigid dogmas and misogynistic theosophies. Atwood’s Aunt Lydia is a depiction of church-state sponsored staunchest pacifists passive to the women’s resistance and rebellion; vicious preachers casting as spokesperson for antifeminism and urges handmaids to metamorphose themselves in the crux of de-sexuality, impersonality, disfiguration, disembodiment and dehumanization. In contrast, Nick is a renegade mutineering legacy of handmaids through underground networking channels resulting in rescue operations of entrapped maidens. However, the novel’s mimetic impulse of the commander appears more pathetic than sinister, baffled than manipulative and almost at all times a fool personae, thus condoning antifeminism. The narrator-protagonist of Handmaid’s Tale coping, endurance and survival quest after all, transmits translucent beacon of hope and humility for the oppressed minority amidst chilling and depressive uprooted soulless existence of a misogynous regime. Atwood’s subtle transfiguration to heroic feminist survivor sly subversive and determined daring conniver overthrow coercive dungeons of the pervasive canons of Gilead’s ruthlessly dystopian tyrannical nature. “Dark realm within’, ‘cellar’ and ‘attic hiding place’ connote ubiquitous nightmarish envisionings colonizing powers imposed upon handmaid-slave dynamic identity beyond exemplar premises of pervasive canons of Gilead frontiers. Offred’s solicitous gratification with hiraeth is a phantasmal escapism from absurdity and futility and/or defeatism and paralysis of the obsolete frozen barren wasteland. The mind style narrator-protagonist voice and perception is symptomatic of traumatic events and of excluded experiences that exemplifies discourse of a socially marginalized individual more than a woman’s language. Afterall, Eurydice, the Creation- death goddess whose self-expression and self-affirmation epiphanies emerges as evanescently and enigmatically in the resurrected tomb of the buried earthy womb epitomizes Offred’s repressive state of affairs.
Further Reading, References, Endnotes and Podcasts
Donna J. Haraway’s, 35. Introduction: A Cyborg Manifesto, Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Routledge New York pp. 149-181
Speculative Fiction Marek Oziewicz, University of Minnesota, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78, Published online: 29 March 2017
A woman’s place is in the resistance: self, narrative and performative femininity as subversion and weapon in the Handmaid’s Tale by Courtney Landis, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Repository and Digital Archive pp. 1-70
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The New York Times Margaret Atwood on ‘What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump?’ Book Review Essays March 10, 2017
Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition’ Amin Malak, Canadian Literature Review, pp. 1-8
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating, Hilde Staels, 1995, English Studies, 76:5, pp. 455-467
‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism and The Handmaid’s Tale, Shirley Neuman, pp. 1-12, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75, No. 3, Summer 2006.