deconstruction in the feminist dystopia

The Handmaid’S Tale

‘If I wanted to talk about just one thing to one person, I would write a letter. ‘ 1

Margaret Atwood

Given the feminist reputation of The Handmaid’s Tale – it has been known as “feminist dystopia”1 – it can be convenient to make the facile assumption that the book issues their warnings of political apathy exclusively to a female market. While this kind of argument is seemingly unsophisticated, it is not with no foundation. Without a doubt, many of the novel’s female heroes, including the narrator herself, happen to be accused of political apathy, and it is the ladies of Gilead that are most impacted by its totalitarianism. Yet , this is an overly simplistic view of Atwood’s sociable commentary, while she extends her concept to all people to avoid succumbing to a community such as the one she describes: the men also are still left unsatisfied by regime, even though some women preside over other folks, demonstrating the fact that author’s communication is not just a typically feminist one, at the same time, it is obvious, as Coral formations Ann Howells argues2, that Atwood’s sympathies lie mostly with the handmaids. non-etheless, it is important to remember the fact that Handmaid’s Tale offers alerts about concerns other than totalitarianism, making review, for example , after the go up of religious fundamentalism that characterised global governmental policies in the eighties. It was of particular matter in the United States, where the New Proper suddenly started to be a political force under the Republican obama administration of Ronald Reagan, suggesting a return to America’s Puritan inheritance.

This essay will, however , challenge the assertion the fact that universality of Atwood’s concept is released through the genre being a social satire, this is rather achieved by using a blend of several genres, which social satire is just 1. Indeed, The Handmaid’s Adventure can also be categorised as a feminist novel or possibly a dystopia, and it will be argued here that Atwood predominantly exploits these of these groups, rather than regarding social �pigramme, in order to forewarn her viewers, though they are doing overlap in several respects. Instead, the novel’s satiric elements seem to concern less harrowing matters than totalitarianism, focusing more after the everyday activities in Gilead and the actual Washington Post Book Community described as ‘some of the more dark interconnections among politics and sex’3: the satire can be therefore issued on a micro level, rather than macro level as problem implies.

The feminist implications in Offred’s fr�quentation seem to reveal that The Handmaid’s Tale is primarily targeted towards women. Indeed, her style demonstrates what Hélène Cixous called ‘écriture féminine’ (literally ‘gendered women’s writing’)4, which Elaine Showalter specifies as ‘the inscription with the feminine body system and female big difference in language and text’5. This is the majority of palpable around the evening in the monthly impregnation ceremony, during which Offred, within a refusal to be subjugated by the state-sanctioned rape of the Leader, poetically is exploring her human body whilst naked in the shower. She accustomed to think of it as an ‘instrument’, which usually she can control and utilise to meet her very own desires, and which, when intrinsically limited, formed a ‘lithe, sole, solid’ entire, now, however , she has recently been reduced to a ‘cloud’, a metaphor accustomed to imply a loss of self-possession. This ‘cloud’ is congealed around a central object that is certainly ‘the form of a pear’, used to symbolise the tummy, this has turn into ‘hard’ and ‘more real’ than Offred herself, recommending that she’s treated being a ‘national resource’ by the condition and only appreciated for her child-bearing capabilities. To describe the tempos of her menstrual cycle, the girl uses a cosmic analogy, comparing her ova to ‘Pinpoints of light’ that are traversed by a ‘gigantic, round, heavy’ moon, which includes long been associated with menstruation. Once this moon disappears, the girl sees ‘despair coming towards me just like famine’, a hyperbolic simile used to emphasise the pressure on the women of Gilead to conceive. The feminine body is a prevalent motif in Atwood’s work, and her graceful background is conspicuous in the explicative imagery of this passage, whose components of extended metaphor and fluency epitomise Cixous’s literary theory. Offred’s style is as a result distinctly feminine at times, a narrative procedure that could be viewed to deal Atwood’s readership.

Regardless of her periodic lapses in to ‘écriture féminine’, however , Offred is distinctly un-feminist in many respects, which is perhaps an indication that the identified audience from the Handmaid’s Adventure is less filter than a great overwhelmingly girl one. Without a doubt, as Arnold E. Davidson comments6, she is ‘passive’, ‘tellingly domesticated’ and ’embodies the same sexual dualities that Gilead exhibits within their starkest form’. In this feeling, therefore , the girl represents what Howells describes as a ‘moderate heterosexual feminism’, in contrast to Moira’s ‘separatist feminism’7. While Atwood is not critical with this moderatism (herself distrustful of ideological doctrine), she does warn up against the political not caring of her narrator: Offred frequently laments her very own indifference with her mother’s feminist activism, which in turn, along with the politics apathy of so many young women, has contributed to the rise of the extreme right wing. As she right now realises, ‘We lived as always, by overlooking. Ignoring basically the same as lack of knowledge, you have to am employed at it’. The paradox in the second sentence in your essay condemns this sort of apathy, suggesting that young women consciously disregarded the feminist movement. The women that Offred criticises, including their self, can be classified as belonging to post-feminism (a term first used in the 1980s, at the time of writing), which can be characterised with a backlash, or perhaps mere indifference, to the radical feminism that preceded this, Atwood consequently exploits the apathy of her leading part and other female characters to criticise modern social advancements, substantiating the opposing debate that The Handmaid’s Tale is definitely predominantly a warning to women.

Atwood vindicates her caution through the background of a totalitarian theocracy, where the women happen to be subjected to numerous hardships the fact that men aren’t forced to withstand, this perhaps makes the novel more surprising to a feminine audience, and it therefore appears to exist while more of a alert to this particular group. To exemplify, the women of Gilead have been completely dispossessed with their original brands, illustrated by patronymics given to the handmaids: they take up the identity of their particular Commander (hence ‘Offred’, ‘Ofglen’ and so on), which shows them as commodities and highlights the rigid patriarchy that has gripped American world. The fact that the reader hardly ever learns Offred’s birth identity serves to stress her loss in personal id. The remaining females in Gilead are naturally similar anonymity, referred to by the functions that they perform, the ‘Aunts’, for example , are in control of training and monitoring the handmaids, even though this is a great ironic title given their very own callous specialist. The ‘Marthas’, meanwhile, happen to be recommended into a life of domestic contrainte, their name has a biblical origin, dependant on a story in Luke 15: 38-42, in which Martha, sibling of Jane and Lazarus, is preoccupied by ‘all the work your woman had to do’8. This occult meaning to Christianity is one of several in The Handmaid’s Tale, which will serves to stress Atwood’s alert that faith can be used to rationalize all of society’s ills. Contextually, this is a reply to the go up of the New Right (and indeed spiritual fundamentalism in general), which usually pervaded global politics in the 1980s.

Along with the lack of their labels, Barbara Rigney points out a myriad of ways in which Gilead is particularly oppressive to their female population9: they have been removed of all civil rights, they can be forbidden to learn or publish, and their situation essentially sums to that of your slave. The matter that spreads throughout most through Atwood’s book, however , is a treatment of ladies as ‘two-legged wombs’ with no other purpose than to procreate. This is epitomised by epigraph via Jonathan Swift’s A Simple Proposal10, a Juvenalian essay advocating the treatment of women and children as cows, which Atwood uses to outline her thematic and satiric motives. This comparability between women and cattle is definitely not an isolated one in The Handmaid’s Adventure, however: the handmaids will be controlled by simply ‘electric cows prods’, which are generally used to control breeding pets or animals. The satirical intent from the aforementioned epigraph anticipates the tone which Atwood will handle Gilead’s obsession with fertility. Indeed, the impregnation ceremony, which usually Rigney paradoxically yet correctly describes as ‘pornographic and asexual’11, is usually laden with irony and humour, in spite of its perturbing subject matter. The sex is entirely without feeling, pointed out by the cold of the room, the fact that Offred remains to be fully clothed, and her description in the procedure because ‘fucking’, a stark verb that connotes emotional distance, this is in comparison with the ‘ethereality and matter’ of the light canopy that hangs above them. The passionless ambiance is furthered by the perception of regimentation, which is created through the ‘two-four marching stroke’ of the Commander and the explanation of Imperturbable Joy as ‘arranged’. Your sexual work, therefore , has become a manifestation from the state’s systematic ethos. Offred’s use of the 3rd person, ‘One detaches oneself’, serves to increase this result. The importance placed on conception by simply Gilead includes a contextual basis, as Atwood was producing at a time of rising infecundity and birth-defect rates, which resulted via environmental polluting of the environment and natural disasters, her work often offers environmental warnings, as in her short stories Hardball and We Need it All, from Good Bones (1992)12. Her fictional point out is consequently an embodiment of contemporary concerns, whose alternatives she alerts against.

Interestingly, nevertheless , Offred’s description of the service, while alternatively blunt, includes a ‘sense of humour regarding itself’, an excellent that the New York Times discerned throughout the novel13. Indeed, the girl ironically feedback upon the Commander’s sexual performance, ‘At least he’s a marked improvement on the past one’, and, despite like a victim of state-sanctioned rape, manages to find ‘something hilarious’ about the situation. Atwood is for that reason comparable to Dickens, who, in novels such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations, demonstrates a coalescence of the comedian and the bleak14. This substantiates Amin Malak’s argument the novel ‘avoids being solemn’ and ‘sustains an sarcastic texture throughout’15. Clearly, consequently , The Handmaid’s Tale is usually, at least in part, a social satire, however , Atwood does not utilize this aspect of the story to concern her alerts of political apathy. Without a doubt, her �pigramme is more than often aimed at small , personal issues, which can be significant given that the story largely materialises in a domestic setting, this contrasts with Orwell’s masculine emphasis on point out machinery in Nineteen Eighty-Four16. Nevertheless, since Malak remarks, this satire serves to dislocate complete emotional participation, producing a Brechtian type of alienation17. In a sense, therefore , it distracts from the novel’s dystopian components, which are Atwood’s main channel for giving her safety measures of politics apathy: all things considered, her readership is more likely to heed Offred’s account of extremist sociable control instead of her connaissance underpinning that.

This social control does not just affect the lives of women, nevertheless , but the ones from all Gileadean citizens, and so the statement is proper in its assertion that The Handmaids Tale expands its meaning to all audiences, to quotation Malak, Atwood ‘refrains coming from convicting a gender in the entirety as the perpetrator of the headache that is Gilead’18. Indeed, as he also remarks, it is unusual that the novel’s male characters are pictured as vicious, and ‘Even the Leader appears more pathetic than sinister, puzzled with manipulative, almost, sometimes, a Fool’19. It must not be ignored that he too has recently been stripped of his name (though not officially), referred to just by his job subject. Furthermore, because Offred their self acknowledges, the impregnation wedding is ‘not recreation’ although ‘duty’ to get the Leader, and his final attempt at a private relationship can be described as pitiable failure, because, to quote Howells, ‘the personal has become inescapably political’20. Eventually, he is as isolated because the narrator, and his peculiar desire to enjoy Scrabble with her, as well as with her predecessor, demonstrates the magnitude of his loneliness. Furthermore, in spite of their particular superior location in the interpersonal hierarchy of Gilead, the male population will be subservient in a more subtle value: deprived of sex, it is sometimes easy for these to be manipulated by their woman underlings. Aware of her electricity, Offred teases the military at the obstacle by ‘flaunting her not allowed sexuality’, and they are forced to ‘touch with their eyes’. A similar feeling of sexual desperation is created when the doctor, sexually starved, offers to make Offred pregnant. The state as a result prohibits the desire for sex in men as well as girls, serving being a warning to both parties to that end.

In a similar manner that not all of Atwood’s men characters happen to be two-dimensional evil doers, Malak demonstrates not all of her feminine characters are sympathetic either, demonstrating which the novel’s message is not only a straightforward feminist one. He describes the Aunts as being a ‘vicious élite of collaborators’21, who, as Howells paperwork, bear proclaimed similarities to leaders of the Concerned Ladies of America, a Christian women’s motion of the overdue 1970s and early eighties that told ‘family values’ and played out a significant function in Congress’s withdrawal of support for the Similar Rights Modification in 198022. They consequently represent anti-feminism (as in opposition to the mere complacency of the younger women), and Atwood’s presentation of which as evil doers functions as being a criticism upon the surge of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, they are portrayed as being a paramilitary organisation, as signified by their khaki uniforms and their cattle prods, as well as propagandists of the plan, telling altered tales of women living in pre-Gileadean society. Fortunately they are responsible for one of the most gruesome cruelties, such as the ‘Salvagings’ and ‘Particicutions’, as well as for specific punishments at the Rachel and Leah Centre. Their just individuation is based on Aunt Lydia, who, in respect to Howells, possesses a ‘peculiar viscousness’ under her ‘genteel girly exterior’23. Indeed, she is accountable for the ‘dreadful spectacle of female violence’24 of the Particicution in which a person is offender of afeitado, in a perverse twist that sees girls in chaotic command above men, the horror of the episode can be vividly pictured in Volker Schlöndorrf’s film adaptation with the novel, in which the handmaids noticeably convulse with anger and engage in a animal wave of hysteria and cruelty25. This kind of scene is usually evidently affected by the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ routine in Nineteen Eighty-Four26, during which Get together members need to watch a propagandist film conveying the enemies in the state and subsequently communicate their hatred for them. Atwood therefore utilizes elements of dystopian fiction to create a frightening world that serves as a highly effective warning with her readership.

This nightmarish vision of the future is Atwood’s chief means for issuing her warnings of political apathy, and the ubiquitousness of the horror invites trepidation in every audiences. Malak articulates the salient highlights of a dystopia27, all of which happen to be satisfied, even though to different degrees, by Gileadean program. First and foremost, this individual emphasises the exercise of absolute electric power in a dystopian society28, a quality very much present in The Handmaids Tale. Indeed, even the dialect is regulated by the state, so that they can manipulate the thoughts of its people: as Howells notes29, the rhetoric of ‘Aunts’, ‘Angels’ and ‘Salvagings’ takes words with reassuring emotional connotations and distorts them into euphemisms that become tools of oppression. This is reminiscent of Orwell’s Newspeak, a fictional dialect in 19 Eighty-Four30, that contain similar warnings about the risks of propaganda and censorship. Malak likewise specifies the utilization of terror in a dystopia31, a feature reflected inside the ruthless violence applied by simply Atwood’s theocratic state. Combined with Salvagings and Particicutions, you bears experience to spontaneous assault by secret authorities on ‘an ordinary searching man’, which is described by Offred within a factual strengthen to emphasise that such specs are popular. The physical violence of Gilead contrasts having its fundamentalist Christian backdrop, showing how faith, regardless of the pacifist cort�ge, can be used for chaotic means in a political framework, an idea based upon an international variety of models which include Latin America, Iran as well as the Philippines, with an increase of recent examples including War and Afghanistan32. Offred’s declaration of ‘relief’ indicates just how self-serving persons become in totalitarian communities such as these. As well, however , Malak notes that the aim of dystopian fiction is usually not to ‘distort reality further than recognition’, yet ‘to let certain tendencies in society to ” spin ” forward with no brake of sentiment and humaness’33, this really is another feature met by Gileadean regime, which is essentially an exaggerated representation of recent social developments. As stated inside the ‘Historical Notes’, ‘there was little that was truly original with or indigenous to Gilead: its wizard was synthesis’, a activity, to estimate Howells, of ‘fundamentalist concepts, late twentieth-century technology and a Hollywood-style propaganda machine’34. The new therefore ends as a strong warning to learn from history, in order to avoid the introduction of a dystopian society just like Gilead.

To conclude, The Handmaid’s Adventure does indeed exist as being a warning to all or any audiences to prevent the political apathy in which totalitarian routines flourish: Atwood portrays not simply the marginalisation of women yet of males also, validating the review from the Nyc Times that the novel displays ‘an conjugation towards actually its worst villains’35. Therefore, it is more extensive than its ‘feminist’ packaging suggests, their concern increasing to include simple human privileges. In addition , Gilead itself is undoubtedly dystopian for all those readers, and its depiction is therefore not gender-specific, certainly, the author uses the fear and modern day relevance from the regime a lot more than any other facet of the story to speak her message. The satiric facet of The Handmaid’s Story, meanwhile, is definitely primarily encountered on a diminished scale in Offred’s bank account of the everyday routine in Gilead. non-etheless, this kind of represents Atwood’s departure by traditional dystopian fiction: when her male predecessors include given fiel priority for the structural associations between the personal and community realms, this novel is usually told as seen by of an ‘ignorant peripherally engaged woman’36, a perspective likewise adopted in Atwood’s preceding novel, Actual Harm37. Her narrative can be therefore an incarnation in the 1970s feminist slogan, ‘The Personal is definitely Political’38. Pertaining to the reasons already outlined, yet , the new extends significantly beyond its feminist origins, and Gilead is ultimately, to offer Howells, a ‘failed contemplating for everyone’39.