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- Title
The Significance of the Individual in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
- Authors
Rinawmi, V. L.
- Abstract
The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is Margaret Atwood's novel that describes a totalitarian future in which all facets of human life, no matter how personal, are Set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic military subjected to a rigidly enforced state ideology dictatorship formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America. The complex sumptuary laws play a key role in imposing social control within the new society and serve to distinguish people by sex, occupation, and caste. Women's rights are quickly taken away, largely attributed to financial records being stored electronically and labelled by gender. Like the institution of slavery, women in Gilead are enslaved through biblical justifications. The story that is presented from the point of view of a woman who is deprived of her own name and citizenship and known simply by her patronymic name "Offred," might be taken as emblematic of a woman's survival narrative told within the confines of a patriarchal system represented by the dystopia known as Gilead. Offred thought: I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me (Atwood 108). Being denied of her existence as an individual she was restricted to private domestic spaces and relegated to the margins of a political structure. Nevertheless Offred asserts her right to tell her story and by doing so, she claims her own private spaces of memory and desire and also manages to rehabilitate the traditionally 'feminine' space assigned to women in Gilead. Atwood's narrative focuses on possibilities for reconstructing a form of discourse in which to accommodate women's representations of their own gendered identity while still acknowledging 'the power of the (male 'universal') space in which they cannot void, to some extent, operating' (Hutcheon 110).
- Subjects
HANDMAID'S Tale, The (Book : Atwood); ATWOOD, Margaret, 1939-; TOTALITARIANISM &; literature; SOCIAL control in literature; WOMEN'S rights in literature
- Publication
Labyrinth: An International Refereed Journal of Postmodern Studies, 2015, Vol 6, Issue 2, p52
- ISSN
0976-0814
- Publication type
Article