The Handmaid’s Tale is Margaret Atwood dystopian novel masterpiece. It is an explicitly political novel that emerges from long traditions of anti-utopian or dystopian fictions emerging in this century both in literature and politics. Specifically, Atwood joins the ranks of the one of the most popular writers of feminist utopias and dystopias[1]. Issued in 1986, this book sounds out themes such as reproductive rights, female subjugation, oppressive regimes and erosion of individual freedoms in a theocratic future society. Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she intended it as a work of speculative, not science fiction.
“The Handmaid’s Tale was written partly on a
rented electric typewriter with a German keyboard in a walk-up flat in West
Berlin, which was encircled by the Berlin Wall and a Soviet Empire’s spin
dictatorship was still strongly in place, partly in a small house in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that is the per capita murder capital of the U.S. […] This
conned some people into believing it’s science fiction, which was not in my
mind”[2]. She
defines this last as a fiction in which things happen that still couldn’t be realistic
at the time and in the context she wrote, such as, for instance, advanced space
travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other galaxies, or that
contain various technologies we have not yet developed, but she points out that
in this novel, nothing happens that the humankind hasn’t already done at some
point in the past, or that is not doing now maybe in other countries, or for
which technology has not yet enough developed. Nothing inconceivable occurs,
projecting trends already in motion in the future. That’s why the author’s
interpretation is a properly said speculative, not science fiction.
The Handmaid’s Tale has been translated in forty or more languages. It
has sold more than 8 million copies internationally, whose more than 3 million
since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is frequently featured on high schools and university curricula. It won the 1986 Governor General's Literary Award for English language fiction and the 1987 Arthur
C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature. It was also nominated for other
prominent awards, including the 1986 Booker Prize, the 1986 Nebula Award and
the 1987 Prometheus Award. This novel was adapted into a film, an opera, a
ballet, a graphic novel, and several television series[3].
Its main narrative consists of a transcription of
tapes made out by Offred, that recorded her experience growing up in the old
society, of her process of indoctrination into the new one and of her
experience as a handmaid of one of Gilead’s Commanders.
Atwood explains that all fictions begin with a What
if…? The What if? varies from book to book and this is a question to which
the novel is the answer. The what if for The Handmaid’s Tale could be
formulated: What if it can happen here?
What if you wanted to take over the U.S. and set up a
totalitarian government, the longing for power being what it is? What
conditions would favor you, and what slogan would you propose, what flag would
you fly that would attract the necessary 20% of the population, without which
no totalitarianism can stay in power? If it’s advanced the option of communism,
you’d be unlikely to get many takers. A dominance of erstwhile liberal
democrats would be discerned even by the slightly dull-witted as a
contradiction in terms. Although many doubtful actions usually done in secret
or with a good deal of verbal embroidery covering them up have been committed, we
can deal with them, for the sake of the great god democracy. In the U.S., you’d
be more likely to try some version of Puritan Fatherhood if you wanted a
takeover. As a matter of fact, true dictatorships don’t come in in good
times but in bad times, when people are eager to give out their freedoms
to anyone who can take control and pledge to better times. The bad times that
made Hitler and Mussolini takeover possible were economic, with some extra
frills such as a shortage of men in proportion to women, due to the high death
rates during WWI. To put into place this future society, she proposed something
a little more complex and multifaceted: bad economic times due to a shrinking
area of global control, which would mean dropping down markets and fewer
sources of cheap raw materials; but also a period of environmental catastrophe,
which would have several aftermaths: a higher infertility and sterility rate
due to a chemical and radiation damage and a higher birth rate. As a result,
Atwood proposed an hypothetical future society, subject to biblical sanctions, which
assigns more than one woman to its favored male members.
“There is nothing in the book without a precedent
but this material in itself would not represent a novel. A novel is always the
story of an individual, or several individuals; never the story of an
individual, never the story of a generalized mass. So, the real problems in
writing The Handmaid’s Tale were the same as the promises involved in the
writing of any novel: how to make the story real at a human and individual
level. The pitfalls that Utopian writing so frequently stumbles into the
pitfalls of disquisition. The author gets too enthusiastic about sewage systems
or conveyor belts, and the story grinds to halt while the beauties of these are
explained. She wanted the factual and logical background to her tale to remain
background and she didn’t want it usurping the foreground”.
Looking at verbal hygiene practices in The
Handmaid’s Tale in relation to the issue of authority, discussing the
question of power underlying linguistic conventions, the social function of
linguistic rules is not arbitrary. Like other customs, conventions, traditions,
the use of language often contributes to a circle of exclusion and
intimidation, as those who have mastered a particular practice in using it to
intimidate others. Commentators on literary dystopias have remarked that
language is often shown as a means by which social control is communicated and exerted.
Atwood’s novel exposes forms of linguistic authority constructed upon a gender
hierarchy which has an extremely clear social agenda: the maintenance of an
order based on the suppression of women’s voice and desires.
Following “the reduction of women” convention observed
in feminist dystopian writing, this fiction depicts a futuristic space in which
women’s social roles have been dominated and limited by a patriarchal order. Specifically,
referring to the plot, it is represented by the Republic of Gilead, a
fundamentalist state established after a takeover by an extremist right-wing
élite, as a backlash against the revolutionary feminist movements development
of the previous decades.
The Handmaid’s Tale is composed of two narrative blocks. The first part
consists of Offred’s description, in diary form, of her experience as a handmaid
under the oppressive regime. This is a transcription of recordings found by
historians after the fall of Gilead, and it’s divided in fifteen chapters
alternating reconstruction rendering readings of the daily life and routine as a
handmaid and, in the “Night” chapters, her thoughts and recollections, dreams
and nightmares. The “Historical notes” that form the second block contain the
proceedings of a conference in Gilead Studies. The time gap between the two
parts is approximately two hundred years. The notes are formed mainly by the
Professor Darcy Pieixoto’s paper on the manuscript of the first block. While in
the two blocks narration is constructed intradiegetically, together they also
form a third external extradiegetic level, to which we are the addresses. This distinction can be put in terms of
“public” and “private” levels of narration.
Atwood’s Tale shows that the subjugation of women in
Gilead, which is political, economical and kept alive by the use of force, is
also linguistically affected. The gender-polarized power imbalance is expressed
in a Offred’s meditation, which encapsulates the inner essence of this
linguistic economy: ”He has something we don’t have: he has the word. How we
squandered it, at once”. Men have “the word”; women do not. “The word is
singular, monolithic and biblical because originated by God. Women linguistic
circumstances are of legally enforced scarcity. Openly gender-based, verbal
hygiene works at institutional levels to keep male hegemony. Several passages stress
the power politics invested in linguistic control. Reading and writing are
forbidden for women; writing on tickets and notice boards is replaced by
pictures; books and other reading materials are banned. Women are brutally
silenced and, among the Handmaids, a clichéd form of communication based on the
scriptural texts, imposed, impelling women’s amputated speech and prohibited
access to written language in Gilead regime.
The figuration of enforced uses of language as a means
of social control and manipulation appears as a pervasive trait in the literary
dystopias and, in detail, this feminist dystopia clearly explains gender
ideologies, underlying linguistic contestations, and illustrating the sexually
polarised linguistic economy in Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale in itself is an act of resistance and it moves in
countertrend against the dominant mentality. In Offred’s narration frames,
verbal hygiene is imposed upon her in such a way as to enable her own authorial
voice to be inscribed. This act of resistance is also unveiled by the narrator
careful, conscious and precise choices of language. The handmaid’s narration
materializes a feminist utopia of language characterized by creativity and
plurivocality, presented against the backdrop of the linguistic ‘utopia’ of
static, monolithic meaning necessary for the existence of Gilead. Some
linguistic transgressions are ‘visible’, i.e., readers can actually ‘see’ them
as elements in the contents of the story plot. However, most of the
transgressions are not ‘seen’ but expressed in Offred's reconstructed storytelling.
In the mental operations which acquire narrative shape post factum the
contrast between the rhetorical richness of her heresies and the barrenness of
Gileadean dogmas is mirrored by the ineffectiveness of the acts of verbal
hygiene imposed upon her. To combat monolithic meaning, Offred composes what
she defines ‘litanies’, speculations exploring the polysemy of lexical elements:
“I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean a
mode of execution. In the first syllable in charity. It’s the French
word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the other. There
are the kind of litanies I use, to compose myself”. In addition to lexical
items, longer pieces of language text acquire various meanings, as in the case of
the Latin inscription the handmaid’s finds scratched in her cupboard. Another
device that defies Gileadean monolithism is the exposure of its constructedness
and incompletedness. Offred “squanders” the Gileadean “word” and becomes a
verbal hygienist herself by rejecting the linguistic normativity which
“contributes to a circle of exclusion and intimidation” of women and critically
restoring linguistic freedom. Implicit in Offred's speech are the counter-ideologies
of her radical utopian orientation, in opposition to Gilead’s own conservative
utopia. Despite the limited political
impact of her narrative effort, Offred contested the linguistic tyranny of
Gilead and inscribes ‘speaks” her own authority in, over and through the
language. The narrative levels allow an understanding of the conflicted
authority at stake in verbal hygiene practices and counter-practices, and of
the limitations and partiality of such practices.
The Historical Notes of The Handmaid’s Tale
present a set of meta-linguistic practices that could be figured out in
relation to the concept of verbal hygiene. Linguistic control perceptible at
this level parallels the mouth-shutting of women in Gilead, and works as a
metaphorical manifestation of forms and shades of appropriation of a feminist
discourse in a sexist environment. Verbal hygiene is grounded, in fact, on the
“fetish of communication”, for human communication depends on a language
functioning with fixed codes that guarantee the transparency of the messages
between people, so that the linguistic form breaks the rules of a good
communication generating anxiety and triggering specific reactions.
The ‘Historical Notes’ trouble the reception of the radical
speech and raise readers’ consciousness concerning the ideological debates
informing linguistic contestations. In
one of the ‘Night’ passages, Offred speculates: “ What I need is perspective.
The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangements of shapes on a flat
surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise, there are only two dimensions.”
This excerpt stressed the handmaid’s analytical stance, while offering a
metafictional commentary on textual construction and the readers’ feedback. One
way to add perspective to our reading is by analysing the ‘third text’, that’s
to say the novel as a whole, understood in the sense that the two narrative
blocks, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and the ‘Historical Notes’, yield a third that
evidenced the relations between narrators, author and readers. Atwood's
structural choices play a crucial role in forging the individual readers’
psychological discussion and let’s envision her socio-political and feminist overview.
The stylistic choices that influence the readers’ response to the instances of
verbal hygiene in the novel include the title, the order in which the narrative
blocks are presented and the narrative perspective. Lacking the rhetorical sophistication
and emotional appeal of the handmaid’s personal account, the latter consists of
a collection of gross misinterpretations, misogynistic asides and jokes, and
flares of academic vanity and false modesty delivered to a passive audience.
All this is rendered in a kind of prose that, by being punctuated by worn-out
expressions and the editorial ‘we’, resounds stereotyped to academic readers, raising
up the distance between Pieixoto and his audience and conveying an
authoritarian attitude. Finally, Atwood’s satirical parody of the academy is
also reflected in the choice of terms for the conference venue (drawn from
Inuit vocabulary, “University of Denay, Nunavit” echoes ‘deny none of it’).
The story plot is gender-polarized, involving
conflicted linguistic authority. The novel points out the remarkability and the
intertwined levels of mediation of the cultural strategy of verbal hygiene. The
‘third text’ makes the parody of the historian’s narration more evident and
restores the feminist significance deleted by the academics. This version of
the feminist “elsewhere” carries out the contradictions between a woman’s declaration
of her desire and the dystopic outframes which ignite and surround it.
The language is so crucial for dystopias that we are
justified to label it as an overarching structural element in the construction
of narrative plot, being often, not always, an x-factor. Dystopias are also stories
about language and, more specifically, of metalanguage. In feminist dystopias,
the linguistic practices are linked to the gender battle of domination, in
which language is just an instrument of enforcement of the dystopic order. This
fiction revolves around the liberating potential of language by showing women who
resist male dominance tightening them.
The gender-polarized versions of verbal hygiene observed in this
narrative reveal culturally embedded assumptions inclined to change the status
quo, as well as the visions of utopia underlying them.
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale renders utopias
‘of’ language because of its feminist approach in the sense of the construction
of a women’s language and of a woman’s act of storytelling. These fictions, in
fact, consist of “of” and “off” dystopian language. Similarly to the paradox embedded
inside the “utopia” definition, the elusive figures of the feminist “good
place” portrayed in them exist in the “no place” of narrative which exceeds the
possibility of being encoded in language[4].
Let’s have a look now at the Handmaid’s Tale
plot synopsis and related lexicography: the dystopian novel is narrated by the
main character, Offred, in swinging descriptions of her present life and
expository sections in which she recalls her past.
Offred narrates at the end of the novel:
“I’m sorry
it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force.
But there is nothing I can do to change it. I’ve tried to put some of the good
things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without
them? Nevertheless it hurts me to tell it over, over again. Once was enough for
me at the time? But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this
limping and mutilated story because after all I want you to hear yours too if I
ever get the chance, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground,
some other place. What they have in common is that they’re not here. By telling
you anything at all I’m at least believing in you. I believe you’re there. I
believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence.
I tell therefore you are. So, I will go on. So, I will myself to go on. I am
coming to a part you will not like at all, because in it I didn’t behave well,
but I will try nonetheless to have nothing out. After all you’ve been through,
you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth.”[5]
In this passage,
she addresses herself to the narratees, prompting the readers into a sympathetic,
interactive response (‘I want you to hear yours too’) and identification with
the ‘you’. The repetition of ‘believe’,
‘tell’ and ‘you’ adds rhetorical strength to the excerpt and heightens the
readers’ effective response. The passage also conveys the utopian desire for
‘some other place’ where a better form of human interaction will be possible.
The utopian impulse is marked by a desire for a space where narrative can flow
and linguistic exchange exist outside the constraints of the dystopic space of
Gilead[6].
Offred recollections reveal that she was the daughter
of a feminist activist who had chosen to be a single mother. Before the advent
of the theocratic government, the protagonist attended the University and she
had a close friend named Moira. Offred became involved with a married man, Luke,
and eventually she and Luke wed and had a daughter. Following a military coup
in which the president and most members of the Congress were killed, the
country became the Republic of Gilead[7].
The
regime rearranged the societal class order on the basis of a quirky
interpretation of some Old Testament doctrines.
One of the most significant changes is the limitation of women's
rights: women become the
lowest-ranking class and they are not allowed to own money or property, to read
and write, and are deprived of control over their reproductive functions.
One day, Offred was fired from her job at the library
because women were no longer permitted to work. That evening, she learned that
women were not even allowed to have money, and her bank account had been
transferred to Luke. Eventually, Offred, along with Luke and their five-year-old
daughter tried to flee to Canada with forged passports but they were caught,
and she, considered a criminal for being an adulterer married with a divorced
man, was sent to the Rachel and Bilhah re-education center. Her marriage was
forcibly dissolved, and her daughter was taken from her. Instead of being
sentenced under the Republic of Gilead's draconian criminal
justice system, Offred accepted training
to become a "Handmaid", an alternative available only to fertile
women. In facts, environmental pollution and radiation have drastically
affected fertility and she was one of the few remaining women who can conceive.
She has been assigned to produce children for the “Commanders”, the ruling
classes of men.
On their turn, in Gilead theocracy, women are classified
as following: the chaste childless Wives of the Commanders; the housekeeping
Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over the
Wives and are called by the names of their assigned Commanders. Ranked under
the Commanders are the Guardians, who have police powers, and the society is
permeated with government spies called Eyes. Those who cannot conform are sent
to the Colonies, and people of color (Children of Ham) are resettled. Offred
begins her third assignment as a Handmaid, having been unsuccessful in her
previous two. Women wear particular uniforms, ranked highest to lowest: the
Commanders' Wives in sky blue, their unmarried daughters in white, the
Handmaids in red with highly visible large white bonnets,
the Aunts (who train and indoctrinate the
Handmaids) in brown, the Marthas (cooks and maids, possibly unmarried sterile women past
child-bearing years) in green, Econowives
(the wives of lower-ranking men who handle everything in the domestic
sphere) in blue, red and green stripes, and
widows in black.
Fred is Offred’s Commander (her name means “of Fred”)
and his Wife is Serena Joy, a former singer on a televangelist program. Offred
is required to go grocery shopping in the company of the neighboring handmaid,
Ofglen. As they come back, they pass the Wall, where the bodies of executed
prisoners are displayed. One day, Offred notices a phrase carved into the
closet floor: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”. On Offred’s monthly visit to
the doctor, he suggests that the Commander may be sterile and such a thing was
not accepted in the regime and that he could impregnate her. Frightened, she
declines. At home, she’s required to attend the Ceremony, ritualized rape
conducted during the Handmaid’s likely fertile period each month: after the
Commander reads the Bible to the household, Offred must lie between Serena
Joy’s legs while Serena clasps her hands as the Commander has sex with her.
“My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher.
Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my
body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating
too would be inaccurate because it would imply two people and only one is
involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't
signed up for.”[8]
This practice had roots on Chapter 30 of the Genesis:
Rachel offers her handmaid, Bilhah, to her husband Jacob, because she’s unable
to conceive children.
As Offred is unable to become pregnant, the
Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy, suggests that Offred secretly sleep with their
gardener and chauffer Nick. She hopes to cloak Nick’s child as The Commander’s.
Offred and Nick begin a highly illegal affair, swamped in shadowy motives.
Later that night, the protagonist sneaks downstairs,
hoping to steal a flower, and finds Nick, who tells her that her Commander
asked her to go to his office the following night. When one of the Handmaids
gives birth, all the other Handmaids attend her; a complex ritual showing that
the baby really belongs to a Wife accompanies the birth process. When Offred
presents herself in the Commander’s office, she’s surprised to find that he wishes
to play Scrabble, even though women are forbidden to read. The nighttime
meetings continue, and Offred finds the monthly Ceremony uncomfortable now that
she has a personal relationship with the Commander.
One day Ofglen
reveals to Offred that she’s a member of an underground resistance movement.
From the Commander, Offred learns that the phrase on the closet floor means
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down” and that the Handmaid who carved it had
hanged herself after Serena Joy learned of her secret liaisons with the
Commander.
“On the Wall hang three women from this morning […]
’let that be a reminder to us’, says the new Ofglen finally. I say nothing at
first, because I am trying to make out what she means. She could mean that this
is a reminder to us of the unjustness and brutality of the regime. In that case
I ought to say yes. Or she could mean the opposite, that we should remember to
do what we are told and not get into trouble, because if we do we will be
rightfully punished. If she means that, I should say praise be…she isn’t one of
us. But she knows. [...] ‘Under the Eye’ says the new, treacherous Ofglen.
‘Under the Eye’ I say, trying to sound fervent. As it such play-acting could
help, now that we’ve come this far. […] ‘She hanged herself’ she says. ‘After
the Salvaging. She saw the van coming for her. It was better.’[9]
From these passages it’s highlighted the oppressive
rules of the suspicious regime to which many women are subjugated throughout
continuous brainwashing, consisting in and provoked by strict and misunderstood
religious dogmas based on the Bible and the overall existing distrust against
potential dissidents. They show how, altogether raped women, in the body and in
the spirit, consent to this sneaky political system to which themselves are
victims. In fact, the punishment for treason was the Salvaging for female transgressors
and the Particicution for dissident men. In this fiction, showing her
masterclass in statesmanship studies, Atwood gives an unparalleled literary
contribution against raging totalitarianisms, making this topic an evergreen
classic also nowadays.
“The sun comes out, and the stage and its occupants
light up like a Christmas crèche (French calque) […] The three bodies hang there, even with the white
sacks over their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by
the necks in a meatshop window; like birds with their wings clipped, like
flightless birds, wrecked angels.”
In this excerpt is blatant the use of poetic metaphors highlighting the
upsetting drama they live in and the author prowess to focus on the contrast of
similar scenes derived from the laws of nature and the racked demise of the
outsiders of the theocratic regime other than the deep sorrow feelings of the
narrator and the others attendants in front of the brutal awkward aftermaths of
the rebels against the biblical dogmas.
“ A sigh goes up from us; despite myself I feel my
hands clench. It’s too much, this violation. The baby too, after what we go
through. It’s true, there is a bloodlust; I want to tear, gouge, rend. We
jostle forward, our heads turn from side to side, our nostrils flare, sniffing
death, we look at one another, seeing the hatred. Shooting was too good. The
man’s head swivels groggily around.”[10]
Weeks later, Serena Joy dangerously arranges for
Offred to have sex with Nick in hopes that Offred will conceive; after that
assignation, she and Nick continue with an affair.
“I
reach the top of the stairs, knock on the door. He opens it himself. There’s a
lamp on; I blink. I look past his eyes, it’s a single room, the bed’s made up,
stripped down, military. No pictures but the blanket says U.S. He’s in his
shirt sleeves, he’s holding a cigarette. “Here”, he says to me, “have a drag”.
No preliminaries, he knows why I’m here. To get knocked up, to get in trouble,
up the pole, those were all names for it once. I take the cigarette from him,
draw deeply in, hand it back. Our fingers hardly touch. Even that much smoke
makes me dizzy. He says nothing, just look at me, unsmiling. It would be
better, more friendly, if he would touch me. I feel stupid and ugly, although I
know I am not either. Still, what does he think, why doesn’t he say something?
maybe he thinks I’ve been slutting around, at Jezebel’s, with the Commander or
more. It annoys me that I’m even worrying about what he thinks. Let’s be
practical. ‘ I don’t have much time’, I say. This is awkward and clumsy, it
isn’t what I mean. ‘ I could just squirt it into a bottle and you could pour it
in, ’he says. He doesn’t smile. ‘There’s no need to be brutal,’ I say. Possibly
he feels used. Possibly he wants something from me, some emotion, some
acknowledgment that he too is human, is more than just a seedpod. ‘I know it’s
hard for you’ I try. He shrugs. ‘I get paid’ he says, punk surliness. But still
makes no move. I get paid you get laid, I rhyme in my head. So that’s how we’re
going to do it. He didn’t like the make-up, the spangles. We’re going to be
rough. ‘you come here often?’ ‘ and what’s a nice girl like me doing in a spot
like this,’ I reply. We both smile: this is better. This is an acknowledgment
that we are acting, for what else can we do in such a setup? ‘Abstinence makes
the heart grow fonder’ we’re quoting from late movies, from the time before. And
the movies then were from a time before that: this sort of talk dates back to
an era well before our own. Not even my mother talked like that, not when I
knew her. Possibly nobody ever talked like that in real life, it was all a
fabrication from the beginning. Still, it’s amazing how easily it comes back to
mind, this corny and falsely gay sexual banter. I can see now what it’s for,
what it was always for: to keep the core of yourself out of reach, enclosed,
protected. I’m sad now, the way we’re talking is infinitely sad: faded music,
faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer
possible. Without warning I begin to cry. At last he moves forward, puts his
arms around me, strokes my back, holds me that way, for comfort. ‘Come on’ he
says ‘we haven’t got much time’. With his arm around my shoulders he leads me
over to the fold-out bed, lays me down. He even turns down the blanket first.
He begins to unbutton, then to stroke, kisses beside my ear. ‘No romance’ he
says ‘okay? That would have meant: no strings. Now it means: no heroics. It
means: don’t risk yourself for me, if it should come to that. And so it goes.
And so. I knew it may only be once. Good-by (archaism),
I thought, even at that time, good-by. There
wasn’t any thunder though, I added that in. to cover up the sounds, which I am
ashamed of making.[…]I would like to be without shame. I would like to be
shameless[11].
I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was. […] I
wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed
me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant,
less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love,
or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets,
birds, rainstorms, or snow.”[12]
After
their initial sexual encounter, Offred and Nick begin to meet on their own
initiative as well; Serena Joy discovers that she enjoys these intimate moments
despite memories of her husband, and shares potentially dangerous information
about her past with him. Offred later tells Nick that she thinks she is
pregnant.
One night the Commander, attempting to be tantalizing,
requires the blindsided and baffled Offred to don a sexy costume and takes her to
a covert, government-run brothel, where Offred sees emotionally broken Moira
working as a prostitute, using Jezebels, women forced to become prostitutes and
entertainers. Jezebels are available only to the Commanders and to their
guests. Offred portrays them as attractive and educated; they may be unsuitable
as Handmaids due to temperament and sterilized. They operate in unofficial but
state-sanctioned brothels, unknown to most women. Jezebels, whose title comes
from Jezebel in the Bible, dress in the remnants of
sexualized costumes from "the time before", such as cheerleaders'
costumes, school uniforms, and Playboy Bunny costumes. They can wear make-up, drink alcohol
and socialize with men, but are tightly controlled by the Aunts. When they pass
their sexual prime or their looks fade, they are discarded without any
precision as to whether they are killed or sent to the Colonies.
Interesting on this Commander gift to Offred is the
author’s detailed description of the bestowed nightclub dress,[13] other
than Offred recalls:
“He’s holding a handful of feathers, mauve and pink
[…] It’s a garment, apparently, and for a woman: there are the cups for
breasts, covered in purple sequins. The sequins are tiny stars. The feathers
are around the thigh holes, and along the top. So, I wasn’t that wrong about
the girdle, after all. I wonder where he found it. All such clothing was
supposed to have been destroyed. I remember seeing that on television, in news
clips filmed in one city after another. In New York it was called the Manhattan
Cleanup. There were bonfires in Times Square, crowds chanting around them,
women throwing their arms up thankfully into the air when they felt the cameras
on them, clean-cut stony-faced young men tossing things onto the flames,
armfuls of silk and nylon and fake fur, lime-green, red, violet; black satin,
gold lamé, glittering silver; bikini underpants, see-through brassieres with
pink satin hearts sewn to cover the nipples.”[14]
Furthermore, it’s astonishing the seemingly realistic
insight of the club, the overall scenery and sex-workers, as you can touch and
live very vivid images, and the hidden juvenile perversion and transpassing
pulse of the Commander:
“He retains hold of my arm, and as he talks his spine
straightens imperceptibly, his chest expands, his voice assumes more and more
the sprightliness and jocularity of youth. It occurs to me he is showing off.
[…] He’s demonstrating to me, his mastery of the world. He’s breaking the
rules, under their noses, thumbing his nose at them, getting away with it.
Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is set to inspire,
the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything,
absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all […]“ Then I see her. Moira. […] She’s dressed
absurdly, in a black outfit of once-shiny satin that looks the worse for wear.
It’s strapless, wired from the inside, pushing up the breasts, but it doesn’t
quite fit Moira, it’s too large, so that one breast is plumped out and the
other one isn’t. She’s tugging absent-mindedly at the top, pulling it up.
There’s a wad of cotton attached to the back, I can see it as she half turns;
it looks like a sanitary pad that’s been like a piece of popcorn. I realize
that it’s supposed to be a tail. Attached to her head are two ears, of a rabbit
or deer, it’s not easy to tell; one of the ears has lost its starch or wiring
and is flopping halfway down. She has a black bow tie around her neck and is
wearing black net stockings and black high heels. She always hated high heels.
The whole costume, antique and bizarre, reminds me of something from the past,
but I can’t think what. A stage play, a musical comedy? Girls dressed for
Easter, in rabbit suits. What is the significance of it here, why are rabbits
supposed to be sexually attractive to men? How can this bedraggled costume
appeal? Moira is smoking a cigarette. She takes a drag, passes it to the woman
on her left, who’s in red spangles with a long pointed tail attached, and
silver horns; a devil outfit. Now she has her arms folded across her front,
under her wired-up breasts. She stands on one foot, then the other, her feet
must hurt; her spine sags slightly. She gazes without interest or speculation
around the room. This must be familiar scenery.”[…] “You can’t cheat Nature –
he says- Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the
procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan. […] Women know that instinctively.
Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? to trick the men
into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day.” ”So now
that we don’t have different clothes – I say- you merely have different women.
This is irony, but he doesn’t acknowledge it.”[15]
By these words comes up the contrast between the
proclaimed support of women’s rights by the author, deeply sounding out the
inner psychology and emotions, exploring them as they truly are, and the bold masculinity
in patriarchal societies. An evergreen topic.
In the club you
could meet women from every walk of life: “Well, we have quite a collection.
That one there, the one in green, she’s sociologist. Or was. That one was a
lawyer, that one was in business, an executive position; some sort of fast-food
chain or maybe it was hotels”, facing the dilemma between morality and
disinhibition not only in this kind of work environment and context but also
generally speaking, propelling readers' questions and reflections even
nowadays. Is it just a narcissistic ostentation of femininity in dark times?
just a showbiz like another or a kind of feminine ransom or pride, or, instead,
another sort of slavery, of subjugation to male pleasure or lush?
So,
the issue of integrity comes up several times, such as, i.e., Serena Joy suggestion
to Offred to have sex with Nick, both for breeding children and for jealousy,
or the transgression of a so-called obeyance to Bible and religious dogmas by
going to nightclubs; or again it must be stressed the difference between art
and beauty characterizing these venues, and prostitution in a male dominant
dystopic patriarchalism.
Proceeding with the narration, in the Gilead’s
Republic, all the women are stranded off in a system in which they are required
to attend a savage gruesome and grisly public execution, and Ofglen tells
Offred that one of those killed was a member of the Mayday resistance. The next
shopping day, a different Handmaid identifies herself as Ofglen: the new Ofglen
tells Offred that the old one hanged herself before she could be arrested.
Advancing with the story plot, when Offred returns
home, she finds that Serena Joy has discovered the costume that she wore to the
sex club. A van of the Eyes comes to arrest Offred, but Nick tells her that the
Eyes are really resistance fighters. The danger of this situation pushes Offred
to escape The Commander’s household, thanks to Nick’s help. Whether she is
fleeing towards her freedom or her death is unclear.
“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else
the light”[16]
Although this end gives us no resolution, it evokes
the space of and off narration: ‘of’ narration because it is
where Offred voice comes from; ‘off’ narration because it is absent from the
novelistic text. Such a space, where a woman’s storytelling is not only
possible, but free from the male dystopic orders which constrain it, conveys
the utopian paradox in the sense that the feminist ‘good’ place of linguistic
freedom is also the narrative ‘no’ place.
Because of her professional deformation as a
University professor, teaching lessons in a critical way, she leaves open-ended
conclusions that don’t close the matter and that make room to the reflections
of readers about the thorny, disturbing, scorching and at the same time
eviscerated, dissected topics she proposed. Her personal lexicography is marked
by an anti-minimalistic prose, a rich, graceful and eccentric language other
than by a lyrical, scratching, sinuous, colloquial style, straight to the point
and creative with her puns and fantasy, invented words.
Eventually, the epilogue makes clear that the events
of the story, found on tape cassettes, are being discussed as part of a
symposium on Gilean Studies in 2195 and hints that a more equitable society
followed the Gileadean theocracy. The novel epilogue takes place in 2195, when
a historical congress is discussing the events of the “Gilean period”. Margaret
Atwood’s novel was inspired by social and political trends of the 1980s.
Offred speaks words out in a disembodied voice. She
frequently expresses herself by using punning and wordplay — hallmarks of
Atwood’s narrators. Anyhow, Offred’s narrative records also her internal
resistance to a State that treats human beings as objects. It’s a story of women’s courage and
determination. She acknowledges that it involves reconstructing and reordering
chaotic events. She is aware that our access to the past is necessarily
distorted by words. The novel’s satiric epilogue, “Historical Notes,” acts as a
warning about the dangers of dismissing or overwriting history[17].
“Tape like
this is very difficult to fake convincingly, and we were assured by the experts
who examined them that the physical objects themselves are genuine. Certainly
the recording itself, that is, the superimposition of voice upon music tape,
could not have been done within the past hundred and fifty years. […] It has a
whiff of emotion recollected, if not in tranquillity, at least post facto. […] Gilead society was Byzantine in the
extreme, and any transgression might be used against one by one’s undeclared
enemies within the regime. He could have assassinated her himself but the human
heart remains a factor and both of them thought she might be pregnant by him.
[…] Did our narrator reach the outside world safely and build a new life for
herself? Or was she discovered in her attic hiding place, arrested, sent to the
Colonies or to Jezebel’s, or even executed? Our document, though in its own way
eloquent, is on these subjects mute. We may call Eurydice forth from the world
of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her, we
glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasps and flees. As
all historian know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the
obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot
always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own days”[18].
The Testaments, a highly anticipated sequel written by Atwood, set
fifteen years later the events of the first novel and that sees the
transformation of Aunt Lydia character, was published in September 2019 and it
was awarded the Booker Prize.
Questions have been raised if this is a feminist
novel. Atwood explains, in her introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale[19]
that “If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so
victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which
women are human beings and are also interesting and important, and what happens
to theme structure and a plot of the book, then yes.”
Furthermore, to
the question whether this book is autobiographical, she answered “ I had not
donned a red outfit and a white bonnet and be coerced into procreating for the
top brass of a theological hierarchy”.[20]
Moreover, it has been wondered if it is an
antireligion novel. In this case, Atwood reckons that “it depends what you mean
by that. True, a group of humanitarian men seize control and attempt to restore
an extreme version of the patriarchy, in which women are forbidden to read.
Further, they can’t control money or have jobs outside, unlike some women in
the Bible. The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking
over America doubtless would: they wouldn’t be Communists or Muslims […] The
book is not anti-religion. It is against the use of religion as a front for
tyranny; which is different thing altogether”.
A last question was if it is a prediction, she
answered “No, it isn’t a prediction, because predicting the future is not
really possible: there are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities.
Let’s say it’s not an anti-prediction: if this future can be described in
detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be dependent on
either.”
Offred faces Gilead’s terrible might as she tries to
survive with an enduring sense of her self and with a constructive social
interaction. To suppress individuality and to keep alive the regime, Gilead
rewrites history, asserts governmental control, above all on television
news-casts, forbids books, magazines and newspapers, and leaves only gossip as
an independent source of knowledge. Gilead manipulates language, eliminates the
written word where possible, generates its own forms of New-speak, debars women
from writing, and keeps sacred texts locked away, inaccessible for most people
in carefully chosen readings or recordings. It establishes a strict moral code emboldened
by public ceremonies, making evident the omnipresent fear of the Eyes, and the silent
warning proclaimed by the hooded and robed dead who hang along the wall.
Gilead also adopts measures specifically aimed against
women, their individuality, and their identity.
With the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in
1985, the Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood stands out as one of the
most rampant writing prophets. She has been unveiling this vocation as an
independent social critic of uphill scope, a speculator in future times, a
wry-wise woman and a modern seer in the line of William Blake. She’s also a
critical reconstructor of cultural memory, like the biblical prophets, in the
remembering of the past. Atwood's claims for traditional values are indeed
anti-messianic, including the many multi-faceted forms of her wisdom, and not blamed
by any transcendentality.
Soon after the coup, women were fired from their jobs,
lost their right of abortion and birth control, were subjected to arranged
marriages, found that their testimony in a court of law was not accepted
without attestation, and discovered that their charge cards were closed and
their bank accounts were placed in the hands of their fathers, husbands, and
other male custodians.
Offred at first rigorously refuses to call the room
where she sleeps in “mine”, because it has no key for her to keep secret her
privacy, excluding the others, and because it’s a transitory way to stay for
her. But eventually she labels it “mine”
exactly when her private life is being compromised. When Offred loses any
meaning of her life, she finds a set of memories that allow her to recall a
sense of self: she can remember her job, her love for her husband Luke, her
child, her friends, her education, her fun – the successes and failures of
everyday life. Luke and their daughter slip into past tense. Her education and
love for word games bring a kind of fulfilment with the Commander. Within the
vortex of fears and vulnerability, the contrast between “blank time” and engaging
interactions with powerful, inscrutable individuals, the handmaid finally fails
to maintain her identity. She’s caught in the powerful grasp of the dystopia.
In Gilead, in fact, personal identity formation and intersubjective relations are
so weakened, degraded, and debased that domination and control are internalized
by those who are subjected to the regime.
Offred delights herself by playing with words, re-brushing
and keeping alive for herself the richness of the English language and
providing, by that, solace and amusement in her leisure time. Sometimes her
deconstructions open new perspectives, interpretation and critique, as with
household and chair/char/charity. But her critical play with language leads to
no action: the play may entice her into depoliticizing the implicit issue and
into action.
In college with Moira, she toys with the phrase “date
rape” just to ironically trivialize this ritual episode. A few years later, she
sees sexism in the way of saying “even-steven” but she fails to recognize what
Moira is trying to emphasize, that is to say that power relations between men
and women in contemporary America are not even or equal. No loads of verbal
construction, deconstruction and reconstruction seem able to help Offred
understand, communicate, or resist[21].
Finally, the provocation to prophecy in Atwood’s work
comes from reaching modern Western forms of faithlessness and amnesia that
breed alienation, violence, and injustice. She seeks after the possible unities
of things, by searching back through the lives of the earth and its culture for
wisdom, weaving together many traditions, including the Judeo-Christian, to
reawaken commitment to a covenant with life that Western civilization has again
and again broken and she enters in the imagination of her readers through her
evocative poetics of allusion, mixture of style, and fusions of gender[22].
Again, as far as lexicography is concerned, often The
Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace are often paired together in
critical readings due to several shared features, including their first-person
narration, which marks them out as resembling witness testimonials, and the
reliability of the witness. While cognitive stylistic tools have been applied
in the investigation of literary texts, their application to TV, film, and
screen has been more limited.
Since its release, the first series adaptation of The
Handmaid’s Tale (MGM & Hulu 2017) has received great critical acclaim,
winning eight Emmy Awards from thirteen nominations as well as two Golden Globe
awards for Best TV series and Best Actress for Elizabeth Moss (who plays June/
Offred). The novel on which the series is based features June/ Offred as the first-person
narrator who recounts her experiences in short sections that detail her present
day and her previous life, as well as some of the events leading up to the
inception of Gilead. In contrast to the sustained first-person narrative in the
text, the TV series adaptations focalise the narrative through multiple
characters – such as her friends, Ofglen and Moira; her husband, Luke; and the
Commander’s Wife, Serena. June/Offred story remains prominent and she’s the
only character giving a voice through interior monologue. The focus on
June/Offred’s in the series serves to personalise her voice and story, but
‘because of the torturous training she’s subjected to under Aunt Lydia, she
conveys her deepest and more personal thoughts via voiceover only’[23]. The
voiceovers are often accompanied by ‘lingering close ups’ which create a strong
sense of ‘claustrophobia’ for viewers[24].
A survey of ten online UK newspaper reviews of the
first TV series comments on the political clearness, fairness and relevance of
this series. Critics describe it as particularly timely and prescient, depicting
topics and social issues that move close to those in the nowadays political
climate, with reviewers framing these connections as not just resonating with
our own but being lined up with contemporary reality. Chandler notes how ‘the
horrors of The Handmaid’s Tale are happening right here, right now’ while
Rees[25] observes
that ‘this riveting adaptation has mapped itself onto the contemporary news
cycle’. Atwood recognised that when it first came out it was viewed as being
fat-fetched and, when she wrote it, she was making sure not to put anything
into it that humans had not already done somewhere at some time. This is why the
author refers to The Handmaid’s Tale as speculative rather than science
fiction, and labels it as an Orwell-inspired classic dystopia. Such connections
have led the reviewers to acknowledge the cautionary tone of the story. Some view
it as a contentious warning; a strong push to keep in mind what we have to lose.
Instead, as with the responses to Oryx and Crake, the reviewers talk
about the frightening nature of the narrative, through which The Handmaid’s
Tale takes this further, enriched by horror elements. The process of
creating a thrilling and upsetting story that presents a nightmarish vision of
the world and verisimilar contents is believed to be terrifying. This horror
categorisation is evoked in the political and social resonance of the novel,
which presents a gruesome reality. Many reviewers identify the structure of the
narrative, describe the use of flashbacks and the function they have in
the development of the story:
Even the flashbacks work here. Because they are back
to pre-Gilead, it feels like a brief respire […], before pushed back down again
with a boot on your head. And they act like warnings- to Offred, maybe to us
too- against normalisation. It wasn’t always like this, it’s not ordinary now:
don’t let it become ordinary[26].
So, the flashbacks disrupt the spatio-temporal
contextualisation of the rest of the story in the here and now of Gilead. The
label ‘push’ is used for the felt experience of returning to Gilead., which is
a term borrowed from computer science and used by researchers to describe the
readerly experience of a deictic shift, the conceptual movement into a text or
story. Following this theory, encountering June/Offred’s voiceovers takes another
step back to the narrative contents, and a deeper conformity to her perspective.
This viewing experience is conceptualised as blunt and apparently violent; started
off by a ‘boot on your head’. Other reviewers observe the structural role of
flashbacks in filling in the backstory, setting up that contrast between them
and now through the ‘glimpses of Offred’s old life’, which deceive ‘sign of
things breaking down’ into acknowledging divisions or depth of characters
within the story. Critics comment on the divided role of women in Gilead,
noting how the patriarchy’s great triumph is to persuade the women to police
themselves.
Stylistic studies of film and TV have given emphasis to
the analysis of dialogue from a practical perspective and on the adaptation of
book to screen, whereas film studies approaches traditionally explore just visual
cues. Recent accounts have argued that a combined investigation of verbal and
visual codes in movies and other visual narratives would take advantage from
further exploration, as language analysis has not historically been a priority
in film studies, whose insights overlook the use of the dialogue and the
interaction between language and non-language choices, exploring either
macro-level issues of a film or a micro-analysis of specific frames. To provide
an analysis that includes all these considerations, ideas from deixis, narration
structure and pragmatics have been applied alongside a breakdown of the visual
elements. It could be argued that the more prominent stylistic effects in The
Handmaid’s Tale series relate to viewers’ understanding of June/Offred
character as a storyteller. However, although June/Offred narrates part of her
story, film studies theorists acknowledge the presence of a ‘filmic narrator’
in telecinematic narratives. In this TV series has been used a romanticised and
Baroque style supported by the use of a symmetrical composition.
On this issue, the ‘divided self’ metaphor was first
explored by Lakoff in his accounts of ‘the divided person’, in which a person's
experience is figured out as fragmented by the component parts of Cartesian
dualism, the rational-emotional divide. In such metaphors, a person is divided
by their more rational ‘subject’ and their emotional or bodily ‘self’, apparent
in phrases such as I am not myself today or I made myself go for a
run. While Lakoff explores the concept of the split self in terms of the metaphorical
instances of the language[27], Emmot prefer
adopting the terms ‘split selves’ ‘broadly to include all cases of a character
or real-life individual being divided and/or duplicated in any way in a
narrative’[28].
Emmott sounds out the duplication of both characters and real-life individuals
who ‘perceived themselves to be ‘split’ because of a transitory sense of
experiential discontinuity or because of a traumatic life change’. Gottlieb
identifies the protagonist’s division within the novel, which she narrates
through ‘a series of juxtapositions between her deprived, degraded self in
Gilead and her former emancipated self’[29]. Many
reviewers noted, for example, that her name is June but also Offred,
identifying her pre-Gilead names as well as conferring her status as belonging
to the Commander Fred in Gilead. She’s also shown in her former life with her
husband Luke and daughter Hannah when they visit a fair, while also revealed to
be in her bedroom in Gilead as she mentally recounts the memory. In these
contexts, the division of selves is signposted through visual splicing and by
verbal choices. Split self-presentation might be ‘inherent in the narrative
form, since first-person narratives invoke a current self reporting on a past
self’. Interior monologues are used ‘to convey a character’s thoughts, feelings
or motivations at the auditory level’. Like other Atwood writings, The Handmaid’s
Tale has a final revelation which reframes the content of the rest of the
tale: an epilogue describes a future conference in which is revealed that June/Offred's
story presented in the first 300 pages of the book was a transcription of a
series of cassettes recording her account. The story is a ‘tale’, which is a
label that ‘removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and
days’, while the term ‘story’ might well be a true story about what we usually
agree to call ‘real life’. The verbal text also represents an ambiguous
addressee, in that the you-referent often changes. Sometimes, the address can
be ‘generalised’, with June/Offred commenting on facts which are relevant
universally in the world or in Gilead specifically: ‘the chances for a healthy
lady birth are one in five, if you can get pregnant at all’. This dialogue
between the selves is also shown off in other passages of the novel, for
example, in reference to not being pregnant despite the hopes of the household,
she admonishes herself with ‘No ice cream for you this month, young lady’.
Occasionally, the ‘you’ referent is not June/Offred
(‘I love you so much. Save Hannah’). Similarly, June/Offred addresses the
previous Offred in response to reading a hidden scratched message: for example,
in response to a gift from Serena of a jewellery box with a dancing ballerina
in the lid June/Offred sets out ‘I will not be that girl in the box’, and then
she writes ‘you’re not alone’ on the wall in the cupboard. A combination of
horizontal and self-reflexive address can also be observed when she addresses
Moira: ’Moira, you wouldn’t stand for this shit. You wouldn’t let them keep you
in this room for two weeks. You’d find a way out. You’d escape. Get up. Get
your crazy ass up.’
However classified, the you-references invite readers
to consider the address of June/Offred’s tale. The you-address is a reminder
that this is a tale about her life, which may be oriented towards a person. Moreover,
the number of characters directly addressed (Moira, Luke, past/future Offred)
functions as catalogues of Offred social roles: wife, mother, friend, Handmaid.
At the same time, the use of self-referential address is a clear indication of
her split selves. She has no one to talk to in Gilead, and therefore, she can
ultimately only narrate thoughts to herself.
In June/Offred presentation of the self are used many
metaphors. Emmot considers manifestations of how you can find metaphors in
fiction and non-fiction narrative. Key metaphors in The Handmaid’s Tale
relate to body parts and their metonymic relationships to the wider world. An
‘Eye’, for example, is the term for someone who spies for the Gilead
authorities (‘Maybe he watches me. Maybe he’s an Eye’). Similarly, hands are
also referenced in the text. Of course, they form part of the term ‘handmaid’
and, while ‘in Gilead hands and feet are pronounced non-essential tools’, the
concept of hands as representing agency is nevertheless noted: ’I have given
myself over into the hands of strangers’. These metaphors draw on culturally
entrenched ideas of both agency and surveillance, and the isolation of body
parts is emblematic of the wider objectification of handmaids in Gilead. Such
‘chains’ of repetition support the de-humanisation of June/Offred, which is
further acknowledged in comparisons she makes between herself and animals
(‘Washed and brushed like a prize pig’; ‘We’re two-legged wombs’) or inanimate
entities (‘This is what I feel like, this sound of glass. I feel like the word
“shatter”). Anyhow, the most prominent metaphors relate to a superordinate “container”
source domain. The first metaphor observed is “a memory is a container”, which
is evoked through both June/Offred’s mention of memories as something you can
‘fall in too far’, and later as something you can become ‘lost’ in.
Charteris-Black argues that ‘the existence of a clearly defined container also
implies a conscious controlling entity that fills or empties the container’.
Like with some of the examples of self-referential you-address mentioned,
June/Offred established herself in two roles: as the conscious controlling
entity who populates the memory, and also holds control of her own movement
within the container (‘If I let myself fall in too far, I won’t ever get out’).
The reference to not being able to ‘ever get out’ further frames the idea of being
contained as a negative experience; it becomes a country in which she can get
lost, therefore, it forms an additional kind of imprisonment. This idea is
further evoked when June/Offred references the woman who previously undertook
the role of handmaid in Serena and Fred’s household: ’There was an Offred
before me. She helped me find my way out. She’s dead. She’s alive. She is me’.
Within this description, June/Offred designates the agency to the previous
Offred as helping her ‘find [her] way out’. Conversely, the latter sentences acknowledge
an amalgam of their roles: ‘she is me’ is an acceptance of their shared
experiences. June/ Offred elaborates this first container metaphor in her
description of ‘the room is a country’. In this declaration, there is a switch
from her mental state to her physical reality. She draws on different source
domains, moving from describing her memories to describing her surroundings.
She narrates how ‘there are things in this room to discover’ and casts herself
as being ‘like an explorer, a traveler to undiscovered countries’. This
metaphor works by shrinking June/Offred’s worlds. It adjusts the scope of her
situation of imprisonment by expanding the confinement of her room to the scale
of ‘undiscovered countries’, and conferring the specific role of ‘an explorer,
a traveler’ on herself.
Another container metaphor is that of “the self is a
container”, when, for example, June/Offred depicts Moira describing how the
self can be a container that provides protection: ‘They didn’t get everything.
There was something inside her. That they couldn’t take away. She looked
invincible’. Equally, the idea that invasion into this container is a type of assault
is suggested in June/Offred’s reference to an Atwood poem:’ you fit into me
like a hook into an eye. A fish hook. An open eye’. In a world that has
stripped women of the physical right to own their bodies, the variations of
container metaphors, and the idea that the self is something that can be slitted
and contained, seem particularly proper.
June/Offred is not represented as one but as a
plurality of characters, and she is represented through a division of mind and
body. As the final part of this analysis, her divisions of self can be examined
through the metaphors she draws on to describe her feelings and mental states. Finally,
in The Handmaid’s Tale, readers experience a sense of immediacy and
artificiality, being June/Offred herself witness to events. This effect backs
the witness literature categorisation of the novel and contributes to discussions
of the reliability of accounts similarly raised in Alias Grace. In other
words, in Gilead, your account is always one which is mediated; one which is
never completely your own.[30]
[1] See, Peter G. Stillman, S. Anne Johnson, Identity,
complicity and resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale, Utopian
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1994), pp. 70-86
[2] See, Margaret Atwood, “Writing
Utopia”, Writing with intent- Essays, Reviews, Personal prose (1983-2005),
First Carroll & Graf edition, 2005, pp. 92- 100
[3] Intersemiotic Translation:
translation/interpretation of a linguistic sign to a linguistic system of
non-linguistic signs (for instance, adaptations or transmutations). About
adaptations, see, among others, Umberto Eco, Dire quasi la stessa cosa,
esperienze di traduzione, Bompiani Editore, 2013, pp. 363-395
[4] See, Ildney Cavalcanti, Utopia of/f language in
contemporary feminist literary dystopias,
Utopian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2000), pp. 152-180; https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718180
[5] See, Atwood M., The
Handmaid’s Tale, Vintage Book edition, April 1998, pp.267-268
[6] See, Ildney Cavalcanti, Ibidem,
p. 172
[7] See,
https://britannica.com/topic/The-Handmaids-Tale-by-Atwood
[8] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem,
pp. 94
[9] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem,
pp. 374-375
[10] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem,
pp.267-269
[11] “Without shame” can mean
acting with a sense of wrongdoing but can be positive and confident;
“shameless” means lacking a sense of shame and is generally negative, implying
a lack of moral or social restraint.
[12] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem,
pp.261-267
[13] For more info about nightclub
fashion trends and the dichotomy between art and morality throughout the ages,
see, Paola Canale, Burlesque in Canada, Barnes and Noble, 2021
[14] See, Ibidem, p.230
[15]
Margaret Awood, Ibidem, p.230-239
[16] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem,
p.285
[17] See, Colin Boyd, Jules Lewis, Andrew McIntosh, The
Canadian Encyclopedia, October 15, 2019
[18] See, Margaret Atwood, Ibidem, p. 311
[19] See,
Margaret Atwood, Ibidem, pp. XVI- XVIII
[20] Atwood M., Book of Lives:
Memoir of sorts, Penguin Random House, 2025, p. XIV
[21] See, Peter G. Stillman, S. Anne Johnson, Identity,
Complicity and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale, Utopian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1994), pp. 70-86,
[22] See, Janet L. Larson, Margaret
Atwood and the future of prophecy, Religion & Literature, 1989, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40059401
[23] Fienberg Daniel, The Handmaid’s
Tale: Review. The Hollywood Reporter, 2017;
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/handmaids-tale-review-991871
[24] Hinds, Julie, 2017
https://eu.freep.com/story/entertainment/movies/julie-hinds/2017/04/22/handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood-hulu/100714222
[25] Rees Jasper, 2017. The
Handmaid’s Tale review;
https//telegraph.co.uk/tv/2017/07/31/handmaids-tale-night-episodes-10-review-winters-tale-potent/
[26] Wollaston Sam, 2017, The
Handmaid’s Tale review; https://theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/29/handmaids.tale-review-best-thing-youll-watch-all-year
[27] See, Lakoff G., More than cool
reason: a field guide to poetic metaphor, University of Chicago Press, 1989;
Lakoff G.,The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and thought,
University Cambridge Press, pp. 202-251; Lakoff G., Sorry, I’m myself today:
The metaphor system for conceptualizing the self. In Spaces, worlds and
grammars, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.91-123
[28] Emmott, C., ‘Split selves’ in fiction and in medical ‘life-stories’:
cognitive linguistic theory and narrative practice. In Cognitive stylistics.
Language and cognition in text analysis, ed. Elena Semino and Jonathan
Culpeper, 153-182, 2002
[29]
Gottlieb E., Dystopian fiction East and West: Universe of terror and trial,
McGill – Queens University Press, 2001, p.103
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