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Rhetorical Strategies in The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia and the Paradoxes of Power

1992; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1992.0032

1913-4835

Glenn Deer,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

RHETORICAL STRATEGIES IN THE HANDMAID’S TALE: DYSTOPIA AND THE PARADOXES OF POWER G LEN N D E E R University of British Columbia In The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood is caught in the dilemma faced by many creators of satiric dystopias: the author needs both to condemn particular social injustices and to portray the mechanisms of oppression as credible enough, as sufficiently powerful and seductive, to represent a believable evil, not an irrelevant or farfetched one. While attempting to bal­ ance ethical interests with plausibility, the ambitious author risks falling into either transparent didacticism or a contradictory fascination with the rhetor­ ical machinery of dystopic horror. Atwood’s discourse is marked by stylistic and rhetorical features — habits of syntactic and lexical arrangements and strategies of managing point of view and addresser-addressee relations — that show she has succumbed to the latter: scenes of violence and horror meant to illuminate sites of oppression are also strategically designed to manipulate and horrify. Atwood’s narrator is an authoritative and author­ itarian storyteller, one who manipulates the reader as she tells her story, but one who is also caught in the web of Gileadean power politics. Offred’s powerful narrative skill conflicts with the powerlessness, the innocence, and the descriptive phenomenological cast of mind, that also characterize her. It is as if Atwood’s skill as storyteller continually intrudes, possessing her narrative creation. Narrative self-consciousness, in fact, does explicitly and strategically emerge. To see The Handmaid’s Tale as ideologically and rhetorically problematic is not a “politically correct” view, at least if one considers the majority of re­ cent critical opinions, which aim at solidifying the conventionality of the text by inscribing it in an already readable canonical genre (dystopia, political satire, postmodern subversion), by deciphering allusions, or by weighing the effects of framing devices like the concluding “Historical Notes” section.1 Only Frank Davey and Chinmoy Banerjee have recognized how the novel “participates not only in various literary conventions and bourgeois assump­ tions about the self, but in various commercial formulas for capitalist book production” (Davey, Reading 84), or how “Atwood is concerned with the aesthetic enjoyment of a particular kind of victimization, and not with a critical examination of its determinant relations” (Banerjee 80). Atwood’s politics in her earlier fiction have been cogently analyzed by Larry McDonald E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v i i i , 2, June 19 9 2 as being fraught with contradiction (as are also, McDonald points out, the fictions of MacLennan and Davies), because of the reduction of collective problems to “the psychic wounds of individual characters” and the tendency to undercut the possibilities of positive political change: “these novelists end by urging individual adaptation to a status quo which their fiction simulta­ neously urges upon us as intolerable” (122). The Handmaid’s Tale is similarly caught in contradictory discursive im­ pulses: it shows a world that is “intolerable,” but it cannot avoid complicity in using the mechanisms or rhetoric of that very intolerable world. Hence, a trope that might characterize the rhetorical gestalt of the novel is paralepsis , the figure of verbal dissimulation and duplicity that asserts its lack of rhetoric while using rhetoric, that on the one hand critiques authority and on the other hand is complicitous with that authority, that feigns power­ lessness in order to wield power, that disavows deliberate arrangement while arranging words with great care: “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story,” Offred apologizes, then proceeds to make us wince with her sharp “fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force” (279). By examining these and other instances of such discursive contradictions and paradoxes, I will provide a close reading of the novel and subject key sections to lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical analysis; I will try to get a grip on the authority and style of Atwood’s storyteller while remaining close to the play of addresser-addressee relations, those social relations that metonymically reflect the implied storyteller’s attitude to power. In The Handmaid’s Tale the reader is addressed by a...