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Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid's Tale*

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2154-9648

Peter G. Stillman, Shaun Johnson,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is an explicitly political novel which became an immediate bestseller when published in Canada in 1985 and the United States in 1986.1 The novel emerges from the long traditions of Utopian fiction, particularly the anti-utopia or dystopia, which, prominent since Swift's Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, has become a common feature of this century's political and literary landscape. Atwood also joins the ranks of the writers of specifically feminist Utopias and dystopias. This sub genre, rejuvenated in the early seventies with the women's liberation move ment, includes works such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. The feminist novels show that power is gendered, that gender distinctions are pervasive and extensive, and that the personal and political interweave. In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's narrator tells a very personal tale of under standing and ignoring, activity and complicity, fidelity and betrayal, in the political settings of the contemporary United States and the future dystopian society of Gilead. Many commentators on The Handmaid's Tale have characterized the narrator as a heroine, a developing consciousness, or an emerging woman. Some have looked to the pre-Gilead period (our present) as a happy (or tol erable) alternative to the Gileadean nightmare; others have interpreted the Gileadean society as, in part, a by-product of cultural feminism; and a few have found hope or assurance in Gilead's obvious demise before 2195, the date of the epilogue's academic conference.2 But these interpretations are unseated by a close reading of the text and attention to its dystopian context,3 which demonstrate the need for sustained political, feminist con sciousness and activity among women by exploring what may happen in their absence.