This thesis explores the oppression of women within the gender institution of patriarchy in Margaret Atwood¡¦s dystopian novel The Handmaid¡¦s Tale, and their resistance to this male-dominated society. As a feminist writer, Atwood is very much concerned about the issue of gender, which she foregrounds in The Handmaid¡¦s Tale. In my analysis, I apply some theories of radical feminists and the French feminist who devote themselves to the study of gender--Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Catherine MacKinnon, and Hélène Cixous. Millett focuses on women¡¦s subordinated position that leads to women¡¦s oppression in patriarchy. Rich and MacKinnon focus on how women are controlled and oppressed in maternity and sexuality within the patriarchal society of gender inequality. Cixous challenges the validity of gender by pointing out its characteristic fluidity through creating woman¡¦s own writing in order to redefine female selfhood for women¡¦s resistance. The thesis is composed of five chapters. The Introduction presents the background materials about Atwood and The Handmaid¡¦s Tale, the motivation of the thesis, and the resonance between The Handmaid¡¦s Tale and certain feminists¡¦ theories. The first chapter analyzes the formation of the unbalanced power relations between the sexes in which women are subordinated to men through the socialization. Moreover, because of women¡¦s subordination, women are modulated as mothers through socially institutionalized motherhood such as the Wives and the Handmaids in Gilead. The second chapter further analyzes how women are formulated as sexual objects through the experience of sexual objectification within the institution of heterosexuality, such as the mistresses and the prostitutes of Gilead. The third chapter discusses how female orality empowers women to resist their patriarchal society in The Handmaid¡¦s Tale. The protagonist Offred, by ¡§writing her voice¡¨ through storytelling, resists patriarchal oppression, restores her body and self, and transforms herself from a victim in a claustrophobic world of male domination to a heroine of femininity. Moreover, her act of writing by her voice also reflects women¡¦s histories of repression, which should be reconstructed in a culture in which only males are literate. Offred¡¦s oral act of storytelling, to the reader, may also signify her resistance to reconstruct women¡¦s repressed histories. The concluding chapter reiterates the research of The Handmaid¡¦s Tale with a synthesis of Atwood¡¦s and some of the prominent feminists¡¦ points of view, namely Millett¡¦s, Rich¡¦s, MacKinnon¡¦s and Cixous¡¦s, toward the oppression and resistance of women within the institution of gender. This study hopes to explore and thus illuminate the nature, the functioning, the operation of socially constructed male domination, and then proceed to search the possible solution, or the ¡§voice;¡¨ however feeble it is, the author, or the protagonist conceives to defy the oppression imposed on women.

Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Michigan University, 2009. / "14-62709." Bibliography: leaves 54-59.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-257).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-119). Also available via the World Wide Web.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace, Atwood demonstrates that the connection between language, translation, and the female body is evident in the ways in which language is used to control the female body. Atwood posits that language systems assume the female body is fixed; however, language is inherently unstable. Consequently, if the female body is inscribed by language, the female body is not fixed just as a text is not fixed. Atwood writes the female body as a translation of masculinist text in order to resist the tradition of constructing the female body reductively through masculinist language. Through the attempts of her female characters to represent themselves (rather than being represented) in her work, Atwood illustrates that ?authentic? linguistic representation of the female body is impossible because language is a patriarchal construction which defines limitations on female voice and articulates the female body in masculinist terms.

My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture.

My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture.

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

This dissertation focuses on the politics of self-narration and the use of visual images and strategies in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners , Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye. I argue that these authors are reworking the metafictional form by using visual strategies (such as reflection, distortion and point of view) to explore the complex relationship that us created when the woman narrator when she is both subject and object of her own fictional autobiography. / I use the artistic form of anamorphosis as the overriding metaphor for discussing this relation and its manifestation in these texts. Paintings and drawings in which the anamorphic form is used depend upon strategic distortion, indirect viewing and perspective for their effect. Anamorphoses present exploded, fragmented images which, through the strategic positioning of the viewer, are reconfigured into recognizable forms. The emphasis in these works of visual art is upon the moment at which these images are reconfigured. In literary works, I argue, the emphasis is on the process of creating a distorted image and on that which is contained in the spaces that are revealed through the process of exploding that image. This metaphor allows me to explore the interdependence of the visual and written elements of self-representation in these novels and the simultaneous, shifting, mutually informing relation between a narrating, subjective "I" and a narrative "eye" (with its emphasis on the visual, on perspective, and on point of view). / The resistant, reinscriptive and interrogative strategy of "literary anamorphosis" moves these novels beyond the confines of linear, literary forms to create a distinct, feminist, narrative space in which women writing in Canada can articulate the complex politics of their positions in but not of the masculinist Master Narratives that have historically defined and controlled them.

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2004