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.

Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1941 on their and their editor's hunch that something newsworthy was in the offing. The couple went in part to add to their library of phototext books (three had been published since 1936), but more to advance the agenda of the anti-Fascist, anti-isolationist Leftist Popular Front, whose goals coincided with those of the Roosevelt administration. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, they immediately immersed themselves in the enterprise of bringing war news to the American listening and reading public. Through the portals of CBS radio, Life magazine, PM newspaper, and other journalistic outlets, and despite stultifying censorship, they made it clear that the Red Army was a formidable anti-Hitler force that wanted only financial and material assistance from the U.S., and that the Russian people, steeped in patriotism and family values not very different from American ideals, were worthy allies. Stalin, they hinted, was a well-intentioned and well-organized autocrat, but nothing worse. Upon returning to the United States, Bourke-White traveled extensively to promote a Russian-American alliance, and published a photo-chronicle of their Russian trip, Shooting the Russian War. Caldwell published two very different books, All-Out on the Road to Smolensk and All Night Long, that also advocated this coalition. I argue that Caldwell composed Smolensk as a heroic quest to report on the war firsthand, while All Night Long, a popular and sensational story about Russian guerillas, bears all the characteristics of a Socialist Realist novel touting the Soviet cause. Both books were successful in endorsing Soviet objectives in the West. Their individual and collaborative literary products have been largely forgotten, but Bourke-White's photographs continue to inform our memory of that war.

The establishment of effective relationships is fundamental to good nursing practice and the fulfillment of nurses’ moral responsibilities. While intrapartum nurses are uniquely placed to establish relationships that can directly influence the woman’s experience of childbirth, there has been limited investigation of the relationships, identities and values that underlie nurses’ varied approaches and responses to labouring women. The purpose of this study was to explore intrapartum nurses’ understanding of their moral responsibilities from a social-moral perspective, using Margaret Urban Walker’s “expressive-collaborative” model of morality. Interviews were conducted with fourteen registered nurses working in a birthing unit of a Canadian teaching hospital. Four themes were identified that captured nurses’ moral responsibilities, including: organizing and coordinating care, responding to the unpredictable, recognizing limits of responsibilities to others, and negotiating care with women and families. Nurses enacted their moral responsibilities to labouring women in a variety of ways depending on their personal and professional experience, the circumstances, the people involved and the context of care. A key factor influencing responses to women was the degree to which understandings and expectations related to birth were deemed to be reasonable and mutually agreed upon among nurses, physicians, women and their families. Nurses also described limits on their responsibilities to others. Their choice of response to circumstances in which practice was constrained departed from the idealized expectations and ‘expert’ practices often reflected in professional guidelines. While nurses were able to identify contextual influences that constrained their ability to maintain effective relationships with women, the influence of their own values on the care they provided was less apparent. This suggests a need to challenge normative assumptions related to care of women in childbirth, including the provision of choice and family centred care, in order to create environments that can support and sustain practices that build understanding, mutuality and trust between nurses and birthing woman. In addition, given the contested nature of childbirth and the lack of shared understandings of what constitutes ‘best’ care, there is a need to develop collaborative models of inter-professional maternity care that include the voices of women as a central component.

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.

No description available.

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.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.