This essay deals with how Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) works as a critique of the patriarchal hierarchy and the values it brings. This is portrayed in a dystopic setting in which women are subordinate to men, but also men being subordinate and marginalized by other men. Based on a gender theory on masculinities, an analysis is made on two male characters; Luke and the Commander. Both characters gain advantages in society because of hegemonic masculinity. One of them gains advantages in pre-Gilead society, and the other in the Gilead society. The focus of the analysis is on the similarities of the two characters’ connection to hegemonic masculinity. Even though, they live in different periods of history. / Denna uppsats behandlar hur Margaret Atwoods roman En Tjänarinnas Bekännelse (1985) fungerar som en kritik mot det patriarkala samhället och de värderingar som det medför. Detta porträtteras i en dystopisk miljö där kvinnor är underlydande till män, men också där män är underlydande och marginaliserade av andra män. Baserat på en könsanalys om maskuliniteter, så görs en analys av två karaktärer. Luke och the Befälhavaren. Båda karaktärer får fördelar i samhället på grund av hegemonisk maskulinitet. En av dem får fördelar i samhället före skapandet av Gilead, och den andra i Gileads samhälle. Analysen fokuserar på de likheter som finns i kopplingen till hegemonisk maskulinitet hos dem två karaktärerna. Även fast, de lever i två olika tider av historien.

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William Shakespeare and Margaret Cavendish each published plays and poems focusing on the precarious implications and cultural enactments of female chastity in their time. Their lives and writing careers bookend a time when chastity's place in English politics, religion, and social life was perceived as crucial for women while also being challenged and radically redefined. This paper engages in period-specific definitions of virginity and chastity, and with modern scholarship on the same, to explore the historicity of chastity and how representations of self-enforced chastity create opportunities for female political power in certain fiction contexts. Through a comparison of the female protagonists of Measure for Measure and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity—Isabella and Travellia—I argue that both characters are able to assert and gain practical forms of power within their respective systems of government, and not just in spiritual or economic spheres.

This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, they must overcome bodily limitations. Oryx—the quintessential problematic, oppressed feminine figure—and Ren are both associated with sex as they are passed from man to man throughout their lives. Furthermore, as other females (namely, Amanda and Toby) adopt masculine traits associated with power in an attempt at self-preservation both before and after the waterless flood, men in the novels strive to subvert this power through rape to remind these women of their confinement within their physical bodies and to reinstitute the binary gender system. The men also span the gender continuum, with Crake representing the masculine "machine" and Jimmy gravitating toward the feminine victim. Crake, who seems to live life uninhibited from his body, appears to escape the bodily confinements that the women experience, while Jimmy's relationship to his body is more complex. As Jimmy competes to "out-masculinize" Crake, and Amanda and Toby struggle to avoid both identification with and demolition by the machine, readers of the novels are invited to think beyond the "machinery" of gender norms to consider gender as a continuum instead of a dualistic factor.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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This essay will compare Margaret Atwood´s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale to the tv-adaptation of the novel by Bruce Miller. In the original work, the protagonist Offred narrates the story of her life in a patriarchal society called Gilead. In contrast, the viewers are guided by different sound and visual strategies in the series. One sound strategy is the use of voice-overs as the viewers can hear Offred´s thoughts in situations where she is being mistreated. In addition, visual strategies include the viewers watching the ceremony from a bird-view angle and reviewing the scene as outsiders looking in. I argue that the novel provides a deeper understanding of how it is to live in Gilead as a handmaid, as Offred, because of how the novel is told through first-person narration. Also, in both versions, Offred is objectified by the Gilead society, but in the tv-version, I believe that she is also objectified by specifics of the adaptation. The essay will focus on the objectifying treatment of Offred by comparing the novel and the series and the use of these strategies and discuss relevant terms from the story through the narrative of Offred. The analysis is divided into three passages from the novel and corresponding episodes from the series’ first season. They are chosen since the objectifying treatment of Offred is demonstrated within them. The theoretical framework is feminist theories of objectification to help me compare the novel and the series regarding this aspect, primarily, the objectification theory established by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts. The essay, all in all, shows that the handmaids, as fertile women, in the patriarchal society of the Gilead are treated as mere objects whether through their sexuality or their reproductive function.

<p> This dissertation examines explicit and implicit conceptualizations of time and history in four contemporary Canadian novels: Allan Donaldson's Maclean, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, and Lee Maracle's Daughters are Forever. Performing close textual analysis from a posture of 'deliberate empathy,' the author identifies several key textual devices and concepts that signal the texts' alternate ideas about time and history. These include temporal simultaneity, historical multiplicity, and the presence of the past. Drawing on critical work from fields including literary theory, globalization and cultural studies, indigenous studies and anthropology, the author investigates the political significance of the texts' different historical and temporal models. She argues that the way individuals and cultures understand time and history bears significant influence on the ways in which they understand their ethical relationships with and responsibility toward the world around them. The dissertation closes with a call for further engagement with questions of temporality and for continued efforts to link pedagogical activity to struggles for human rights. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)