In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood indirectly exposes frightening and undemocratic traits in societies of our time when she applies them to a fictive future in which these factors have caused horrible consequences. A group of men has formed a new state, “Gilead”, in which they ruthlessly control the population. This essay studies how this dictating power gains and, essentially, maintains power in the fictive society. The essay argues, and comes to the conclusion, that by surveilling the population and by restricting its means of communication the dictatorship is able to control the people and keep them docile.

This study attempts to examine how gender roles appear in the adaption of Margaret Atwood’s published book, The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, which introduces the fictional and dystopian society Gilead, where the infertility rates decreased as the result of climate change. This study focuses on the first, second and third seasons of the TV series from 2017-19. A qualitative method was used to study how groups of males and females are portrayed in a hierarchy. This study examines how males and females are represented in The Handmaid’s Tale through a content analysis with multimodal critical discourse analysis as a method, completed with gender system theory and feminist standpoint theory.  In the study, we focused on four groups of females and two groups of males that were included in an obvious ranking in the hierarchy of Gilead. All of the groups were analyzed separately to observe how their gender roles were represented in the TV series. Consequently, we compared the male groups to the female groups to examine the differences between their representation and ranking in the hierarchy in Gilead. The results of this study shows that males are dominant and females are submissive in Gilead, which confirms the gender theory used in this study. The low-ranking groups of females, such as the handmaids or the marthas also confirmed the existence of the feminist standpoint theory. It shows that the groups of males were placed in the highest ranking in the hierarchy in Gilead, even though some of the women seemed to be powerful, it was not enough to dominate all of the male groups in the hierarchy.

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.

Through the history have the women been subordinated to the men, structures that still are present in these days even though feminist movements have tried work against them. One platform that is quite common to use for drawing attention to a certain subject is popular culture. Here the author can disguise their thoughts or highlight them through another context. This brought my attention to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale where religious symbols are commonly used through the book at the same time as women’s rights are neglected. I wanted to know how these religious symbols are connected to this kind of structures, how they are motivating them. To answer that question I used a text analysis with the focus to find the underlying factors to this kind of use of religious symbols and how the gender roles are built up. I used two kinds of theories, one is Stig Hjarvard’s mediatization theory with the focus on banal religion, and the other is Yvonne Hirdman’s gender theory that are focusing on the view of women through the history. What I found was that Atwood is using religion as a theme to criticize the patriarchal structures in her time and to comment on the use of religious symbols uncontextualized to debate on questions that affects a majority of people, like questions about sexuality, abortion and sexual abuse.

Using postmodern, feminist and queer notions of utopia/dystopia and narrative theory, this thesis contains an analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale (novel 1985; film 1990; TV series S01 2017) based on theoretical and methodological understandings of utopia/dystopia and narrative as deeply connected with notions of temporality and relationality, and of violence and resistance as the modes of expression of utopia and dystopia in the source texts. The analysis is carried out in an explorative manner (Czarniawska 2004) and utilises the notion of “disidentification” (Butler 1993; Muñoz 1999) and the concepts of “diffraction” (Haraway 1992, 1997; Barad 2007, 2010), and “entanglement” (Barad 2007). The conclusion becomes that utopia and dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale are, to a great extent, imagined within the same system of understanding, but that utopian hope can be found in the relationality and temporality of resistance, and that the radically different utopian place is the queer horizon.

This essay shows how Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) functions as a critique of patriarchal society as it depicts a dystopic, dismantled society where women are divided into societal groups on biological grounds. Based on socialist feminist literary theory, an analysis is carried out of two of the female characters, Offred and Serena Joy, who are both oppressed by a patriarchal, totalitarian government; an oppression that is manifested in different ways. Offred is used as a tool to provide children and Serena Joy is confined within the home. The focus of the analysis is on the oppression of these two characters by the patriarchal government through the removal of their rights due to their gender. Red and blue, the two colors used to mark their different societal groups, are analyzed to show how they affect the reader’s perception of these characters and how the novel demonstrates the division of women visually. / Denna uppsats visar hur Margaret Atwoods roman Tjänarinnans berättelse (1985) fungerar som en kritik mot ett patriarkalt samhälle. Denna kritik tar sig uttryck genom en dystopisk skildring av ett samhälle där kvinnor delas in i sociala grupper baserat på deras biologiska förutsättningar. Med utgångspunkt i socialistisk feministisk litteraturteori görs en karaktärsanalys av två av de kvinnliga karaktärerna, Offred och Serena Joy. De är båda förtryckta av det patriarkala, totalitära styret, ett förtryck som tar sig uttryck på olika sätt. Offred används som ett verktyg för att öka barnafödandet och Serena Joy är isolerad i hemmet. Analysen fokuserar på förtryckandet av de två karaktärerna baserat på borttagandet av deras tidigare rättigheter på grund av deras kön. Röd och blå, två färger som används för att markera deras sociala grupp, analyseras för att påvisa hur de påverkar läsarens uppfattning av karaktärerna och hur romanen rent visuellt kategoriserar kvinnor i olika grupper.

This essay analyzes the narrative surrounding women’s right to autonomy in two novels in the Speculative Fiction genre, more specifically the 20th century dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985), and the anti-utopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), while arguing for the pedagogical merit of both works. Matters regarding female independence and gender equality are in consistent flux, and any uprise in feminist movements and female emancipation has most commonly been met with resistance. In the overarching aims of the curriculum of upper secondary school it is stated that the education must promote values such as equality, solidarity and inclusivity. As women’s rights to their own bodies are currently under debate in several contexts, students are likely to have been exposed to contemporary discussions on gendered oppression. For these reasons, analyzing how the female body has been rendered in historical and contemporary texts is arguably both relevant and important. As this essay discusses, gender and power relations have remained relevant in political developments: reproduction rights continue to feature prominently, whether in narratives of future worst-possible scenarios, or in speculative fiction. Lastly, this essay proposes that using Speculative Fiction in the L2 classroom can increase learner motivation. / <p>Slutgiltigt godkännandedatum: 2023-06-02</p>