瑪格麗特．愛特伍德反烏托邦小說《女僕的故事》中的性別政治：女性的壓迫與抵抗

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(1)Wang 1. Introduction Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Canada, in nineteen thirty-nine, is one of the most brilliant writers in contemporary Canadian literature.. As a versatile and prolific writer, she. has produced eight novels, ten books of poetry, three short story collections, numerous essays and reviews, some children books, and so forth.. In late 1990s, her works have been. translated into more than twenty languages and published in twenty-five countries. has been awarded many important international prizes.. She also. The novel The Handmaid’s Tale has. won the author the Booker Prize in Britain, the Governor General’s Award in Canada, the Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Prize, and the Los Angeles Times fiction prize in the United States.. Because of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood is described as “the most distinguished. novelist under fifty currently writing in English” (qtd. in Howells 1). Atwood has become Canada’s most renowned writer, and one of its most profitable exports. Furthermore, the author has actively participated in Canadian politics and its feminist movement.. She believes in the social function of art and the writer’s responsibility to the. reader. Her works are mostly connected with contemporary social and political issues. She considers that literature is attached to politics: writing is a political act.. She writes. books and she also studies them. She thinks that a literary work can both offer people ideas and lead them away from oppression. (1982, 203).. Atwood regards a writer as “eye-witness, I-witness”. Atwood assumes that “art is a moral issue, and it is the responsibility of the. writer artist not only to describe her world, but also to criticise it, to bear witness to its failures, and finally, to prescribe corrective measures－perhaps even to redeem” (Rigney 1). Hence, as a writer, Atwood is much attracted to the Amnesty International because of the distinct morality in her works: “all it does is tell stories. I make the story known. stories have a moral force, a moral authority which is undeniable” (1982, 203).. Such. For instance,. in Atwood’s Bodily Harm and Life Before Man, the moral is political: “having to do with power: who’s got it, who wants it, how it operates” (1982, 353).. The author explains that.

(2) Wang 2. the meaning of the political is “how people relate to a power structure and vice versa” (Ingersoll 185).. Further, she defines the term politics as follows: “Politics, for me, is. everything that involves who gets to do what to whom. That’s politics….. Politics really has. to do with how people order their societies, to whom power is ascribed, who is considered to have power” (Ingersoll 149).. Actually, Atwood’s definition of politics accommodates her. abiding thematic concerns: her scrutiny of the relations between men and women, which has always been taken by the author as a form of power politics, her engagement with the question of Canadian national and personal identity, and her wider humanitarian concerns with human basic rights and their protection (Howells 6-7). Nevertheless, the issue of gender remains the author’s major concern.. She portrays. the suffering of her female characters confined to their feminine roles in the earlier novels: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle. Atwood is regarded as a feminist writer, for “her protagonists are always explorers through tradition and myth in search of a new identity and in search of a voice, a tongue, a language, an art, with which to proclaim that identity” (Rigney 10). Her works always share the obvious concerns of feminist writing. The author’s political consciousness and her feminism become even more apparent in her later works.. In her eyes, men are more dangerous, when they are in control, or because they. have power. In Liking Men, male power lies in men’s capability to rape and murder women. In addition, Atwood writes poems about tortured women: “You’ll notice that what they have in common / is between the legs….. Who invented the word love?” (1981, 55). Atwood. often shows her feminist anger in A Woman Issue in criticizing the atrocities perpetrated on women, such as chastity belts, genital mutilation, and prostitution. Moreover, gender is the essential theme for analyzing The Handmaid’s Tale. In the regime of Gilead, people are bereaved of their individual freedom and ordered to serve the state in different types and functions. Men are chiefly divided into six categories: the Commanders, the Eyes, the Angels, the Guardians, the doctors, and the workers.. Women.

(3) Wang 3. are also divided into eight groups: the Wives, the Handmaids, the Aunts, the Marthas, the Econowives, the Unwomen, the widows, and the prostitutes.. The author expands her. political view to encompass a world where both men and women are caught up in the struggle to see “who can do what to whom and get away it, even as far as death” (HT 144). Oppression is always Atwood’s subject in her novels and poetry. Her novels Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, and her poetry entitled True Stories are profoundly political: “all represents the confrontation with power and its universal forms: dictatorship, tyranny, torture and the reality of violence” (Rigney 104). are oppressed in Gilead.. In The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, most men. Male bodies are hung on the Wall.. Male characters, such as. homosexuals, Roman Catholic priests, or Quakers are executed.. If male sexual activity is. restricted, women and the female sexuality are even more harshly violated.. The Handmaids. are valued merely as child-breeders because of women’s subordinated positions to men after the overcoming of the state by the Sons of the Jacobs.. Besides, the state is threatened with. various problems, such as pollution, AIDS, and natural diseases; thus, the national birthrate has fallen to a very low level.. The definition of women as “two-legged wombs” works. entirely in the interests of the patriarchal elite who deny women any freedom of sexual choice or of lifestyle in Gilead. However, The Handmaid’s Tale is very different from the author’s other works, because of its original genre as a feminist dystopia.. The genre of utopia is adopted by some. feminists during the rise of the women’s movement in the1970s. Feminist utopias are used to explore gender issues in society. The utopian novels of the 1970s usually provide the reader with a better world, far away from sexual hierarchy and domination.. By contrast,. Peter Fitting suggests that “more recent fictions no longer give us images of a radically different future, in which the values and ideals of feminism have been extended to much of the planet, but rather offer depressing images of a brutal reestablishment of capitalist patriarchy” (142).. In the dystopian novel of The Handmaid’s Tale, set in 1990s, women are.

(4) Wang 4. totally under the control of male members of the patriarchal households. and maternity are regulated and repressed.. Women’s sexuality. In Fitting’s view, the dystopian novels are taken. as more ominous signs than the utopian texts, used to warn the reader about the real social and political events which take place in the same dangerous circumstances as our present lives do (143).. The Handmaid’s Tale, written in the mid 1980s, describes a patriarchal world. that reflects the New Right ideology in the American culture of that era. The New Right is one of Atwood’s prime targets for its warnings against the declining birthrate, its anti-feminist, anti-homosexual position, its racism, and its strong adherence to the Bible (Howells 129). Above all, the author, as a feminist writer, worries that the American New Right advocates some traditional family values which confine women, because its aims may serve to frustrate the feminist movement of the 70s and 80s, and negate women’s promoted status in society. With the rise of feminist consciousness, women begin to work outside their home as members of the labor force.. Women are gradually becoming economically independent.. The. standard family form in the New Right’s perspective collapses: that is, the white, heterosexual, married couple with children, in which the husband working in the labor force and woman is the wife and mother, who should take care of the children at home. The New Right seeks to restore the patriarchal authority and dominance of husbands, or father-figures, in the traditional American family.. Women, without any sense of feminist consciousness,. are forever relegated to second place as mothers and wives, and receive unfair treatment, under male control, at home.. For instance, the Gileadean society blames women’s. reproductive function for the decreasing birthrate and the constant rise of infertility in the state; thus, women are transformed exclusively to the traditional, passive roles of mothers. Furthermore, the feminist dystopian presents the reader with the Gileadean society based on seventeenth-century American Puritanism and biblical tenets.. As a Canadian,. Atwood also reveals the inherited Puritan culture in Canadian prehistory. The author depicts that, “those nagging Puritans really are my ancestors…the mind-set of Gilead is really close.

(5) Wang 5. to that of interest in Puritans” (Ingersoll 223).. The Handmaid’s Tale, inscribed in the. policies of the New Right, presented as historical reconstruction of Puritan patriarchy. The novel is originally a dedication to two noted figures: one is Mary Webster and the other is Perry Miller (Evans 177).. Mary Webster, one of Atwood’s favorite ancestors, was a witch. hanged in 1683 but she survived from her hanging and escaped.. During the seventeenth. century, many witchcraft persecutions occurred for witches’ destructive power and their threat toward Puritan religion and society. Another dedicatee is Perry Miller, an American scholar of Puritanism, who studies the witches’ story.. As Karen Stein points out, “in. explicating and valorizing the texts they interpret, both Pieixoto and Miller ignore the deeply misogynist strain of Gileadean and Puritan cultures (60). In Historical Notes, the character Professor Pieixoto misreads the Handmaid Offred’s story because of his own masculine prejudices and his suspense of moral judgment in studying Gilead during the conference (Michael 166).. Being a vanguard of American scholarship to celebrate the Puritan tradition,. Perry Miller overlooks the rigidly and punitive society that seeks to destroy Mary Webster, and seems to misinterpret the legend of the witch.. Because of the Puritan tradition,. references compared women to “handmaids of the Lord” and a dissenting woman as “an American Jezebel” are explicitly found in Miller’s histories (Howells 130). also employs many of Puritan practices associated with childbirth.. Besides, Gilead. For example, the. Birthing Stool and the provision of refreshments known as “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes,” which are provided at a birth (Evans 183-4). The Handmaid Janine has to sit on “the lower of the two seats” of a Birthing Stool, and one of the Commanders’ Wives “sits on the seat behind and above Janine,” framing Janine with her legs in order to signify that the Wife is giving birth through her own Handmaid.. And during the childbirth process, other. Commander’s Wives are served desserts, coffee and wine, and all Handmaids are offered grape juice and food downstairs. Gilead is extremely misogynistic in its theocracy and practice. The name of Gilead.

(6) Wang 6. originally comes from a religious story that concerns women’s childbearing capacities (Bal 36).. The Book of Judges delineates that Jephthan of Gilead promises God to offer the first. thing that comes from his house as he returns home, if God permits him to defeat Ammon. After winning the victory from the war field, he returns home and his only daughter is the first sight to greet him.. The father, Jephthan, tells his daughter that she has to die for the. sacred contract he has made with God. But before her death, the daughter asks for two mouths in the mountains to mourn her own virginity. For the daughter, to die without bearing any child is a tragedy for a woman to lament about.. Besides, in Jephthan’s story, it. seems that the daughter cannot disobey her father’s intention and sacrifices her own life to fulfill her father’s promise, which suggests the role of the female role as an object only for male use.. In Gilead, the state manipulates women’s biological and reproductive capacities.. The author creates a late-twentieth-century future society in which women’s function to procreate is of paramount significance, for disease and pollution have led to a catastrophic decline in the birth rate. In addition, the author tries to reflect the current attitudes held by women that they will not have the chance to break through the patriarchal yoke if it is established in a religious light. The patriarchal Gilead appropriates biblical texts to institute and to enforce political control over its people. The epigraph Genesis 30:1-3 indicates the importance of children to women, as well as the theme of male control over women (Stein 61).. Gilead thus reduces the Handmaids to slavery status, being mere reproductive. machines. The Handmaid’s Tale is represented in the form of a dystopia with some revision.. The. Republic of Gilead prescribes a social life of frugality, conformity, censorship, corruption, fear, and terror based on those general terms of existence enforced by totalitarian states in such famous dystopian texts as Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 (Malak 9-10).. Amin Malak claims that what distinguishes the novel from other. dystopian traditions mainly depends on “its feminist focus” (11).. The truth is that sexual.

(7) Wang 7. politics is the author’s plainest theme, and she often uses “fairy tales dramatizing cannibalism and dismemberment of females” (Wilson xii). Atwood’s most pervasive fairy-tale image is probably that of the “dancing girl,” the possessed victim in the famous fairy story, “The Red Shoes,” by Hans Christian Anderson.. But the idea of dancing oneself to death becomes a. crucial irony in The Handmaid’s Tale for the heroine dressed from head to toe in red would face the fate of dancing from a hangman’s noose (Rigney 10).. In the novel, the author. portrays a future patriarchal world where most women, but few men, are victims.. Atwood. states that, without doubt, power is absolute, and that control of sex is also extremely stringent in such a dystopian text as The Handmaid’s Tale (Dodson 99).. The Handmaids. demonstrate the fact of women’s being oppressed through their subordinated position in a male-dominated society as Simone de Beauvoir claims in The Second Sex: For him she is sex－absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not with reference to her; she is the incidental.. As. opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute－she is the Other. (16) However, as a Canadian and a woman, the author denies any easy passivity and naivety for Canadians and women to yield to whatever the power structures that may subject them.. In. the text, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Atwood hints that Canada is “a collective victim; the central symbol for Canada…is undoubtedly survival, la Survivance” (1972, 32). The theme of survival can be implicitly seen through the prevalent scenes of women’s victimization in the novel of The Handmaid’s Tale also.. I suggest that the. Handmaid Offred’s survival indeed results from her resistance, expressed in the form of her storytelling.. The following sections are brief descriptions of the main body of my thesis in. which I mainly concentrate on the connection between Atwood’s text and the theories of Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Catherine MacKinnon, and Hélène Cixous. *****.

(8) Wang 8. The issue of gender has been widely discussed since the publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. In The Second Sex, the key theoretical work of twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir discloses the crucial truth about women’s oppression in history.. She. indicates that the problem lies in the belief that man is the Self and woman is the Other (Beauvoir 16).. Women’s oppression mainly results from their subordination to men. For. Beauvoir, woman’s subordinate position originates from her confinement to the virtue of otherness. Woman is the Other because she is not-man.. Being a woman, she will never be. like man, the Self, who can define the meaning of his own existence. Beauvoir claims that “woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality” (20). As Beauvoir exposes the prevalent gender relations between the sexes in history, she argues that “one is not born a woman, but, rather becomes one” (301). Beauvoir questions the notion of biology as destiny by inquiring into the formation of the female sex.. Woman. is categorized as the second sex, or the other, chiefly for the biological differences between the sexes. Beauvoir points out that biology is one of the most crucial factors for man to determine woman’s subordination: So there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature.. It is often said that she thinks with her. glands. Man superbly ignores that fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones.. He thinks of his body as a. direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed downed by everything peculiar to it. (15) In Beauvoir’s view, the female body justifies the traditional feminine role, the Mother, which woman should undertake in society. However, the reproductive function is manipulated as a.

(9) Wang 9. means for men to control women and cast them in the role of the Other, and women are trained to be what a woman is in a male-centered culture (Chapman 201).. Woman has long. been restricted to her body, and is always required to behave “like a woman.” that woman’s inferiority and oppression are rooted in the female body. course more than simply a womb.. It is evident. But women are of. Beauvoir implies that it is undeniable that one is born. with a sexed body, but gender is not born with sex—it is acquired (Butler 111). Beauvoir seems to make a viable distinction between sex and gender in culture; it is manifest that for Beauvoir woman’s emancipation is impossible without the transcendence of the limitation of her physical body. The Second Sex has achieved the status of a classic of feminist thought, and Beauvoir’s feminism has inspired many later feminists.. Several decades after Beauvoir’s writing, the. issue of gender is further developed by the radical feminists since 1960s.. In my thesis, I. read The Handmaid’s Tale from a feminist perspective. I mainly concentrate on the theories of some prominent radical feminists—Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Catherine MacKinnon and the French feminist Hélène Cixous, in order to investigate the problem of gender in Atwood’s novel. On the one hand, I adopt Millett’s idea to analyze women’s subordination, as depicted in this novel, as exists within the patriarchal institution of gender in the Gileadean society. Further, I apply Rich and MacKinnon’s views to discuss how, in The Handmaid’s Tale, women are biologically controlled and oppressed in maternity and sexuality within the unequal gender relations in patriarchy.. On the other hand, I apply Cixous’s concept to. challenge the popular concept of gender by pointing out its characteristic of fluidity to redefine women’s bodies and selves and for women’s own resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale describes women’s oppression and victimization.. The Republic. of Gilead is a totalitarian state in which women are controlled and oppressed by men.. It is. obvious that gender is the source responsible for women’s oppression in a patriarchal society like Gilead. Many critics pay attention to some feminist issues of the novel, such as the.

(10) Wang 10. objectification of females and the value of women as merely maternal and sexual. The author indeed presents male domination and women’s oppression under patriarchy in a historical context.. Likewise radical feminism demonstrates women’s oppression in the. patriarchal society.. As Valerie Bryson defines radical feminism, “it is essentially a theory of,. by and for women; as such, it is based firmly in women’s own experiences and perceptions and sees no need to compromise with existing political perspectives and agendas” (181). Radical feminists highlight the theme of women’s oppression.. Radical feminists even insist. that women’s oppression is one of the most fundamental forms of oppression in history and they claim that “it is the first, the most widespread; and the deepest form of human oppression” (Tong 71).. Besides, unlike some earlier schools of feminists, they argue that it. is patriarchy that controls and oppresses women: “it is the patriarchal system that oppresses women, a system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition, a system that cannot be reformed but only ripped out root and branch” (Tong 2-3). patriarchy is radical feminists’ major concern.. The theory of. Furthermore, they insist that male power is at. the root of social construction of gender under patriarchy. However, it was Kate Millett who introduced the key concept of patriarchy into modern feminist thought. The term patriarchy is certainly not new to political theory, but the use to which Millett put it absolutely was (Bryson 184). In Sexual Politics, one of the first and most influential texts of radical feminism, Millett claims that the term patriarchy derives from the Greek patriarches, meaning “head of the tribe;” it is central to seventeenth-century debates over the extent of monarchical power (Bryson 184-5).. Further, Millett compares the power of a father with. that of a king over his people and that both are sanctioned by God and nature.. Thereafter,. Millett’s idea of patriarchy concerns a social system based on male domination and female subordination, and is regarded as a standard among current feminists.. And according to. Millett, the term “sexual politics” refers to women’s oppression under the unbalanced power between the sexes in patriarchy. In this respect, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale may aptly.

(11) Wang 11. fit into the discussion of sexual politics as defined by Millett, since the novel depicts an appalling story of how women are oppressed within the patriarchal institution of gender inequality. Further, Millett illuminates how and by what means the sex/gender system determines women’s subordination and oppression in society.. In Sexual Politics, Millett borrows. Robert Stoller’s perspective to illustrate the distinction between sex and gender.. Stoller, as a. famous radical feminist in surveying the topic of gender, argues that “gender is a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations.. If the proper terms of sex. are ‘male’ and ‘female,’ the corresponding terms for gender are ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’; the latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex” (Stoller 9). Millett maintains that patriarchy always exaggerates biological differences between the sexes to make certain of men’s domination, or masculine roles, and women’s subordination, or feminine roles through the process of socialization (Tong 96).. In Sexual Politics, Millett claims that biology, like. sex, is a crucial factor that supports the social institution of gender and determines women’s subordination and oppression in patriarchy. Like Beauvoir before them, today’s radical feminists point out that women are restricted to their biological functions, and are oppressed in maternity and sexuality to take their feminine roles in patriarchal societies.. Rich and MacKinnon are the two major radical. feminists who demonstrate how women are controlled and oppressed biologically in maternity and sexuality within the patriarchal society of gender inequality.. Rich indicates. that male control of women and their bodies through socially institutionalized motherhood brings about an unfair relationship between the sexes and the modulation of women as mere mothers. As Alexander Theroux claims, “the aim of institutionalized motherhood as [Rich’d] have it, is simply that all women shall remain ‘under male control’….. Most women in. history have become mothers without choice’” (qtd. in Cooper 305). Further, MacKinnon points out that male manipulation of the female sex abounds in a male-dominant society..

(12) Wang 12. MacKinnon suggests that male dominance of the female sex leads to gender inequality, and this dominance in turn results in social objectification of the female gender within the social institution of heterosexuality. namely, a sexual object.. Under the institution women’s identity is reduced to an object,. Being a beautiful thing for sexual use of men delineates “women’s. status as second class” people in society (MacKinnon 1989, 130).. MacKinnon claims that. “[her] approach identifies not just a sexuality that is shaped under conditions of gender [,] but reveals this sexuality itself to be the dynamic of the inequality of the sexes” (1989, 130).. In. this thesis, I apply the theories of Millett, Rich, and MacKinnon to my analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale with a better understanding about the formation of gender role and identity and women’s oppression within the social institution of gender under patriarchy. Moreover, Cixous challenges the premises of cultural biological determinism on women, in order to explore a female sexuality that is women’s own bodily specificity, rather than on male sexuality. Cixous urges women to create their own kind of writing, in order to refute Freud’s view of female sexuality, which is said to be shaped by penis envy and Lacan’s point of man’s language acquisition in the Symbolic order. Significantly, she proposes the idea of “the other bisexuality” to reclaim women’s bodies and selves (NBW 84).. As Cixous. points out, “feminine writing” means embarking on “the passage toward more than self, toward another than the self, toward the other” (NBW 112).. Cixous suggests that the. purpose of feminine writing is “not to submit the subject…to the laws of cultural cowardice and habit” (qtd. in Sellers 1996, 18).. Cixous, as a postmodern feminist, tells the ways of. showing respect for the sexual difference and the significance of emancipating female selfhood in the phaollocentric culture. Further, in my thesis, I try to apply Cixous’s concept to discuss the significant theme of how female orality may empower women to resist the patriarchal oppression in Gilead and to search for female selfhood. The Handmaid’s Tale concerns not only women’s oppression, but also women’s resistance through their voice.. I think that the novel indeed portrays the.

(13) Wang 13. power struggles between the sexes, since the author deliberately uses female orality as a means, whether successfully or not, to counter whatever the opposite sex and the fate (of always being in a subordinated position) impose on women.. The Handmaid Offred’s. storytelling may signify the major oral discourse that will lead to woman’s resistance and reacquision of female identity in the text.. I shall concentrate on Cixous’s theory écriture. feminine to examine how Offred, in storytelling, empowers herself through creating woman’s own “writing” to reclaim her body and self. in her theoretical discourse.. “Writing” by the voice is Cixous’s major theme. When confronting the pervasiveness of male power in Gilead,. Offred devotes herself to “writing” with her voice, a possible way for her to resist patriarchal oppression and to preserve the autonomy of female body and female selfhood. By her voice, Offred in her own way works hard to transform herself as a female victim of male violation into the very female victor and survivor.. Furthermore, through her voice, Offred will. reconstruct women’s histories of repression. ***** In Sexual Politics, Millett defines the term politics as “power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another” (SP 23).. Moreover,. Millett argues that sex is a status category with political implications for male-female relationship, which is the paradigm for all power relationships: Social caste supercedes all other forms of inegalitarianism: radical, political, or economic, and unless the cling to male supremacy as a birthright is finally forgone, all systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situation. (SP 487-8) Gender relations, as the term “herrschaft” proposed by Max Weber, refer to “a relationship of dominance and subordinance” (qtd. in Millett 24-5). The Handmaid’s Tale “offers a tragic view of gender relations, in which ‘the oppression of women’ by men is seen as unchanging, universal, and monolithically imposed” (Dopp 43). The Republic of Gilead is a patriarchal.

(14) Wang 14. prototype. The novel represents how a group of women are controlled and oppressed by more powerful men.. The Commanders are the supreme leaders of the Gileadean Kingdom,. in charge of the households and their women the Wives and the Handmaids.. According to. Millett, “sexual domination obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concepts of power” (SP 25). Gender has always been constructed for males to control females in patriarchal societies. Toril Moi argues that Millett’s sexual politics means the process whereby the ruling male sex seeks to maintain and extend its power over the subordinate female sex (26). Millett mentions that “sexual politics obtains consent through the ‘socialization’ of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status” (SP 26). Atwood’s idea of the unfair gender relations in The Handmaid’s Tale seems an echo to Millett’s opinions on the “consent through the ‘socialization’ of both sexes.” In the first chapter, I concentrate on Millett’s view about male control and gender construction, specifically in the formation of woman’s sexual status and role under patriarchy. As Maggie Humm claims, patriarchy is an essential part of individual heterosexual relations, for these are permeated by male power (61).. Millett indicates that patriarchal ideological indoctrination through the. process of socialization is the chief cause for women’s oppression.. Women’s subordination. causes the oppression of women in patriarchy. Actually, The Handmaid’s Tale exposes the two major forms of women’s oppression under patriarchy, i.e., maternity and sexuality. Maternity is Atwood’s major concern and it is also a central issue of The Handmaid’s Tale.. In the first chapter, further, I apply Rich’s concept in my examination of the. oppression of women in maternity in Gilead.. In Of Woman Born, Rich clearly distinguishes. between motherhood as “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children,” and motherhood as “the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential－and all women－shall remain under male control” (WB 13). Rich makes a distinction between the institution of motherhood, which controls women’s reproductive.

(15) Wang 15. capacities, and the experience of mothering that gives women great pleasure and great power. The Handmaid’s Tale portrays a male-dominated society in which the concept of motherhood is extremely distorted. The Handmaid’s Tale may correspond to Rich’s view that women’s experience of mothering is controlled and manipulated through the social institution of motherhood. In Gilead, not only the traditional feminine role as the Wives but also the Handmaids as surrogate mothers under the system of surrogacy indeed involve in the institutionalized experience of being a mother.. What the Wives and the Handmaids. experience is a kind of socially strictly defined, institutionalized motherhood. As Judith Evans claims, “Rich emphasizes the difference between the way being a mother, as institutionalized in our society, is, and the way it could be; and between how some behavior is viewed now, and how it should be” (83). woman is a mother.. Patriarchy has always convinced women that a. In other words, mothering is women’s own one and only job.. Rich. points out the restrictive maternal role that exists in patriarchy: “woman’s status as childbearer has been made into a major fact of her life. have been used to negate any further identity” (WB 11).. Terms like ‘barren’ or ‘childless’ The institution of motherhood may. have originated from the power of the mother and male desire to control the mother.. Men. are jealous and fearful of women’s biological reproductive powers to bear and nourish human life.. Rich suggests that men’s jealousy and fear stem mostly from their perception that “all. human life on the planet is born of woman” (WB 11). For men, women have a unique power to create life. Rich further proves the patriarchal oppression of the female body: Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny. In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (through control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our.

(16) Wang 16. intelligence. (WB 40) According to Rich, the female body is exactly “the terrain on which patriarchy is erected” (WB 55).. Because of the institution of motherhood, women’s bodies are. probably manipulated for male use.. What Rich implies is that women should cherish. their own experiences of mothering and achieve women’s own liberation.. As Jane. Lazarre states, “Rich is more concerned with exploring the relationship between women and their children, between women and their own failed or lost potential power” (qtd. in Cooper 295). In the second chapter, I will discuss how women are oppressed and exploited in their sexuality. Rich argues that “the experience of maternity and the experience of sexuality have both been channeled to serve male interests; behavior which threatens the institutions, such as illegitimacy, abortion, and lesbianism, is considered deviant or criminal” (WB 42). Hence, women are not whole persons but are reduced to different functions. In Gilead, women are categorized into three functions: domestics, sex prostitutes, and reproductive prostitutes.. There are the Marthas, or domestics; the Wives, or social secretaries and. functionaries; the Jezebels, or sex prostitutes; and the Handmaids, or reproductive prostitutes. Women easily become instruments of patriarchal appropriation of female sexuality. In the essay, Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory, MacKinnon works with traditional Marxist arguments and makes analogies between the oppression of workers and the oppression of women. In MacKinnon’s view, the deprivation of workers’ products of their work is to separate them from what constitutes their personal identity.. Similarly, women are taken from their own sexuality and so they are deprived of. female identity.. MacKinnon points out the male control and exploitation of female sexuality.. According to MacKinnon, sexuality becomes the main instrument of men’s domination of women and the very “linchpin of gender inequality” (1982, 533).. MacKinnon argues that. sexuality is the locus of male power and the socially constructed gender relations of male.

(17) Wang 17. domination and female subordination is rooted in the institution of heterosexuality (1982, 533). For MacKinnon, it is the institution of heterosexuality “which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission” (1982, 533).. Further, MacKinnon. explains that “sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women…. Man fucks woman; subject verb object” (1982, 541).. Patriarchal society is filled with the. experiences of sexual objectification such as rape, pornography and violence.. Female. sexuality is appropriated by men and exists merely for men (MacKinnon 1982, 533). Hence, the formation of women’s subordination is “what women learn in order to ‘have sex,’ in order to become women－woman as gender－comes through the experience of, and is a condition for, ‘having sex’－woman as sexual object for man, the use of women’s sexuality by men” (MacKinnon 1982, 531). Moreover, MacKinnon indicates that rape, incest, sexual harassment, pornography, contraception/abortion, prostitution, and lesbianism, the seven specific social forms for men to dominate women through sex (Warner 109).. As Humm claims, sexual violence, or the. threat of violence, may constitute the material reality of women’s lives (116).. Specifically, I. suggest that male sexual violence toward women or abuses of female sex is obviously seen in patriarchal Gilead. The Handmaid’s Tale reflects upon a patriarchal society that is full of male sexual violence or abuse of female sex.. As MacKinnon assumes, “all the ways in. which women are suppressed and subjected－restricted, intruded on, violated, objectified－ are recognized as what sex is for women and as the meaning and content of femininity” (1987, 6).. The novel corresponds to MacKinnon’s idea that the experiences of sexual. objectification within the institution of heterosexuality are inevitably linked with sexual violence and violation on women and also engender gender inequality in patriarchy.. In. MacKinnon’s view, women’s experiences of sexual objectification of rape, pornography, and violence are the true core of women’s oppression (Humm 116). In the third chapter, I will investigate the curious act of the Handmaid Offred’s.

(18) Wang 18. storytelling in The Handmaid’s Tale. she leave us, as readers?. Why does she tell the story?. And what message does. The banning of books and ensuing orality is a common topos in. dystopian literature as in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451; however, the author Atwood adopts the dichotomy of literacy and orality to demonstrate how a comprehensive power structure represses women by means of restricting them to an oral cultural tradition (Klarer 130).. In. the Gileadean society, women are not allowed to read, speak, or write. The final appendix of Historical Notes indicates that Offred commits her storytelling through the way of tape recording. Offred’s storytelling may signify the very positive function of female orality in The Handmaid’s Tale. Through her own voice, the Handmaid tries to subvert the oppression of the female body and searches for female selfhood; further, she also reconstructs women’s repressed histories. Part of my third chapter tries to search and explore the essential connection between orality and body in the novel.. Many critics have discussed the important and meaningful. oral act of Offred’s storytelling. In fact, Offred’s oral tale is a kind of feminine “writing” associated with the female body.. The patriarchal regime of Gilead is obsessed with the. female body and its reproductive system.. Coral Ann Howells maintains that Offred must. have realized that her strength to resist lies in the “writing” of her restricted role and, only through “writing,” the “restricted” self can thus be transformed into the “emancipation of the marvelous text of her self” that Cixous focuses on in her discourse (137). “write yourself.. As Cixous claims,. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the. unconscious spring forth…this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self which she must urgently learn to speak” (1991, 350-1).. In the third chapter, I will mainly apply Cixous’s. theory of écriture feminine to examine the writing on woman’s body.. Lucy M. Freibert. suggests that, in terms of écriture feminine, Atwood demonstrates through Offred women, who are able to take risks and to tell stories, may hence transcend their conditioning to regain their voices for reclaiming their bodies, selves and identities (18). Offred’s oral act of.

(19) Wang 19. storytelling symbolizes her resistance and survival in Gilead. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous emphasizes woman’s libidinal economy, that is, “her jouissance,” “ the feminine Imaginary” that “cannot be identified by man or referred to in the masculine economy” (NEW 82, 90). Feminine writing is precisely the space where jouissance is inscribed. Moreover, woman should write the body because women have turned away from their bodies and they are taught to remain unaware of them; taught to love the opposite sex (NBW 94). Women should write their bodies because women’s inscriptions of themselves as women and their sexual experiences have been appropriated and determined by men (Sellers 1991, 139).. Cixous boldly challenges Lacan’s theory of human. development and Lacan’s “either/or” logic of complete separation from the mother for man to acquire language and to enter the Symbolic Order successfully.. As Cixous urges, woman. should write: “No I-woman am going to blow up the law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now in language” (NBW 94). Cixous exposes not only woman’s negativity in language but also the binary structures traditionally embedded in the masculine system of thinking that grounds the opposition, activity and passivity, between the sexes.. Woman always stays in the passive position under the phallocentric culture: “Either. woman is passive or she does not exist. 64).. What is left of her is unthinkable, unthought” (NBW. According to Cixous, in the Freudean/Lacanian theoretical discourse, because woman. lacks any relation to the phallus or the transcendental signifier, she is always outside the Symbolic, that is, outside language, the place of law, and excluded from the relationship with culture and the culture order (1981, 46). Woman’s passive role within the linguistic system leads woman to be unable to speak, deprived of her power, desire, speaking and pleasure under the Symbolic Order (Cixous 1981, 45). death” (1981, 48).. Hence, Cixous says that, “woman, for man, is. Further, she claims that women “always inhabit in the place of silence,. or at most make it echo with their singing. outside knowledge” (Cixous 1981, 49).. And neither is to their benefit, for they remain. However, through writing the body, woman will.

(20) Wang 20. return to the Imaginary and receive “pleasure, happiness, increased value, enhanced self-image” (NBW 87). Moreover, Cixous proposes the idea of “the other bisexuality” in her theoretical discourse, in order to refute Freud’s concept that anatomy is destiny, that is, to establish female sexuality according to biological sex differences.. As Cixous explains,. Bisexuality－that is to say the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways according to the individual, the non exclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this “permission” one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the body and the other body.. (NBW 84-5). According to Cixous, writing acquires the unique fluidity, having the capacity to encompass and shift freely within the two stereotypified categories of feminine or masculine. emphasizes the role of the mother’s body in feminine writing.. Cixous. Cixous points out that “the. inscription of the rhythms and articulations of the mother’s body which continue to influence the adult self provides a link to the pre-symbolic union between self and m/other, and so affects the subject’s relationship to language, the other, himself and the world” (Sellers 1994, xxviiiii). Further, Cixous believes that women are closer to a feminine economy because “women’s sex-specific experience potential physically to nurture and give birth to an other makes it easier for women to accept the disruptions (to the self) that an encounter with the other can bring” (Sellers 1996, 9).. Cixous insists that, in feminine writing, knowledge of. the self is a precursor to knowing the other, but is not appropriate to the other’s difference, in accordance with the masculine law. Besides, in Cixous’s discourse, she stresses that the maternal voice allows women to write their bodies.. Cixous compares the maternal voice. with “[the] song before the law, before the Symbolic took one’s breath away and reappropriated it into language under its authority of separation” (NBW 93).. Cixous claims. that man lacks such voice which maternal woman has because woman remains constantly.

(21) Wang 21. linked to the maternal “as no-name and source of goods.. There is always in [woman] at. least a little of the mother’s good milk. She writes in white ink” (NBW 94). Cixous’s feminine writing is the main route for performing women’s sexuality and libidinal economy. Furthermore, Cixous proclaims that woman should write, in oral or written language. “Writing” by the voice is a significant theme in Cixous’s discourse of feminine writing.. For. Cixous, feminine writing is not restricted to the rule of masculine writing of “writing by the written” (Stanton 167).. The third chapter of my thesis attempts to highlight how Offred,. through “writing” by the voice, indeed commits herself to woman’s own writing to restore the autonomy of female body and selfhood. break through silence to voice.. Cixous emphasizes that women should write to. As Cixous asserts that “woman must put herself into the text. －as into the world and into history－by her own movement” (1975, 347). And Cixous suggests that the feminine text is as follows: A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there is no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter. (1975, 357) Through “writing” by the voice, Offred will recuperate her body, her self, and her speech.. Traditionally, writing has been manipulated by men; hence, women are. deprived of written language and play the silenced role in history.. In the third. chapter, through Offred’s act of “writing” by the voice, I further discuss how women’s histories are repressed in a male culture of literacy, and the significance to reconstruct “herstory.” The central focus of my thesis is the oppression and resistance of women within the institution of gender, as depicted in Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s.

(22) Wang 22. Tale.. The introduction sketches a brief synopsis of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,. and introduces the theories of the following feminists: Millett, Rich, MacKinnon, and Cixous.. The views of radical feminists, such as Millett, Rich, and MacKinnon,. respond to women’s subordination and oppression within the institution of gender in patriarchal Gilead: particularly, women are oppressed by the traditions of maternity and sexuality.. Moreover, Cixous’s idea outlines the dangers of women’s deprivation. of their identities and histories within the institution of gender and the necessity to redefine the female body and self under the oppression of patriarchal societies.. In. addition, the textual evidence in this novel supports these feminists’ comments on women’s oppression and their research of female selfhood and histories, which constitutes an act of resistance. Reading Atwood’s text side by side with some of the feminist critics’ work, the reader would not only be informed of the unequal gender structure that exists in a patriarchal society, or still in our present world, but also have an in-depth understanding on how and why gender roles and identity are actually a social and cultural construct under which women are devastated, oppressed, and victimized.. Chapter One.

(23) Wang 23. The Oppression of Women in Maternity The Republic of Gilead is a rigidly patriarchal kingdom.. Immediately after the. Handmaid Ofglen’s suicide, Offred finds out that she can “feel, for the first time, their true power” (HT 286). The Handmaid Offred’s word “their” actually refers to the omnipresence of male power in Gilead. The novel degree by degree reveals, through Offred’s narration, the fact that women are subordinated and oppressed by men in this male dominated world. Traditionally, it is through the family, the chief social institution in patriarchy, that women are controlled and oppressed; the family also encourages women’s subordination to men and aggravates the unbalanced power relations between the sexes.. For example, the Wives, the. women of the highest female class in Gilead, are deprived of the jobs and property that they once had in their pre-Gileadean lives, and revert back to the patriarchal prototype of the family, in which they are delegated to inferior positions under men, and they are owned and controlled by their husbands, known as the “Commanders.”. Furthermore, the novel. suggests that women’s position of subordination in the family and the maternal roles they assume (or are forced to assume) are deeply intertwined with the oppression of women. Religion is the major device for the promotion of the manipulation of women’s biological functions and maternal roles in Gilead.. The totalitarian state of Gilead indeed is a theocracy,. in which the Bible is dominant, for the Bible is usurped by men to control and oppress women in their roles as mothers in the families, namely, the “Households” in The Handmaid’s Tale.. Moreover, in the novel, the oppression of women in maternity indeed results from the. experience of the social institutionalized motherhood in the patriarchal society.. Education is. the major means by which men subordinate women as mothers within the institution of motherhood.. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Red Center is obviously manipulated by the. Gileadean state as an occasion for the school to educate the Handmaids, and to force them to accept their tasks as mothers.. By means of the function of education, women, as the. Handmaids, are trained under the “Aunt”s’ indoctrination to function merely as reproductive.

(24) Wang 24. machines for men.. The author Margaret Atwood seems to provide a bleak landscape of. male domination in this dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which forms the author’s indictment of the baldly patriarchal regime’s control over “the female body and its reproductive powers” (Hansen 29).. Under the regime, women’s biological function in. maternity is usurped and exploited in Gilead, for the sole purpose of male dominance. First of all, the regime of Gilead is marked by its rigid, physical boundaries that confine women’s activities.. The chief female character, Offred, one of the numerous. Handmaids in the novel, is permitted to travel only to the center of Gilead for grocery shopping and other errands.. And on her way she is confronted with various kinds of. physical barriers on the way for shopping.. In the first place, she has to leave the Household. through the back door, because the Handmaids are allowed to use the front door only on specific occasions: such as their first visit to their new post or their ceremonial participation in a Birth Day.. The garden outdoors also strengthens the image of boundary with its vivid. “flower borders” (HT 16). Then, Offred and her shopping companion, Ofglen, proceed through a series of checkpoints defended by the Guardians of the Faith.. Eventually, they. may end the shopping trip within the protective boundaries of the central part of town near the ominous “Wall” (HT 31).. The Wall is where any transgressive act is punished.. are often bodies, male and female, hung on the Wall.. There. In addition, the Wall stands for the. extreme reminder of the boundary that defines women’s existence in Gilead. Offred says that she and Ofglen, “stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn’t matter if we look.. We’re supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging. on the Wall” (HT 32). The Handmaids have no options, but only adapt themselves to the patriarchal surroundings of Gilead, and Offred craftily compares herself to a rat during the trip: “Now and again we vary the route; there’s nothing against it, as long as we stay within the barriers. A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze” (HT 165).. The Handmaids are more like hares deprived of freedom in a “maze” which is like a.

(25) Wang 25. trap. However, in Gilead, it is apparent, in truth, that “perhaps the more impermeable and intimidating barriers are those which exist between individuals in the form of strict gender and class segregation” (Myhal 215).. Although Gilead is a society of male control, men do. not escape categorization and strict ranking.. For example, at the top are the Commanders,. who stand for the high-class people and act the role of mastery of the state. Beneath the Commanders are the Eyes, the spying and intelligence operatives of the regime. characters occupy a superior status to that of women.. Male. The Commanders are the male figures. who dominate the Households and his women like the Wives and the Handmaids. Nevertheless, while men hold privileged positions, they are seen as mere functionaries of the dogmatic system of Gilead.. During each monthly Impregnation Ceremony, the Commander. is simply doing his duty to impregnate his Handmaid, Offred; there is no passion, feeling, or emotion involved in this process.. That is to say, men themselves are forbidden to go beyond. their own boundaries to do anything else because of their different positions and functions within Gilead’s plan. On the other hand, the seven categories of the females in Gilead are visually reinforced by the different colors of attires that they wear. The Handmaids are the most recognizable figures in the open field, because they wear red suits; as Offred relates, “everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us” (HT 8). Offred’s scarlet, nun-like uniform also represents her imprisonment in the Handmaid’s role; she calls herself “a sister, dipped in blood” (HT 9). easily-recognizable uniforms.. Other types of women also dress in unique and. In fact, each woman wears a stigma of fixed identity which. indicates her status and function in Gilead. Further, the functional boundaries, reinforced by these different women’s uniforms, legally separate women.. Although the Handmaids are. designated “a position of horror” by the Aunts, they are shunned and despised for their inferior status, even among women themselves (HT 13).. For the Handmaids, as surrogate.

(26) Wang 26. mothers, are indeed the good/bad women, the saintly prostitutes.. Offred describes the. distasteful feelings of the Wife, Serena Joy, towards her when she enters the Household earlier: “What does she envy me?. She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can’t avoid it.. a reproach to her; and a necessity” (HT 13).. I am. Besides, when Offred sees three Econowives. mourning for a baby’s death on the street, Offred points out their hatred for the Handmaids: “Beneath her veil the first one scowls at us. One of the others turns aside, spits on the sidewalk. The Econowives do not like us” (HT 44).. During the large ceremonies like. Salvagings and Prayvaganzas, Offred observes that “our area is cordoned off with a silky twisted scarlet rope, like the kind they used to use in the movie theaters to restrain the customers.. This rope segregates us, marks us off, keeps the others from contamination by. us, makes for us a corral pen” (HT 277).. The image of being caged like an animal typefies. the Handmaids’ inferior position in the state. After the elite Sons of Jacob occupied the United States of the early twenty-first century, women’s positions were drastically transformed.. In Gilead, the Household. embodies the place where women are confined and controlled by men: that is, by the Commanders.. Kate Millett declares that “patriarchy’s chief institution is the family.. It is. both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole” (SP 33).. In Gilead, the Household has replaced the family, the. patriarchal prototype. Further, Millett indicates that the family would lead to women’s subordination and oppression in a male-dominant society: Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of patriarchal state which rules its citizens through its family heads.. Even in. patriarchal societies where they are granted legal citizenship, women tend to be ruled through the family alone and have little or no formal relation to the state. (SP 33).

(27) Wang 27. As Sir Henry Maine, one nineteenth-century historian of ancient jurispredence, points out, “the eldest male parent is absolutely supreme in his household” (122). Offred, once remarks that “the Commander is the head of the household. he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part” (HT 81).. The Handmaid, The house is what. The Commander plays the. role of father in the Household. Besides, Millett asserts that “classically, as head of the family the father is both begetter and owner in a system in which kinship is property” (SP 33). The Wife Serena Joy, as the property of the Commander, is owned and controlled by her husband in the Household.. Millett criticizes the sex role ascribed to women in patriarchy:. “in terms of activities, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male” (SP 26). Being a blue-clad Wife, Serena Joy presides over her home and attends public functions such as the Prayvaganzas, Salvagings, and birthings. The Marthas, primarily domestics seem to enact the role of housewife, because they assist in the reproduction of patriarchy in their practical support of the Handmaids and the Wives in the respective households. In the Household, the Wife often sews in the sitting room.. Usually, she devotes herself to some trivial. domestic affairs as “knitting scarves, for the Angels at the front lines” (HT 13). the aged and infertile Wife Serena Joy can not bear any child.. However,. Instead, the Wife produces. woolen children, that is, those endless Angel scarves she knits. As Offred regards the Wife’s act as: “Her form of procreation, it must be” (HT 154).. Besides, in Gilead, many of the. Wives own such garden as Serena Joy’s, because “it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for” (HT 12).. The silenced Serena Joy continually cultivates her garden. day by day; these gardens seem to be the domains owned by the Wives.. Often, Serena Joy. rules over her depleted kingdom patiently with “her knees on a cushion, a light blue veil thrown over her wide gardening hat, a basket at her side with shears in it and pieces of string in it for trying the flowers into place…the Commander’s Wife directs, pointing with her stick…” (HT 12)..

(28) Wang 28. Serena Joy plays the very tragic role of a wife. The Wife, Serena Joy, is neither the gorgeous lead soprano singing in the television program of the Growing Souls Gospel Hour before Gilead; nor is she an enthusiastic speech maker who makes speeches about “the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay at home” (HT 45). As Offred ironically comments, “she doesn’t make speeches anymore.. She becomes speechless.. She stays in. her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word” (HT 46). All the Wife has to do is to be loyal to her husband and the family.. Serena Joy, trapped in the role of wife, confined to the sanctity of the home, is. “neither serene nor joyous” (Hammer 40).. As the wife, she seems a dying, withered flower.. Offred expresses her chilling feelings towards Serena Joy as she meets the Wife in the Household for the first time: Her blue waist, thickened, her left hand on the ivory head of her cane, the large diamonds on the ring finger, which must once have been fine and was still finely kept, the fingernail at the end of the knuckly finger filed to a gentle curving point. It was like an ironic smile, on that finger; like something mocking her. (HT 14) Patriarchy endows the authority of men through the institution of family.. Millett. claims that “traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children” (SP 33).. Ironically, the Handmaids are “infantilized” and they are. owned by the Commanders (Bouson 138). in households.. The Handmaids are treated as child-like figures. The characterization of infantilization exemplifies the total ownership of the. fathers, the Commanders, of the female young, the Handmaids.. For example, the Handmaid,. Offred, mechanically responses to Serena Joy in an inauthentic, feminine voice as the Wife tries to lay out the ground rules for their relation earlier: “They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll” (HT 16).. Further, treated like a child in the Household,. Offred may not be told certain things. She is permitted to watch television news on the.

(29) Wang 29. evening of the Ceremony. (HT 105).. She is like “a child being allowed up late with the grown-ups”. When she asks a Marthas for a match, she feels “like a small, begging child” (HT. 268). More clearly, the Commander, like a father, reads Offred, the child, “bed time story” from the Bible before the Ceremony (HT 87). The truth is apparent: “through its imposition of a rigid system of hierarchical classification, the Gilead regime effectively robs women of their individual identities and transforms them into replaceable objects in the phallocentric economy” (Bouson 137). From the outset, the Handmaids get involved in the name game.. The Handmaids, as. surrogate mothers, are stripped of their birth names before Gilead. However, the name game means that each Handmaid’s name has multiple hidden meanings in it.. For example,. every Handmaid’s name is called the possessive preposition of and the Christian name of the Commander to whom she is assigned:. such as Of-fred, Of-wareen, Of-charles and so forth.. While having completed a posting to bear babies, the Handmaids periodically abandon those names, assuming new ones in three different households. The name Offred is not the real name of the Handmaid.. On the earlier stage, there is a scene when the Handmaids seem. furtively exchange their previous names in the Rachel and Leah Center, once called the Red Center: “Alma.. Janine.. Dolores. Moira.. June” (HT 4).. Among these female names,. June is assumed probably to be Offred’s true name because it is the only name which is not accounted for throughout the text (Thompson 67).. In fact, a name symbolizes one’s identity.. Women are bereaved of their names and identities.. The name, Serena Joy, is not the Wife’s. authentic name either. Her actual name is “Pam,” as Offred read in a news magazine in the pre-Gileadean life (HT 45).. The infinite interchangeability of the Handmaids’ new names in. different households stresses the deprivation of their self-identities in Gilead.. As Karen. Stein suggests, “the most chilling scene occurs when Ofglen, the partner whom Offred usually meets during the routine shopping trip, is not the usual one she expects” (269). this changed woman bears the same name.. But. Offred describes that terrible moment as she.

(30) Wang 30. encounters the new Ofglen: “Ofglen, wherever she is, is no longer Ofglen.. I never did know. her real name.. Debrah Raschke. That is how you can get lost, in a sea of names” (HT 283).. remarks on the multiple meanings of the name Offred, among which is Of Fred that “suggests her status as object” (265). including women.. The Commanders are the owners of everything in their houses,. The name game proves the general principle of male ownership toward. women and women’s subordination in Gilead’s patriarchal society. Religion also helps men to manipulate women’s reproductive and biological capacities in Gilead. From the outset, in Gilead, there appears the absence of a religious apparatus, the church.. The only church has been converted into a museum that celebrates its Puritan. heritage.. The only other church-like building is occupied by the Eyes as one part of their. crucial headquarters.. Still, the church is replaced by those stores of Soul Scrolls which are. mechanical and confined to only five official and endlessly repetitive prayers with “the toneless metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over” (HT 167). Further, the ministers and the priests do not exist in the Gileadean society.. Instead, the Commanders and. the Aunts are considered as the two chief figures to spread the Word, that is, God’s creeds. The Aunts, like priests, are loyal to their God and maintain their right to quote God’s creeds constantly while instructing the Handmaids.. The Commanders are the only persons who. possess the Bible, and they read the Bible to other members in households. In Gilead, the apparatus of church seems to be replaced symbolically by God’s creeds. In other words, everything seems to run essentially under the control of God.. It is obvious. that those religious trappings of piety are reinforced by the formulaic language that is used by the Handmaids (Thompson 63).. They have to greet each other with “Blessed be the fruit,”. respond to each other with “May the Lord open,” or fill in time with “Praise be” (HT 19, 44). Besides, the crucial image of eye cannot be neglected in the text, because the image of eye symbolizes the omniscience and authority of God.. The Commanders’ black vans are usually. marked with “the winged Eye in white on the side” (HT 22).. When encountering Japanese.

(31) Wang 31. tourists, Offred portrays the interpreter, who is dressed “in the standard blue suit and red-patterned tie, with the winged-eye tie tin” (HT 28).. The folding screen in the doctor’s. office is also emblazoned with “a gold eye” but “with a snake-twined sword upright beneath it, like a sort of handle” (HT 60). Further, each of the machines known as Holy Rollers has “an eye painted in gold on the side, flanked by two small golden wings” (HT 167).. Actually,. the power of religion operates overwhelmingly in Gilead “Under His Eye” (HT 45). In Gilead, the Handmaids wear sparklingly red suits; they are the most visible and noticeable figures in Gilead.. Under the omnipresence of male scrutinizing gaze, the. Handmaids are manipulated in fulfilling their tasks of bearing children.. The most apparent. manifestation of surveillance relies on the male Guardians, the routine police force of Gilead’s politically charged security system (Cooper 49).. When Offred and Ofglen are. shopping, they have to meet the male gaze from the Guardians. As Offred says, “I know they’re watching…[with] their eyes” (HT 22). The Handmaids are constantly exposed to a kind of oppressive, male, scrutinizing gaze in Gilead.. Despite the police apparatus, there. operates a much more clandestine, menacing and violent police organization: the Eyes. When Offred sees Nick for the first sight, she unconsciously regards him as an Eye.. Out of. her worries of being observed, she considers that “perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do” (HT 18).. The Handmaids, watched by these men, cannot do anything transgressive. except for reproduction. On the other hand, His Eye embodies the absolute power of male gaze and patriarchal authority. Further, God’s creeds help to prove His omnipotence, also the mastery of the men in Gilead. One of the daily sayings two Handmaids use to greet each other is that: “Blessed be the fruit” (HT 19). The fruit, which plays the coded symbol for fertility, implies the Handmaids’ reproductive capacities.. The greeting also reinforces the idea that the. Handmaids’ biological function, maternity, is actually sanctioned by God. In the Household, the Commander reads the Bible to the Handmaid Offred: “God to Adam, God to Noah. Be.

(32) Wang 32. ‘fruitful,’ and ‘multiply,’ and ‘replenish’ the earth” (HT 88).. The three words fruitful,. multiply, and replenish indicate God’s blessings towards women’s biological destiny. As the critic Lucy M. Freibert indicates, “the religious trappings that pervade the political structure foster the idea that the primary purpose of the system is to protect women, while the actual purpose is to control them and reinforce the notion that their biology is their destiny” (284). God’s creeds operate forcefully and unconsciously in the Handmaids’ minds and result in their willingness and spontaneity to perform their seemingly sacred role as surrogate mothers. The Handmaids obey God’s creeds faithfully. Offred urgently wishes for her pregnancy: What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled…. Oh God, King of the universe, thank you for not creating me a man. Oh God, obliterate me.. Make me fruitful. Mortify my flesh, that I may be multiplied.. Let me be fulfilled…. (HT 194) However, God’s creeds are transmitted, sometimes wrongly, by the Aunts.. For. instance, from Offred’s previous memory of the Bible before Gilead, she catches and corrects Aunt Lydia’s erroneous “All flesh is weak” to “All flesh is grass” (HT 43). detects the truncations in Aunt Lydia’s quotations.. Offred also. Offred points out that the Aunt does not. go on to say anything about “inheriting the earth” after the sentence: “You must cultivate poverty of the spirit. Blessed are the meek” (HT 60).. Further, Offred refers to the Aunts’. cutting off the sentence of “Blessed are the merciful” without adding the promise to the Handmaids “for they shall obtain mercy” (HT 84).. Besides, the quotation adopted by Aunt. Lydia to describe the Handmaids that “they also serve who only stand and wait” is actually from John Milton’s sonnet When I consider How May Light Is Spent, instead of from the Bible (Thompson 64).. Still, the author reveals the dangers lurking in the process of. institutionalization of the sacred text in the dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (Filipczak 171). The Bible is regarded as “a trapped text turned into a lethal instrument because the regime makes it generate oppressive laws” in Gilead (Filipczak 171).. Further, men’s act of.

(33) Wang 33. transcribing the sentences of the Bible results in the oppression and victimization of women as mothers. The Bible is locked in a special wooden box and it embodies a totem of the totalitarian system in every household. read the Bible.. Only the Commanders are allowed to touch and to. As Offred’s Commander reads the sacred text before the Impregnation. Ceremony: “He inserts the key, opens the box, lifts out the Bible, an ordinary copy, with a black cover and gold-edged pages. The Bible kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it” (HT 87).. The epigraph Genesis 30:1-3. emphasizes Rachel’s plea for children to her husband, Jacob: And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.. And Jocob’s. anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?. And she said, Behold my maid. Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children.. (qtd. in Freibert 282). The biblical story tells us that two sisters, Leah and Rachel, who are engaged in a competition both make use of their handmaids to come up with the most babies for their mutual husband, Jacob.. Here, in the novel, the Commander reads this particular story to his women, the Wife. Serena Joy and the Handmaid Offred.. The story foreshadows an ominous contract. sanctioned by God between the sexes in Gilead.. The real purpose is to produce a baby.. The Ceremony is about the sexual struggle of a man and two women. Three figures, that is, the Commander, Serena Joy, and the Handmaid Offred, participate in the impregnation Ceremony.. And Offred, like Bilhah, bears upon the Wife’s knees.. Pamela Cooper. suggests that “updating in the late twentieth century the misogynous economy of fertility expressed (for Atwood) in the biblical story of Jacob and Rachel, Gilead’s regime positions women as the objects of a deeply punitive, ultimately masterful － but technological, depersonalized－masculine order of surveillance” (50).. The Bible is manipulated by the.