行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
現代反烏托邦文學：察米雅欽與艾特伍德 (II-II)
計畫類別： 個別型計畫 計畫編號： NSC91-2411-H-002-039-執行期間： 91 年 08 月 01 日至 92 年 07 月 31 日 執行單位： 國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所 計畫主持人： 張惠娟 計畫參與人員： 楊瑞櫻，吳建亨 報告類型： 完整報告 處理方式： 本計畫可公開查詢 中 華 民 國 92 年 9 月 8 日摘要 關鍵詞： 艾特伍德， 侍女故事， 女性烏托邦 本計畫試圖探討加拿大女作家艾特伍德 1985 年的作品《侍女故事》所呈現 的跨界努力。《侍女故事》向被稱為「女性主義的 1984」，且評家多由反烏托邦 的觀點探討之。然則《侍女故事》實跨越了經典反烏托邦小說的傳統疆界。《1984》 與《美麗新世界》皆服膺寫實主義的寫作技巧，《侍女故事》則是一後設文本， 深具開放特質。其敘事架構透過說故事技巧的經營和框架的運用等，呈現不定性 和動態感。 由性別政治的角度觀之，《侍女故事》亦呈現跨界特質。由女性主義的角度 檢視之，《侍女故事》對於女性議題的探討確乎不容置疑。然則，艾特伍德對於 此類議題又刻意採行「反諷」、「曖昧」的敘事策略， 似乎刻意與各種女性主義 主張保持若即若離的關係。其作為一女性主義文本顯有許多弔詭之處。
Abstr act
Keywor d: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, feminist dystopia
This project attempts to investigate the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) as an exercise at border crossing.
Initially hailed as “a feminist 1984” and commonly examined from the perspective of
dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale in fact transgresses the boundary of traditional
dystopia in various ways. While 1984 and Brave New World are marked by adherence
to realism, The Handmaid’s Tale is an open-ended, metafictional text.. Its narrative
structure is characterized by intricate manipulation of the techniques of story telling and framing, shattering any illusion of stasis.
In terms of its gender politics, The Handmaid’s Tale also exemplifies
border-crossing features in its deliberate attempt to be ambiguous, paradoxical, and ironic. The text, on the one hand, appears overtly “feminist” and probes into issues such as sexuality and power and female subjectivity. On the other hand, however, a careful examination of the work would thwart any outright assertion of its feminist stance and render ambivalent its allegedly feminist content. It would seem that, textually as well as ideologically, Atwood chooses rather to remain a threshold figure.
目錄
I． 報告內容： 英文論文 “Bor der Crossing: A Study of The Handmaid’s
Tale”
II． 參考文獻
I、 報告內容
Bor der Cr ossing: A study of The Handmaid’s Tale
In a 1994 interview Margaret Atwood indicated her interest in the depiction of the ability to “move beyond borders” (Dodson 4). Significantly, the spirit of mobility characterizes many of her works, pinpointing her desire to revolt against stagnant dogmas and orthodox tenets. Her much celebrated The Handmaid’s Tale may be a case in point.
Initially hailed as “a feminist 1984” (Davidson 24-26) and commonly
examined from the perspective of dystopia1, The Handmaid’s Tale in fact
transgresses the boundary of traditional dystopias in various ways. What is more, though The Handmaid’s Tale appears overtly “feminist” and is
often a cherished text for feminist readers, nevertheless a careful examination of the work would thwart any outright assertion of its feminist stance and render ambivalent its allegedly feminist content. In this paper I would try to read The Handmaid’s Tale in such a way as to
pinpoint its difference from canonical dystopias and to unravel the ambivalence in terms of its gender politics.
The veil— demarcating boundaries— is a dominant image2 in The Handmaid’s Tale. The white wings of the hoods that the handmaids have
to wear on their heads are their “blinders,” to the effect that “it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything” (Handmaid
40).3 Again, the room that the narrator Offred lives in has a window with two white curtains, which “only opens partly” (Handmaid 9). These veils,
symbolic of a walled-in world, suggest the kind of closure and stagnation that characterize Offred’s world. And indeed in this dystopia symbolic veils are everywhere: the checkpoints on the streets, the Wall with the electronic alarm system, and even the Us— Canadian border. Interestingly, as the story unfolds, we see not only the transgressing of all these boundaries, but also the text itself attempting to break away from the
1 Ever since its first appearance,
The Handmaid’s Tale has attracted much discussion along the line of dystopia. Examples are numerous, ranging from the early “Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and the Dystopian Tradition,” by Amin Malak, to the more recent “The Calculus of Love and
Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition,” by Lois Feuer. Chris Ferns’s discussion of dystopia in Chapter Four of his Narrating Utopia is quite typical, which indicates that among the dystopias there is a “family resemblance” (118).
2 David Coad has a rather interesting discussion of Atwood’s employment of the veil as a
deconstructive textual strategy. See his “Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.”
3
The title The Handmaid’s Tale is abbreviated as Handmaid. All references to the work are from the 1986 Fawcett Crest edition.
dystopian tradition of Brave New World and 1984. If the story of Offred’s
effort to cross the national border and regain freedom for herself is enticing, Atwood’s effort in trespassing on the terrain of dystopia and crossing the textual border is alike enlightening.
Atwood’s departure from the “‘classical’ or canonical form of this inverted subgenre of utopia” (Moylan 121) is first of all a breaking away from realism and a shattering of the illusion of stasis inherent in classical dystopias. While both Brave New World and 1984 are matter-of-fact
presentations of nightmarish and even hellish worlds, The Handmaid’s Tale foregrounds storytelling, unraveling a world of indeterminacy and
undecidability. For example, with regard to her affair with Nick, Offred tells the reader two versions of the story, but then afterwards both versions are denied of their authenticity. After the first version she admits, “I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened” (Handmaid 338). After the second version she again apologizes, “It didn’t
happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly” (Handmaid 340).
In another case Offred’s storytelling adopts a drastically different direction, embracing all versions as true. This has to do with her account of the whereabouts of her former husband, Luke. First she says that Luke was already dead:
Here is what I believe.
I believe Luke is lying face down in a thicket, a tangle of bracken, the brown fronds from last year under the green ones just unrolled, or ground hemlock perhaps, although it’s too early for the red berries. (Handmaid 132)
A page later, however, Offred offers another possibility:
I also believe that Luke is sitting up, in a rectangle somewhere, gray cement, on a ledge or the edge of something, a bed or chair. God knows what he’s wearing. God knows what they’ve put him in. (Handmaid 133)
A third possibility, the most optimistic one, is offered still later:
I also believe that they didn’t catch him or catch up with him after all, that he made it, reached the bank, swam the river, crossed the border, dragged himself up on the far shore, an island, teeth chattering; found his way to a nearby farmhouse, was allowed in, with suspicion at first, but then when they understood who he was, they were friendly, not the sort who
would turn him in . . . . (Handmaid 134)
This section is then concluded by the following statement of Offred, “The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time” (Handmaid 135). Alice M. Palumbo refers to this wistfulness on
the part of Offred as exemplifying “the recuperative power of storytelling” (79) or, more in line with Atwood’s Canadian background, “the importance of storytelling as a survival tool” (81). While one may or may not endorse this interpretation, it is beyond doubt that storytelling does unravel a fictional world far removed from any illusion of mimesis.
In her desire to bid farewell to realism, Atwood also leans heavily on the fantastic. The text, a medley of heterogeneous narratives ranging from factual account of the present, memory of the past, dreams, discussion of semantics, to, appended at the end, the proceedings of an international conference, endorses a perspective drastically different from that held by realist narratives. Through what Lucie Armitt terms the “ghosting strategy”4 (4) in her discussion of contemporary women’s fiction and the fantastic, Atwood is able to conjure up embedded narratives to counter and subvert the main text. Her haunting memories of the past, which constantly surge up in the text and disrupt the narrative flow of her account of the present, is an apt example of the textual subversion at work. Interestingly, in one of her mental excursions to the past she really encounters a ghost-like figure— her daughter:
I step into the water, lie down, let it hold me. The water is soft as hands. I close my eyes, and she’s ther e with me, suddenly,
without war ning, it must be the smell of the soap. I put my
face against the soft hair at the back of her neck and breathe her in, baby powder and child’s washed flesh and shampoo, with an undertone, the faint scent of urine. This is the age she is when I’m in the bath. She comes back to me at different ages. This is how I know she’s not really a ghost. If she were a ghost she would be the same age always. (Handmaid 82) (emphasis
mine)
Then, one page later, we are told that “[s]he fades, I can’t keep her here with me, she’s gone now. Maybe I do think of here as a ghost, the ghost
4 Lucie Armitt employs the term “ghosting strategy” to designate the disruptive potential of an
embedded text within a main text. The embedded text, the “phantom,” would “erupt from within the main body of the text, articulating its subversions . . . from within an apparently orthodox structure” (4).
of a dead girl, a little girl who died when she was five” (Handmaid 83).
Here, through the intrusion of the past into the present, or rather the fantastic into the realistic, the narrative stasis of the text has been shattered, uncovering a cacophony the extent of which can only be matched by the chaos initiated by the Republic of Gilead.
The cacophony of The Handmaid’s Tale is, furthermore, enhanced by
the metafictional quality of the text. Indeed one may even read The Handmaid’s Tale as a metafiction. Prevalent in the text, first of all, are
self-conscious comments on the story and the way the story is unfolding. In the beginning of Chapter 41, for example, before Offred proceeds with her story, she utters her opinion regarding the story and even makes apologies for the way the story proceeds:
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. . . . (Handmaid 343)
I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. (Handmaid
343-344)
Here we can also see that the narrator’s role has been accentuated. In fact, in this metafictional work all those elements that have traditionally been relegated to the background in a realist novel have been foregrounded, with the result that the text becomes rather dynamic and interactive. Besides the narrator, the reader is also given recognition as may be seen in the following passage where the reader is directly addressed by the narrator:
But I keep going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear your s too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other places. . . . By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you. I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. (Handmaid 344) (emphasis mine)
In this passage what is interesting, moreover, is the precarious state of the text, which seems to depend for its existence solely on the tacit agreement
between the narrator and the reader. If the bonding is broken, it seems, the text would be no more. Once again, then, the spirit of indeterminacy and the tenet of undecidability are unraveled, pinpointing the great distance of Atwood’s fictional world from that of Huxley’s or Orwell’s.
Besides being a self-conscious text, The Handmaid’s Tale is also very
much “open-ended,” showing a world that is not finished yet and everything is just “in the process.” Chapter 38 is a case in point. Here Offred encounters her old friend Moira unexpectedly and is anxious to know what has happened to her. Offred then tries her best to give a faithful account of Moira’s story to the reader:
This is what she says, whispers, more or less. I can’t
r emember exactly, because I had no way of writing it down.
I’ve filled it out for her as much as I can: we didn’t have much time so she just gave the outlines. I’ve tr ied to make it sound
as much like her as I can. It’s a way of keeping her alive. * * * (Handmaid 316) (emphasis mine)
After the three asterisks then the narrative is taken over by Moira, telling us her own story in her own voice. Offred’s anxiety over her inability to “remember her exactly,” her desperate effort to render the story as fully as possible, and the eventual submission of her narrative role to Moira, all suggest the urgency of the storytelling and the immediacy of the story. The story, in other words, is still “in the process” of being finished. The open-ended nature of the work is further accentuated when, at the end of this chapter, Offred again assumes the role of the narrator and comments on Moira’s story:
Here is what I’d like to tell. I’d like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn’t tell that, I’d like to say she blew up Jezebel’s with fifty Commanders inside it. I’d like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn’t happen. I don’t know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw her again. (Handmaid 325)
The many possibilities speculated are in fact efforts against any fixity of meaning, “deliberately cultivat[ing] uncertainty, blurring, ambiguity, flux— all threats to perfect regularity and normativity” (Dvorak 75-76). Formalistically, then, The Handmaid’s Tale has taken a different path,
departing drastically from canonical dystopias. Indeed, as Celia Florén indicates, in The Handmaid’s Tale “the form is so much part of the
content that the content would vary if the form changed” (253).
Some critics hold that Atwood’s choice of a female narrator is also a significant gesture of transgression. Coral Ann Howells, for example, argues that, since “dystopia is a dominantly masculine genre,” Atwood’s female narrator “turns the traditional dystopia upside down” (141). Sharon R. Wilson indicates that “[a]lthough a few dystopias (e.g. Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time) have been invented by women, The Handmaid’s Tale is unusual in being told primarily from the point of view
of a woman who knows very little about the operation of the society” (127). Wilson therefore comes up with the conclusion that “The Handmaid’s Tale is a metadystopian novel in challenging and critiquing
the whole dystopian tradition” (127). One may wonder, nevertheless, whether Offred can sustain the expectation of female agency habitually discovered in a feminist heroine. Throughout the novel, in fact, what strikes the reader is the passivity of the female narrator, who would “turn to jelly” (Handmaid 366) under the slightest of pressure. Early in the
story, when a doctor offers to inseminate her illegally, Offred already tells us that “[i]t’s the choice that terrifies me” (Handmaid 80). Later,
witnessing a man on the street suddenly grabbed by two “Eyes,” Offred says, “What I feel is relief. It wasn’t me” (Handmaid 220). Indeed the
spirit of resignation is what constantly surges up in her narrative, characterized by statements such as “[w]hy fight? That will never do” (Handmaid 290) and “[g]ive in, go along” (Handmaid 324). Her passivity
reaches its climax when another handmaid Ofglen wants to help her to escape but she declines the offer. She explains, “The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom. I want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him” (Handmaid 348). Yet her love
for Nick, her Commander’s chauffeur, can hardly stand any test at all. After learning the news of Ofglen’s death Offred is completely shattered. She prays:
Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. Now that you’ve let me off, I’ll obliterate myself, if that’s what you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly become a chalice. I’ll give
up Nick, I’ll forget about the others, I’ll stop complaining. I’ll
accept my lot. I’ll sacrifice. I’ll repent. I’ll abdicate. I’ll renounce. (Handmaid 367-368) (emphasis mine)
Given the passivity of Offred, one may wonder whether she is the right kind of heroine to carry out the mission of subverting the male dystopian
tradition. Atwood herself, in a speech entitled “The Handmaid’s Tale: A
Feminist Dystopia? ”given on November 17 1998 in Rennes, France in front of 450 students, attempts to address this issue:
Is the protagonist a feminist heroine? I don’t think so. I think she is an ordinary sort of person caught up in extraordinary circumstances. She proposes no solutions beyond escape. You can’t think of her as a person who given the chance, would set up a planned society of her own— that is, would set up her own attempt at utopia. She’s somebody who wants to just live her life. (24)
From another perspective, however, the ambivalence of Offred as a feminist heroine does point out something unique about the gender politics of The Handmaid’s Tale. Gender is surely among the primary
concerns of the work. One may readily detect many themes that The Handmaid’s Tale shares with other feminist novels. The tie between
sexuality and power, for example, is a dominant issue in the work. The control of women’s reproductive power by the state, the obligatory division of women into various roles (including the category “Unwomen” for those who cannot fulfill any of the roles), and the subversive undercurrents represented by the various liaisons threatening to disrupt the status quo all provide insight into the intricate relationship between sexuality and power. Again, the issue of female subjectivity and identity is also conspicuous in the work. It tends to contrast sharply the past with the present to pinpoint the repression of women in the Republic of Gilead. For example, in one of her monthly visits to a doctor, Offred is shocked because the doctor uses the term “sterile” to designate the Commanders. Offred describes her own response as follows:
I almost gasp; he’s said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is
no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law. (Handmaid 79)
In this highly stratified world, then, woman is only an object, a commodity to be exchanged. It’s not possible for her to quest for female subjectivity, and she is even denied of her own identity.5 In this regard the work’s discourse on the female body is quite interesting. Again Offred contrasts the past with the present:
5
In Chapter 14 Offred says, “My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden” (Handmaid 108).
I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. . . .
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. (Handmaid 95)
It is this reduction of her identity to her reproductive function merely that makes her want to avoid her own body. In another passage about her taking a bath there is therefore the following description:
My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated. . . . I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that deter mines me
so completely. (Handmaid 82) (emphasis mine)
This keen awareness of the female body as restrictive, however, is rendered suspect when juxtaposed with another passage focusing on the slogan of feminists in the past, one of whom is Offred’s mother:
Behind this sign there are other signs, and the camera notices them briefly: FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY. RECAPTURE OUR BODIES. DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN’S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE? Under the last sign there’s a line drawing of a woman’s body, lying on a table, blood dripping out of it. (Handmaid 154) (emphasis mine)
Here then the irony is explicit: the effort of a whole generation of feminists amounts to nothing. Even worse: the call for recapturing the female body leads to the imprisonment of women. The female body has become a prison for the new generation. It is clear, then, that what Atwood attempts to do in The Handmaid’s Tale is not so much offering
some more feminist tenets but rather a reconsideration and reexamination of feminist issues. She chooses to remain ambiguous, paradoxical, and ironic in her work. She deliberately inserts disturbing elements into her text, thwarting any outright assertion of her feminist stance and render ambivalent her allegedly feminist content.
Some critics have gone so far as to deny Atwood’s feminism. Sandra Tomc, for example, is quite suspicious of Atwood’s feminism. She
argues:
For a novel so overtly offered as a piece of feminist doctrine,
The Handmaid’s Tale delivers a curiously, and, for Atwood, an
unwontedly, conservative interpretation of women’s exemplary social actions, advocating what looks more like traditional femininity than an insurgent feminism. (82)
Tomc further points out that “what concerns her [Atwood] is not a feminist politics of emancipation, but the nationalist politics of self-protective autonomy which . . . eventually translates into an advocacy of traditional femininity” (82). This interpretation, however, is not convincing. If, according to Tomc, “[i]n Atwood’s career-long promotion of Canada’s cultural autonomy from the United States, national and gender issues have had for her a commensurate and almost interchangeable status” (82), Atwood nevertheless does not endorse any “politics of self-protective autonomy,” be it national or gender. The Handmaid’s Tale is in fact a critique of essentialism. The advocacy for a
women’s culture by 70s separatist feminists, among whom Offred’s mother has been a prominent one, ironically materializes in a brothel in the Republic of Gilead. The brothel was a hotel in the past, but now “it’s full of women” (Handmaid 305) who used to be sociologists, lawyers,
business executives, etc. (Handmaid 309). Again, Atwood’s critique of
any essentialist conception of women’s sphere is shown in one of Offred’s comments on her lesbian friend Moira:
I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away, I said. You couldn’t just ignore them. (Handmaid 223)
The self-protective autonomy, in other words, remains ephemeral. Atwood, it would seem, chooses rather to remain ambivalent. There are many evidences in the novel pointing to her ironic awareness of the limitation of any gender discourse.
In what may be termed her demythologizing of feminist assertions, Atwood first of all resorts to the technique of parody. The ideal of a woman’s space, culminating in Woolf’s “a room of one’s own,” is realized in a distorted way in the room that Offred occupies. As she describes it in the beginning of Chapter 2:
ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. (Handmaid 9)
This room, exclusively belonging to Offred, seems to be the room that Woolf hankers for. Yet in fact the room is a mere parody of Woolf’s. The description immediately following belies the treacherous nature of the room: “There must have been a chandelier, once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to” (Handmaid 9). The room is a prison
even, though Offred tries to tell herself to think otherwise:
But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a pr ison but a pr ivilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or. (Handmaid 10)
(emphasis mine)
This play on words— prison/privilege— further unravels the parodic nature of the text. Indeed parody is significant in the work, and may account for the appearance of the mirror image. On example may suffice. Describing the hallway adjacent to the room, Offred says:
There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision toward it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A sister, dipped in blood. (Handmaid 11)
Here Offred describes herself in the mirror as “dipping in blood.” This shift from the “red” color of her cloak to “blood” signifies the distortion of her status and the suffering she has undergone. The reduction of “redness” to “blood” is furthermore a reductio ad absurdum of the quest
for a female space, as the “space” now shrinks to the space inside the womb, and Offred’s fate is dictated by the blood there. As Offred describes:
I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear. . . . Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. (Handmaid 95) (emphasis mine)
This space ironically does not allow any female autonomy but rather is a symbol of confinement. The description of a sister dipping in blood,
moreover, is ominous as it unravels the cruel reality about female bonding in the Republic of Gilead and further contributes to the demythologizing of feminist assertions that Atwood is conducting.
Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale in fact attempts to lay bare the
vulnerability of “utopian” concepts such as “sisterhood” and “female bonding.” As her text makes it clear, the kind of sisterhood and bonding that many feminist works celebrate6 is often an imposed harmony ignoring the underlying conflict due to differences in class. Through the relationships between the Aunts (instructors imposing discipline) and Handmaids, the Marthas (kitchen maids) and Handmaids, and Commanders’ Wives and Handmaids, Atwood poignantly portrays how the discourse on Woman may have ignored the real plight of women, and that in many aspects women are not a transcendental category but rather are divided by conflicting interests. In the very beginning of the work, the demythologizing of women as a unified entity is focused on the Handmaids’ difference from the Aunts. While the Handmaids huddled together in a gym, losing their freedom, “Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts” (Handmaid 4). Or consider the unforgettable Aunt Lydia who, “in
her khaki dress, a pointer in her hand” (Handmaid 144), is always full of
moral lessons to teach the Handmaids: “Her voice is pious, condescending, the voice of those whose duty it is to tell us unpleasant things for our own good. I would like to strangle her” (Handmaid 145).
The last sentence clearly reveals the deep antagonism between the Aunts and Handmaids. Again, Offred tells us, “The Marthas are not supposed to fraternize with us” (Handmaid 15), and she proceeds to probe into the
meaning of the term “fraternize”:
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that.
He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the
Latin. (Handmaid 15)
This etymological study does foretell a world in which sisterhood is hardly possible. This bleak fate of sisterhood— the awareness that class is a factor impeding the beautiful dream of sisterhood— is further portrayed in the relationship between Serena Joy, the wife of Commander Fred, and Offred. Their difference is symbolically articulated in terms of their
6
The 70s feminist utopian novels, especially those oriented toward separatism, may be a case in point. See, for example, Sally Miller Gearhart’s 1979 The Wanderground.
different locales:
This garden is the domain of the Commander’s Wife. Looking out through my shatterproof window I’ve often seen her in it, 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 for tying the flowers into place. . . . Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for. (Handmaid 16)
While the shatterproof window symbolizes the gap between the two, Offred nevertheless remembers that in the past she once had a garden: “I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the fingers” (Handmaid 16-17). This pastoral charm thus leads her to a beautiful
dream of sisterhood:
I wanted, then, to turn her into an older sister, a motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me. . . . I wanted to think I would have liked her, in another time and place, another life. (Handmaid 21)
Of course the dream remains a mere dream: “But I could see already that I wouldn’t have liked her, nor she me” (Handmaid 21). It is clear that by
these examples Atwood is commenting on the illusive nature of the idea of female bonding. Through poignant stories of these women characters she attempts to lay bare the vulnerability of celebrated concepts of feminism.
Atwood, furthermore, has something unique to say about the issue of feminism and science/technology. The feminist critique of science has pointed out that “[t]he politics of science have included woman within the gaze of science but have excluded her from the practice of science” (Tuana vii). Marge Piercy’s Woman of the Edge of Time, for example,
describes how a poor Chicano woman is victimized by the medical institution and how the male doctors dominates and objectifies her. Atwood, however, gives an ironic turn to this critique. In the Republic of Gilead, we are told, as tradition is respected in every sphere of life, giving birth is no longer aided by technology or supervised by doctors. Even though sterility rate is high and the percentage of abnormality in babies is one in four due to environmental pollution, still no technological aid is allowed. As Offred comments:
something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell
once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would
be the point of knowing, anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term. (Handmaid 143)
(emphasis mine)
In the special occasion of the Handmaid Ofwarren’s delivery, male doctors are still summoned, but they are left idle outside— “they’re only allowed in if it can’t be helped” (Handmaid 146). Offred thus recalls the
old days when doctors were “in charge”:
It used to be different, they used to be in charge. A shame it was, said Aunt Lydia. Shameful. What she’d just showed us was a film, made in an olden-days hospital: a pregnant woman, wired up to a machine, electrodes coming out of her every which way so that she looked like a broken robot, an intravenous drip feeding into her arm. Some man with a searchlight looking up between her legs, where she’s been shaved, a mere beardless girl, a trayful of bright sterilized knives, everyone with masks on. A cooperative patient. Once they drugged women, induced labor, cut them open, sewed them up. (Handmaid 146)
This account can be very aptly inserted into any feminist work critiquing male science. However, Atwood would rather like to remain ambivalent, since the irony is that the alternative may even be worse. After the passage quoted above there is the following quotation from the Bible: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Handmaid 146). What, then, may the feminist
critique of science lead to? Can that in fact mean more suffering for women? Here then we see Atwood once again refuses to be pinned down by any theory and chooses rather to remain a threshold figure.
To recapitulate, The Handmaid’s Tale is an eloquent example of
Atwood’s effort at border crossing. Textually as well as ideologically, The Handmaid’s Tale exemplifies features that are transgressive and
disruptive. The phrase— a feminist 1984— can never be an adequate label
for The Handmaid’s Tale as it departs significantly from the track of
its gender politics on the other. Atwood’s revolt against stagnant dogmas and orthodox tenets indeed greatly contributes to her uniqueness as a contemporary writer.
Works Cited
Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. New York: St.
Martin’s Pres, 2000.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986.
---. “The Handmaid’s Tale: a Feminist Dystopia?” Dvorak 17-30.
Coad, David. “Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literature and Psychology 47 (2001): 54-67.
Davidson, Cathy N. “A Feminist 1984.” MS (February 1986): 24-26.
Dodson, Danita J. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Critique 38.2 (Winter
1997): 9 pp. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. National Taiwan University Lib.,
Taipei. 24 Feb. 2003.
Dvorak, Marta. “Subverting Utopia: Ambiguity in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Dvorak
73-86.
Dvorak, Marta, ed. Lire Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale. Rennes Cedex:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999.
Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature.
Liverpool Univ. Press, 1999.
Feuer, Lois. “The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the
Dystopian Tradition.” Critique 38.2 (Winter 1997): 83-95.
Florén, Celia. “A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.” Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Eds. Chantal
Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, and José Angel Garcia Landa. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1996. 253-264.
Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. 1979. Boston:
Alyson Publications, 1980.
Howells, Coral Ann. “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Nischik 139-156.
Malak, Amin. “Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and the Dystopian Tradition.” Canadian Literature (Spring 1987): 9-16.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000.
Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, N.Y.:
Camden House, 2000.
Palumbo, Alice M. “On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Nischik. 73-86. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976.
Tomc, Sandra. “‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism.” Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ed. & intro. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea
Tuana, Nancy. “Preface.” Feminism and Science. Ed. Nancy Tuana. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989. vii-xi.
Wilson, Sharon R. “Beyond Colonization: The Handmaid’s Tale as a Postmodern and
Postcolonial Metafiction.” The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood. Ed. Marta
II、 參考文獻
Avellone, Chris. Dystopia. Trident, 1994.
Bammer, Angelika. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s. New
York & London: Routledge, 1991.
Barr, Marleen. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: U of Iowa
P, 1992.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
---. The Utopian Function of Art & Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT P, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. Margaret Atwood. Chelsea House, 2000.
Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Wesport, Conn. & London: Greenwood Press, 1994.
---. Dystopian Literature: A Theory & Research Guide. Westport, Conn. & London:
Greenwood Press, 1994.
Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Duncker, Patricia. Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Fand, Roxanne. J. The Dialogic Self: Reconstructing Subjectivity in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood. Selinsgrove: Susguehanna UP, 1999.
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1989.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London:
Routledge, 1988.
---. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Jones, Libby Falk, & Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds. Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative.
Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, 1990.
Kolakowski, Leszek. “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Vol. 4. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Salt Lake City: U of Utah
P/Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia & Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987.
---. The Concept of Utopia. New York & London: Philip Allan, 1990.
Manuel, Frank E. & Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World.
Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1979.
Marin, Louis. “Frontiers of Utopia: Past & Present.” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (Spring
1993): 397-420.
1988.
Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer & the Tradition of Literary Utopia. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction & the Utopian Imagination.
New York & London: Methuen, 1986.
---. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press,
2000.
Nicholson, Colin, ed. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Nischik, Reingard, ed. Margaret Atwood: Works & Impact. Camden House, 2000.
Palmer, Paulina. Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice & Feminist Theory. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Patai, Daphne. “Beyond Defensiveness: Feminist Research Strategies.” Women & Utopia: Critical Interpretations. Eds. Marleen S. Barr & Nicholas D. Smith.
Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1983. 148-169.
Patrick, J. Max & G. R. Negley. “A Definition of ‘Utopia.’”Twentieth Century Interpretations of Utopia: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. William Nelson.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 108-109.
Ruppert, Peter. Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias.
Athens & London: U of Georgia P, 1986.
Slusser, George, et al., eds. Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society. New York: AMS Press, 1999.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science fiction: On the Poetics & History of A Literary Genre. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1979.
Waugh, Partricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London: Routledge,
1989.
---. Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism. London: Edward Arnold, 1992.
Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism.
New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Feminist Fiction and the Postmodern Challenge.” Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Westport, CT:
III、計畫成果自評
在研究計畫的「背景與目的」中，本人曾強調艾特伍德《侍女故事》的研究， 可以見證傳統反烏托邦論述的侷限。在研究計畫的「重要性」中，本人亦特別指 出《侍女故事》是對於經典反烏托邦文學的改寫。本人所寫就的英文論文”Border Crossing: A Study of The Handmaid’s Tale” 即試圖探討《侍女故事》所呈現的跨
界努力。該文由文本和性別政治二個角度，指出《侍女故事》和經典反烏托邦小
說截然不同的風貌。故研究內容與原計畫甚相符。論文並將投稿至學術期刊，以 期能與學界進一步對話
