Abstract

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale presents its reader with an exercise in learning how to read for survival. The novel argues for a reading that combines emotional and intellectual perception and it demonstrates that without the combination of feeling and thinking, political meaning is lost. Atwood sets her novel in a future America, called Gilead. Pollution and war have resulted in a depletion of the white elite population and after a takeover of the government a stern religious patriarchy institutes a new regime dedicated to increasing the white population. Reproductive control always implies control of women, and Gilead first deprives the female population of all economic power and then divides them into five subjugated classes: Aunts, who do the dirty work of the revolution; Wives, who, past childbearing age, are married to the commanding elite; Econowives, women incapable of producing children, who marry the working classes; Marthas, servants of the Wives; and Handmaids, who have previously proven their ability to produce children and now are to do so for the elite Commanders. The futurist setting allows Atwood to invent words, reassign meanings, and explore the implications of a patriarchal language involved in creating an especially misogynist world. The three sections of the novel-the dedication, the tale itself, and the historical epilogue-combine to produce a text which comments on itself, on the act of authorship, and on the act of reading. Within the story itself, three narrative