Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships

2 Those who see Offred as a rebel, such as Michele Lacombe, Hilde Staels, and David S. Hogsette, cite her irony, her language play, her insistence on retaining personal memories, and even the fact that she \"wrote\" the Tale in the first place as subversive.1 For Coral Ann Howells and others such as Hilda Staels, storytelling is Offred’s means of survival and resistance, reinforcing her identity and challenging those who would silence her (93). The problem with this view is that she did not in fact \"write\" anything; as numerous critics have reminded us, the text we have is a much later reconstruction — by male scholars with not very feminist opinions — of audiotaped fragments. Offred commits nothing to paper because she cannot and she would be in serious trouble if she tried. Similarly, Jeanne Campbell Reesman argues that Offred’s \"voice offers a moving testament to the power of language to transform reality in order to overcome oppressive designs imposed on human beings\" (6). While it may be true that Offred transforms her own reality, Gilead remains as fictionally real as ever, and as the Historical Notes tell us it gets even worse after Offred’s account (e.g., 316). Carol L. Beran says that \"Offred’s power is in language\" (71), but we need to ask how much power that truly is. If this is resistance, as J. Brooks Bouson notes, it is a very silent and ineffectual kind (147).

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Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

An End to an Audience

Combining dystopian with feminist fiction tends to lead to literature that feels current, yet evergreen because it deals with enduring human problems. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power are complementary examples of feminist dystopian fiction that reveal contemporary concerns related to the issues of gender roles, abuse of power, and equality. This paper will use constructivist feminist notions to examine gender roles and relationships in these two texts.

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A Gender's Apocalypse: a Comparison of Power Relations in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" and Naomi Alderman's "The Power"

My article explores how Margaret Atwood deconstructs dichotomous visions of women and proposes a reconstruction of women’s identity in the dominant socio political context, suggesting alternative aesthetic systems. This implies self-knowledge and acceptance of both the good and the bad side of their identity; the acknowledgement of this reality is required in order to survive. This acknowledgement engages the readers in a process of critical thinking about the world that surrounds them, that is, a world of language, though the story also refers to a ‘real’ world where things have happened and might occur again. Atwood’s technique of both referring to a physical world and revisiting myths, fairy tales and literary classics gives space to a rethinking of the rules and roles of the dominant society. At the same time, it questions the readers’ position in this world as well as power relations in society.

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An Intertextual Reading of the Politics of storytelling in The Edible Woman, Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

In the light of Atwood's "Basic Victim Positions" as stated
 in Survival, the women in The Handmaid's Tale embody a wide spectrum of mental
 responses in the face of traditionalist oppression. Most interesting of all is
 the Narrator in her dynamic complexity. While the mental states of the others
 may be seen to constitute a kind of guidebook of recognizable but undesirable or
 unrealistic options, her honest, patient and courageous struggle for freedom and
 dignity, and her ultimate triumph through love and the power of words, redeem
 her earlier indifference and establish her as a woman who elicits not only
 compassion but respect.

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Michael Foley

Papers

"Basic Victim Positions" and the Women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale