I found myself thinking about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale after a brief interaction at a talk at the recent Utopian Studies Conference last weekend. Like the last conference I attended, the conference went well and the panel focusing on feminist utopias and dystopias might have been my favorite panel of the conference. About half the papers of the final panel I attended focused on the novel and the recent HBO adaptation of the novel. The papers by Claire Curtis and Kate Meakin critically examined the adaptation and the way it diverged from the original material of the novel. In both cases, the presenters were critical of the adaptation and particularly its transformation of the originally white nationalist republic of Gilead into a more integrated if equally patriarchal construction. The second presenter, Kate Meakin, went further to explore the way that those troubling aspects of the tv series translated into the recent protests in support of women’s rights that appropriated the image of the Handmaid. She noted that it was particularly problematic to embrace the phrase, Make Margaret Atwood fiction again when the policies being protested had a long history in the oppression of women of color. Far from being a product of Margaret Atwood’s imagination, most of these policies had been enacted to restrict the reproductive rights of women of color, a point that Atwood herself makes in the novel itself.[1]
In the comments section, I brought up the issue of the protests and noted that the protests tended to ignore the larger framing of the novel, one in which the Handmaids are in some sense relatively privileged in comparison to the women sent to deaths in the colonies or the African-American population who were almost certainly exterminated within the framework of the novel. The panelists were rightly critical of my poorly chosen framing of the analysis. Privilege is certainly the wrong word to use in conjunction of a population who must face the sort of intense domination and sexual violence that the Handmaids face, but the comment does gesture towards the nuanced manner that the fictional republic used to avoid the construction of a rebellion in the form of a ‘women as a class.’ The narrative marks the forms of resentment that create divisions between the Handmaids and the Marthas as well as the even wider gulfs between these figures and the various wives within the republic, who themselves are divided by class within the white republic. At the same time, those figures are incorporated within the republic even as they are systemically excluded from its public sphere distinguishing them from the women who are exiled to the colonies, the Jezebels on the margins of the society, and the populations exterminated by the regime.
One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the way that the book explores this dense disciplinary network of surveillance through the interior voice of the Handmaid, Offred. As Atwood notes in her earlier comments on the novel, Offred isn’t a rebellious figure and is a figure that tries to survive in the society as it exists, even as she tries to find a way out of it. Atwood goes even farther, referring to the character as a ‘coward.’ As one of the panelists, Claire Curtis, noted, the desire to survive within the book and the show often comes at the expense of others. For my interpretation, the desire to survive also involves a need to engage with the rules set that is created by the Gilead Republic, an engagement that unavoidably involves a degree of internalization of those very rules. The figure of Offred becomes the vehicle to explore this deeply ambiguous mixture of a desire to escape, to rebel against the republic and at the same time, the perhaps even necessary complicity with that oppression both against herself and other populations.[2] The resentments over the small differences in the regime’s treatment of different groups of women and the slights from other women are richly represented in the figure. It also captures the way that the threat of exile or death becomes another way to get the wives, handmaids, and marthas to perform the role of enforcers of their own oppression.
In this sense, the novel provides a much more thoroughly developed feminist analysis than I had previously given it credit. The Gilead Republic operates through a mixture of direct and indirect patriarchal sovereignty and, at the same time, the deployment of the techniques of sexuality that Foucault discusses in his first volume of The History of Sexuality. This combination winds up taking the form of a sort of diffused panopticism, which in turn leads to a kind of internalization of the logic of the regime by the women who live within it. That internalization doesn’t take the form of some sort of blanket brainwashing, which would have brought the novel into the kind of broad satirical critique that one gets from The Stepford Wives. Instead, it entwines that complicity with the very real and understandable desire to survive. In this sense, the republic succeeds by producing a sort of stasis, shifting the antagonism of the women of the society from dominant structures of that society to each other. In this sense, the disciplinary mechanisms of the society diffuse antagonism and allow for a functioning system. Most of the women within the novels are aware that the society is oppressive, but at the same time are far more consumed by the micro-conflicts between the various groups of classification set up by the republic. The disciplinary mechanisms operate through a process of individualization, depending on often deeply personal apparatuses of control, as well as the construction of a grid-like pattern of intelligibility, creating groups with their own functions, rights and responsibilities. Difference is both manufactured at the behest of patriarchal power and at the same time meaningfully creates differences within those dominated groups, inhibiting the possibilities of rebellion.
[1] Interestingly, Atwood has herself strongly embraced the structure of the protests as well as played a significant role in structuring the new television series. In this sense, we’re returning to the book to not only critique the reception of the novel, but the revised authorial interpretation of the work
[2] The paper by Claire Curtis particularly focused on the question of survival and the implications of the protagonists decision to survive on those around her.
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