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Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Weiss, Allan |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | 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). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 34 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ayapasuprep.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/9/6/21967966/weiss-complicitydystopiantradition.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/viewFile/12383/13255 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
