CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Hayward, Benjamin Bruce |
|---|---|
| Title | Dystopian Descriptions of Reality: Historicizing Patriarchy Through Fiction in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale |
| Summary | This thesis sets out to understand the experiential realities of patriarchy in a 1980s American context through Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. First, fiction and the genre of dystopia are evaluated for their qualities as instruments of historical inquiry. Second, Paul Ricœur’s literary and political theories are combined to create a framework for assessing the political criticism in dystopias, and using this, The Handmaid's Tale is evaluated for its critique of both the rise of the New Right and Radical Feminism in the 1980s. Third, an approach inspired by both New Historicism and feminist criticism is used to show how the literary text unintentionally reveals much more about the patriarchal political forces of its age than even its intentional criticism of the same phenomena. Fourth, this thesis argues that patriarchy in The Handmaid's Tale is best understood through Michel Foucault's theory of power as an all-pervasive network of disciplinary micro-process, which the dystopian world of the text exposes by extrapolating patriarchal power into a physical totalitarian state. Finally, a close reading further reveals the historical patriarchal forces that influenced the text at the very site of its production in 1985, and this raises the question, to what extent The Handmaid's Tale ultimately challenged or merely reproduced the patriarchal literary norms of its era. Despite the difficulties of using literature to understand the past, this study also reveals the strengths of this method as The Handmaid's Tale is shown to be not only a dystopian critique but also a cultural record of the patriarchal pressures of its era. |
| Supervisor | Czigányik, Zsolt |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/hayward_benjamin.pdf |
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