Oppression Speech & Mitsein in Margaret Atwood The Handmaid Tale Article Summary BOOKS: THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood’s Article is ATTACHED Tittle:

Oppression Speech & Mitsein in Margaret Atwood The Handmaid Tale Article Summary BOOKS:

THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood’s

Article is ATTACHED

Tittle: “Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” by Luzecicy, Rob

– for this assignments you have to read a summary of the book and then read the article link above, then you will have to write and expiation (1.5 PAGES)

For this:

– write 1 or 2 paragraphs with the main argument of the article

– in a short paragraphs describes the Stories/Scenes Dealt with

– point out the Topics Covered

– in a couple sentences explain something Interesting in the Readings

ATTACHED IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ASSIGNMENT “Where Everything Else Is Starving, Fighting, Struggling” by Cameron Williams Crawford
Main Argument: The article argues that the food that is used within the story shows a difference
between food, race, class, gender, and the politics that was surrounding Hurricane Katrina. This
is because the south has had a constant food security causing heavy food inequality and thus the
African American hunger only sought to increase racial hierarchies. The African American
community now looks at these rich food items as a commodity which they can rarely achieve thus
building this racial hierarchy through a food scarcity.
Stories/scenes dealt with: Cameron elaborates on how Esch would describe food in rich and
decadent ways when it is a type of food that she would often not have access to. Esch hunts down
food to gather what will be needed to survive but the rich white Americans can gather any item
they wish because of the money that they have even allowing them to flee the area before the
hurricane arrives. Esch often describes herself through these rich and rare foods and she will even
describe other important items as food such as when she talks about condoms and says that they
are golden wrappers filled with chocolate. Then she describes her child as a melon which is
important when she discusses how fruit punch is the closest that they have had to fruit.
Topics covered: Food, Class inequality, Food Scarcity, Racial Hierarchies
Interesting readings: He suggest that Esch sees everything through this view of rich and rare
foods valuing important items as rich but items and people like herself to be of little value and thus
not rare or rich food.
Clio 46:3 2017
Rob Luzecicy
Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Perhaps one of the most remarkable claims to emerge from
the scholarship on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the
suggestion that the novel champions a retrograde notion of fem­
ininity (that is, a concept of femininity that tends to be associated
with concepts of the woman as a passive, demure other). I chal­
lenge this claim through an elaboration of the first-person narra­
tor’s ability to engage in genuine human solidarity, even when
forced to endure the most draconian measures of immiseration.
Offred— in often agonizing detail— specifies how the forces of
the Republic of Gilead attempt to destroy her, yet these attempts
fail in the narrow sense that throughout it all, Offred manages to
retain some hope. This victory is significant, in the sense that it
suggests a human solidarity in the face of near overwhelming ter­
ror. A clue to the nature of Offred’s heroism is found in the ubiq­
uity of the forces that are arrayed against her— at virtually every
turn, in virtually every imaginable way, Offred’s identity is at­
tacked by the apparatus of the state. Despite this, Offred manages
to retain her identity as a member of a resistance movement and
embodies the courage to step forward into an ambiguous future.
Offred highlights this ambiguity in the final fines of her first-per­
son narrative: “The van waits in the driveway. . . . Whether this is
my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have
given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be
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Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in The Handmaid’s Tale
helped.”1 The seemingly totalizing force of the Other does not
imply that Offred is reduced to the exemplar of a retrograde con­
cept of a woman. That Offred is the subject of immiseration is a
given. That Offred is a victim is not. Offred is a rebel.
The critical controversy regarding the nature of Offred’s
character reflects a disagreement between Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre on the nature of our being with others
(Mitsein). In his brief elucidation of a subject’s lived experience of
shame, Sartre characterizes the Other as a hostile entity from
which there is no escape. Simone de Beauvoir characterizes
Mitsein in more positive terms. Mitsein, Beauvoir suggests, is our
primary ontological relation (that is, it is the ontological given).
As the ontological given, the Mitsein enjoys an axiological neutrality
in the sense that any normative claim or evaluation is a predicate.
For Beauvoir, our relation with others is ontologically ambiguous.
I suggest that Offred is a rebel because she can speak and be
heard in an extremely oppressive society. This reflects the exist­
ence of a human solidarity— a solidarity that cannot be dimin­
ished, that cannot be broken. By the end of the narrative, Offred
is not identifiable with the subdued, passive, retrograde concept
of a woman. I claim that— contrary to the suggestions of several
contemporary commentators on Atwood’s text— the narrator of
The Handmaid’s Tale is a revolutionary feminist figure who, despite
her immiseration by the Gileadean society, manages to tell her
harrowing tale. The fact that Offred refuses to be ground down,
so to speak, reflects Beauvoir’s concept of being with others.
Elaboration of the Dystopia of Gilead
The characters of Atwood’s novel languish in a dystopian
hellscape.2 One of the principal practices in the Republic of
1. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 295. Hereafter
cited as Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale.
2. The comparisons of Atwood’s novel to other dystopian fictions are many. Davidson
characterizes the novel as “a feminist 1984.” Cathy N. Davidson, “A Feminist 1984,” Ms.
(February 1986), 24—26. Feuer offers what is perhaps one of the most thorough comparisons of
Atwood’s text to Orwell’s dystopia. Lois Feuer, “Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s
Tale and the Dystopian Tradition,” Critique 38.2 (Winter 1997): 83-95. Before writing The
Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood stated her intention to write “a dystopia, a negative utopia.” Lucy M.
Rob Luzecky
439
Gilead is the regular, systematic, physical, psychological, and sex­
ual abuse of its female population. When the reader is introduced
to Offred, she is sleeping on a cot in a gymnasium that has been
converted into a “red center,” an urban concentration camp
where fertile women are taught to be handmaids. The narrative
voice describes an institutionalized environment in which virtu­
ally every aspect of Offred’s interiority is stripped away from her
until she becomes identified with “something without shape or
name” (Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale, 1). In one particularly excruci­
ating series of reflections, the narrative voice elaborates on the
attempts to destroy her identity:
My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now
because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is
like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell my­
self is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge o f this name like
something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day. I
think o f this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an
amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant
past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name
floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the
dark. (Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale, 84)
The world of Gilead is governed by a theocratic governmental
regime whose stipulations permeate every aspect of the social fab­
ric. The novel’s various settings— the home, the market, the doc­
tor’s office, the brothel— are sites of institutional control. Erving
Goffman suggests that such overarching control effectively pro­
duces “total institutions” where individuals are cut off from every
aspect of the extrainstitutional world, so that their concept of the
self—that is, their very sense of identity— may be experimented
on.’ In addition to being deprived of their names, the inmates at
the red center are subjected to various forms of physical abuse,
such as being electrocuted with cattle-prods, having their arms
beaten (Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale, 194), and undergoing involun­
tary medical procedures (for example, enucleation of the eye) that
Friebert, “Control and Creativity: The Politics of Risk in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,”
in Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, ed. Judith McCombs (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 290.
3. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation o f Mental Patients and Other Inmates
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 22.
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Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in The Handmaid’s Tale
are inflicted for punitive effect. Michel Foucault points out that
totalitarian regimes—which seek to create or maintain a dysto­
pian mode of life— tend to create a strange nexus of torture and
educational practices.45The Republic of Gilead tries to make its
females forget all aspects of the lives they might have led before
the time period represented in the novel (that is, the time period
described as the past in the novel’s world). Darius Rejali charac­
terizes the attempts to inflict misery with the aim of destroying or
diminishing an individual’s subjectivity as a form of penal torture.
Rejali distinguishes between legal torture and penal torture. Legal
torture is performed at the order of a judge, magistrate, or legally
sanctioned administrative body such as a tribunal; penal torture is
administered as a punishment during or after an investigation.
Rejali explains that
in each case one must inquire whether physical torment is involved,
whether the individual is helpless and detained, whether the agents
who practice it are state or quasi-state officials, and whether it is put
toward public purposes. If the answer in each case is yes, then it is
torture, regardless of what it is called. If, in addition, the practice is
legally authorized or authorized by custom, then it is a legal torture,
and depending on whether it is practiced during investigation or after
judgment, it is either judicial torture or penal torture. 3
The particular hell of Gilead is evidenced in the polymorphous
torture visited on its women— a torture whose aim is the diminishment and utter destruction of any memories that they might
have of their previous identities as relatively sovereign subjects in
the communities of pre-Gileadean society.
The oppressive nature of Gilead’s society is further adduced
through reference to the narrator’s lived experience. Offred is af­
forded littie opportunity to celebrate any sense of difference or
uniqueness. Iris Marion Young suggests that social practices that
diminish difference reflect an oppressive society.6 Young charac­
terizes difference as involving any of three components: (a) a felt
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1979), 87.
5. Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 562.
6. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 10.
Michel Foucault suggests a similar point when he notes that disciplinary societies use enhanced
Rob Luzecky
441
sense of particularity; (b) awareness of the diverse capabilities of
one’s body and the variegated nature of human desire; and (c) an
awareness of “the inexhaustibility of linguistic and social relations
without a unitary, undifferentiated origin.” ‘ Offred’s narrative
suggests that she is deprived of the possibility of realizing any of
these. The way one dresses— or is forced to dress—is one of the
primary means that one has of identifying oneself as different
from others in one’s social group. Offred points out that her
clothing is assigned to her, which deprives her of one of the pri­
mary means by which she could visually represent a sense of dif­
ference from the other handmaids. Throughout the novel,
Offred’s sexual behaviors are rigorously codified, in the sense that
the particular time, place, partner, and method of copulation are
not chosen by her. Offred is raped repeatedly throughout the
novel. The explicit external limitation of the objects of Offred’s
sexual desire is elaborated with near-excruciating detail in the
scene in which Serena Joy orders Offred to take the risk of vio­
lating the laws of the explicitly oppressive theocratic regime by
submitting to the advances of the Commander’s driver (Atwood,
Handmaid’s Tale, 205). The restriction of social relations is evi­
denced by the fact that handmaids are not permitted to go out in
public without a “companion” who acts as their chaperone.
Atwood has remarked that no aspect of the novel is pure fabrica­
tion in that events described in the novel have historical corre­
lates.**78 One all too chillingly contemporary instance of the re­
striction of linguistic relations is the novel’s account of the
techniques of surveillance and examination to subjugate their populations. Elaborating on the
state’s “ritualization” of surveillance, Foucault writes, “It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that
makes it possible to quantify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility
through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of
discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the
form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. At the heart of
the procedure of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and
the objectification of those who are subjected.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184—85.
7. Young notes that “some feminist and postmodern writers have suggested that a denial of
difference structures Western reason, where difference means particularity, the heterogeneity of
the body and affectivity, or the inexhaustibility of linguistic and social relations without a unitary,
undifferentiated origin.” Young, Justice, 10.
8. Margaret Atwood, “Margaret Atwood: There’s Nothing in the Book That Has Not Already
Happened,”’ interview by Katherine Govier, Quill andQuire 51.9 (September 1985): 66-67.
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Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in The Handmaid’s Tale
phenomenon of public book burning.9The diminishment of each
of the three components of a felt sense o f difference is one of the
primary mechanisms by which an oppressive regime controls its
citi2enry. Offred’s narration of her lived experience is a harrowing
account of an immiserated, utterly subjugated person who is
forcefully divested of her sense of individual difference.
Atwood specifies that, in the context of the dystopian literary
genre, female characters tend to be portrayed as “sexless autom­
atons or rebels against the regime.”U) Given the explicidy dysto­
pian aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale, one might expect Offred to
be similar to other female rebels in literature such as Orwell’s
Julia, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne,
Huxley’s Julia, and Zamyatin’s 1-330, but Offred seems to have
had every rebellious tendency beaten out of her. A brief survey
of the critical literature on Offred’s capacities for rebellion
demonstrates the scholarly consensus that Offred should be iden­
tified as a rather pusillanimous character.
Sandra Tome suggests that The Handmaid’s Tale is best under­
stood as the author’s expression of an explicidy conservative po­
litical agenda. Far from being an exemplar of “insurgent femi­
nism,” the character of Offred, according to Tome, should be
understood as an advocate for a traditional concept of femininity.
Tome explains, “For a novel so overtly offered as a piece of fem­
inist doctrine, The Handmaid’s Tale delivers a curiously, and, for
Atwood, an unwontedly conservative interpretation of women’s
exemplary social actions, advocating what looks like more tradi­
tional femininity than insurgent feminism.’’*11 Citing the novel’s
generally favorable reviews in Canada, and the author’s receipt of
the Canadian Governor General’s Award, Tome falsely suggests
that Atwood’s political views tend to reflect an explicit Canadian
nationalist sentiment (that is, the uncontentious view that Canada
should maintain its sovereign autonomy). Allan Weiss points out
9. Atwood, “Margaret Atwood,” 29.
10. Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Nan A.
Talese, 2011), 146.
11. Sandra Tome, ‘“The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, ’ Canadian Literature 138-39 (1993): 73-87, 73-74.
Rob Luzecky
443
that Tome’s speculation about the nature of Atwood’s political
views is irrelevant to any elaboration of the thematic content of
the novel.12 Whether Atwood harbors Canadian nationalist senti­
ments is neither here nor there, in the sense that the content of a
literary work of art is not reducible to the author’s biography.
Were it the case that Atwood held a particular set of political be­
liefs, this would not imply that these are reflected in the writer’s
fictional work.
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor argues from more coherent logi­
cal ground when she suggests that Offred is, at best, “a problem­
atic heroine from a feminist standpoint” because her rebellions
seem to be futile (that is, amounting to no concrete challenge to
the oppressive regime, the alleviation of Offred’s suffering, or the
possibility of ascribing any noble motive to her actions) . 13
J. Brooks Bouson cautiously elucidates Offred’s putative com­
plicity when she suggests that Offred is “the victim of circum­
stances, not an active agent capable of directing the plot of her
own life.” 14 Maroula Joannou suggests that Atwood’s narrator is
most accurately characterized as a “solitary weeper” whose exist­
ence is defined by playing the role of the victim forever in flight
from various oppressors .15 Though these characterizations of
Offred as a broken woman seem not to be entirely misplaced in
the sense that there is textual evidence that Offred explicitly
claims that she wishes to be “abject”—it is incorrect to deduce
from these that Offred has wholly accepted the role of victim.
12. Allen Weiss, “Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale” Studies in Canadian Literature 34.1 (January 2009): 120—41,121.
13. Wagner-Lawlor remarks that “Offred herself is a problematic heroine from the feminist
standpoint. She is politically complacent before the Gileadean takeover— thus to some degree
complicitous in it, as she is honest enough to acknowledge, at least in retrospect. Her final step
into the Eyes’ black van can hardly be called a brave or political act, in as much as she has no real
choice, not having in hand the means to kill herself, even if she wanted to, which she did not.”
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, “From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale” Critique 45.1 (Fall 2003): 83-96, 83.
14. J. Brooks Bouson, Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the
Novels ofMargaret Atwood (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993), 154.
15. Maroula Joannou, ‘“Finding New Words and Creating New Methods’: Three Guineas and
The Handmaid’s Tale,” in Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction, ed. Merry M.
Pawlowski (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 148.
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Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein in The Handmaid’s Tale
After witnessing the brutal murder of an insurgent and hearing of
her companion’s suicide, Offred suggests that she would be con­
tent with the mere survival of a mere object divested from all
sense of human solidarity. Atwood writes, “Everything they
taught at the Red Center, everything I’ve resisted, comes flooding
in. . . . I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do
what they like with me. …
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