The Process of Reconstruction in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

Keywords

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The Process of Reconstruction in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

History is under the control of people who understand and manipulate its construction, which enables those in power to shape, invert and redirect it in accordance with their own wills. As those in power have always been males, history has always been the history of “the male sex”, “written by and about males” and, as such, tends to either marginalize or co-opt women’s versions of history.’1 This tendency originates from the otherness of woman: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not with reference to her, she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute –she is the Other.”2 Through her otherness, woman has been oppressed and reduced to an object by the subject himself. The woman’s side, which has, thus, been the other side, is either ignored or constructed in the male-dominated society. Since she is deprived of written language and has to play the silent role, she is not able to write her story, the story of the other side, and exists only in the gaps of history.

Keywords

• Process
• Reconstruction
• Margaret

References

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6. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (London: Pan Books, 1988)
7. Evans, Mary. Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 (London: Routledge, 2001)
8. Foucault, M. The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1974).

9. Hogsette, David S. “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act,” Critique, 38 (1997).
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12. Rao, Eleonora. Strategies for Identity: the Fiction of Margret Atwood (New York: Lang, 1993)
13. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).