Behind The Reversed Gaze:On The Female Self-Awareness In The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood(1939-)is a native Canadian literary giant,internationally acclaimed through more than forty works of poetry,novels,short stories,critical studies,screen plays,radio scripts and books for children,receiving 45 awards including the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award,The Handmaid's Tale(1985),her most famous novel,marks her first attempt in the dystopian writing,which was set in the Republic of Gilead,a fundamentalist theocratic state nightmarishly imagined in the area surrounding Boston.The former part of the novel,applied stream of consciousness as the writing technique,was mostly a first-person narration by a Handmaid.Namely,the Offred tells her anguished experience how she was converted into a seemingly docile handmaid,the reign of terror she had confronted,and the twist in her mind.The latter part is an epilogue named “Historical Notes”,a transcript of a seminar attended by historical intellectuals,mainly the keynote speech of Prof.Pieixoto,expounding on his discovery about the newly unearthed materials(almost 30 tape cassettes and anonymous personal journals with initials only)on the site of once the City of Bangor,and their personal interpretation based on the documents they had.The novel was shortlisted for Booker Prize 1986 and was adapted for TV series winning Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series-2017.This paper intends to analyze The Handmaid's Tale from the perspective of gaze theories,which includes six chapters.The first chapter opens with the introduction of Margaret Atwood and her first dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale,the brief account of gaze theories,and the outline of the research design,namely,questions,subjects and methods of the research.The second chapter is a search of literature about related domestic and overseas studies,which focused on literary traditions,ecocriticism,gender studies and cultural studies.The third chapter discusses,firstly,how the female narrator was deprived of her personal possessions,due rights and dignity,secondly,how the mechanism of disciplines was enforced,not only through excruciating punishments but also in the form of panoptic and cultural gaze,so as to fix the handmaid in a subordinate position.The fourth chapter analyzes the female narrator's reversed gaze upon individuals of Gilead(including herself),intending to argue that the reversed gaze embodies,firstly,her questioning about the handmaid identity and the current situation of Gilead,secondly,her cravings to escape from Gilead and regain her due rights,autonomy and dignity,which collectively validate the argument that her gaze is not simply a behavior of visual confirmation of events happening around,but the product of the tension between her external behaviours and rationality and twist of her internal thinking.It comes down to the fact that the reversed gaze demonstrates her self-awareness never fades.In what follows here is an illustration about subject in difference in the reciprocal gaze.The fifth chapter focuses on “The Historical Notes” part,the transcript of a history-studies themed Symposium.From another perspective of narration,the author describes the fact that her reversed gaze of the long period finally transformed into discourse.This paper contends it is her attempts to voice for the tortured peripheral individuals of the time and participated into history writing,and it is also a way of delayed resistance to the unfairness they had experienced.The sixth chapter briefly summarizes the paper,and points out the inspirational significance of the open ending.