Body And Language:écriture Féminine In The TV Drama The Handmaid's Tale

Under the circumstances that Donald Trump is elected as the new President of the United States and the whole world is turning right politically,The TV drama The Handmaid's Tale has attracted widespread attention.The TV drama has offered a detailed and insightful description of women's miserable situation in a brutal and cruel theocracy and their efforts to maintain their subjectivity.To better examine the TV drama academically,the thesis will use Hélène Cixous' s theory,écriture Féminine,as its theoretical framework.Cixous is one of the representative theorists of post-structural feminism.Her écriture Féminine has given us a new perspective to think about the oppression the patriarchal society imposed on women,how to return to women's confiscated self and how to deal with the relationship between the two genders.With its help,the thesis will analyze the mechanism of the patriarchal control imposed on women in Gilead: its objectification of women,its censorship of women's language and thoughts,and its turning women against women.The thesis also concerns the efforts of women,Handmaids in particular,to maintain their subjectivity.Handmaids with different personalities have taken different measures to handle their harsh situation,but they all lend a helping hand to the others when it is needed.Besides,the thesis tries to jump out of the TV drama and evaluate the contribution it has made to subvert the deeply rooted Cartesian dualism in Western way of thinking which underpins the binary opposition of men and women.The conclusion of the thesis is that as a typical text of écriture Féminine,the TV drama not only concerns about women's inferior position in the society,but also aims to shake the theoretical basis beneath it.Chapter 1 introduces the basic information of the TV drama,including the basic plot of Margret Atwood's original novel,the major adaptions the TV drama has done to the novel,the production of the TV drama,and its reception in the television industry and among the audiences.Chapter 1 also reviews the related literatures in both China and the Western world.The theoretical framework of the thesis,Cixous' s écriture Féminine,is introduced in Chapter 1,too.The thesis dates back to the birth of the theory and examines its inheritance of Derrida's deconstruction principle and its critique of Freud's psychoanalysis.The main body of the thesis includes Chapter 2,Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.Chapter 2 focuses on the patriarchal control imposed on women in Gilead.Chapter 3 observes the efforts of women,Handmaids in particular,to maintain their subjectivity.Chapter 4 tries to analyze the deeply rooted Cartesian dualism in the Western way of thinking.And Chapter 5 is the conclusion.