Female Alienation In The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale(1985)is a dystopian novel by famous Canadian writer Margaret Atwood(1939-).It depicts a tale of terror in a totalitarian regime run by Christian fundamentalists set in New England in the near future.Known as the Republic of Gilead,the patriarchal regime makes life extremely hard for women,classifying them all into various classes and forcing some to be reproductive tools as Handmaids to solve the fertility crisis.Guided by Erich Fromm’s theory of alienation,this present study undertakes to explore female alienation in The Handmaid’s Tale.It argues that Gilead’s all-round repression jeopardizes women’s physical and mental health to cause their alienation,which impedes the pursuit of living a sane life.The thesis first analyzes Offred’s attempts to rebel against alienation.The traits of patriarchy and totalitarianism classify the relationship between the rulers and people in Gilead as the “irrational authority”,named by Fromm.In Gilead,she is deprived of work and forced to leave her husband and daughter to become a Handmaid whose “duty” is to bear children for Gilead’s governors.She feels estrangement from her real self for the forced experience as a “Two-legged Womb”,leading to her alienation.To resist against alienation,she recollects series of words to get related with former society on many occasions,though women are deprived of the right of literacy in Gilead.To obtain more support for her rebellion,she keeps love for her families in her mind and strives for relatedness to Moira and Ofglen,for both love and relatedness can stimulate spontaneity to create spontaneous thoughts and active activities to maintain one’s real self.However,the decline of her love and loss of contact declare her failure ultimately.Secondly,it explores Moira’s endeavor to fight against alienation.Before the time of Gilead,Moira is a lesbian feminist and works for a women’s collective,for which she is selected to be a Handmaid.In this way,her real self represented by the identity of lesbian feminist is repressed.To fight against Gilead’s repression,Moira resorts to the power of love and reason that enables her to have an insight into the alienated essence of Gilead.Yet her reason is deteriorated for she is swayed about the persistence in her real self because of her two failed escape and her love for her friend Offred is lost in the “Jezebel’s” where she is sent to be a prostitute after her escape,resulting in her lacking of psychic security.Eventually,Moira conforms to prostitution and submits to Gilead’s authority to relieve the sense of insecurity in this “butch paradise”,indicating her alienation.At last,the thesis discusses Serena Joy’s ironic alienation.In pre-Gilead era,Serena,as an anti-feminist,owns her real self by devoting herself to making speeches about how women should stay at home.However,she loses her real self for the reason that she is forced to give up her job to become a housewife in Gilead.The loss of real self leaves Serena in a state of loneliness and insecurity.To get rid of this feeling,she automatically conforms with Gilead’s culture to be a competent housewife,in the aim of getting recognition to obtain secondary sense of self to develop her pseudo self which can substitute her real self.Her alienation occurs in the acceptance of this identity and it deepens in her asexual and loveless marriage for it leads to her absence of love.In the end,her alienation turns to be complete alienation,named by Fromm,whose manifestation is total obedience to Gilead,the patriarchal power machine created by her accomplices.In summary,the thesis reveals all-round oppression of women under patriarchal totalitarian regime through the analysis of alienation.Through the imagination of such a society,Atwood shows us a terrible future that is both absurd and real.She aims to prove that the society ruled by patriarchal totalitarianism not only poses a great threat to the recognition of women’s self for alienation hinders the progress of recognition to a large extent,but also impairs the humanity and initiative of all human beings,including men;while social development and human progress requires sane people who are not alienated physically or psychologically.