A Study On Subjects’ Plight In The Handmaid’s Tale And Its Sequel The Testaments From The Perspective Of Foucault’s Power Theory

Margaret Atwood(1939-)is a leading contemporary Canadian novelist,poet and literary critic.As a post-modern intellectual writer,instead of being constrained by sensuality and experience,she is committed to reflecting the richness and profundity of her texts by combining historical and cultural theoretical knowledge.Her masterpiece,The Handmaid’s Tale,became a hot topic of international critical study upon publication.The coming out of its sequel,The Testaments,thirty years later,again provided new material and new ideas for research.The rich postmodern elements of the novel provide the best example of the strategies and techniques of power operation proposed by the philosopher Foucault.In recent years,the research on power theory focuses on “power and body” and “power and discourse”.However,what Foucault has always pursued all his life in research is the subject rather than power.Therefore,this thesis takes “the construction of the subject by power” as its point of view and uses knowledge-power,centering on the archaeology of knowledge,and disciplinary power,centering on the genealogy of power,to examine the subject’s plight as revealed by the four female narrators(Offred,Aunt Lydia,Agnes and Nicole)in the whole novels.The thesis is to expose how the Gilead populace,represented by Offred,Aunt Lydia and Agnes,are constructed as subjects who meet Gilead’s criteria and to analyze how they maintain the forging of the self-subject while being disciplined and finally succeed in the construction of subjectivity,with Foucault’s Self-technology theory.The first part of the Introduction mainly introduces Atwood and her works.The second part summarizes the perspectives and shortcomings of the studies on The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel,The Testaments,at home and abroad,and points out the innovations and feasibility of this thesis.The last part introduces Foucault’s power theory,the relationship between power and subject,and briefly sums up the way how power disciplines subject.The main body consists of three parts: Chapter one investigates how the subjects lose themselves under the construction of knowledge-power.By destroying the discourses of the past,depriving females of discourses,and establishing the Gilead discourses,fundamentalists,based on the Bible,reforge the subjects’ cognition about identity,reason and madness,fact and fallacy,which lead to the loss of subjects.Chapter two examines how the disciplinary power operates through hierarchical observation,normalizing judgment,and the examination proposed by Foucault,successfully create a Panoptic Society.By doing so,Gilead constructs docile new images that meet its standards.Chapter three makes a thorough analysis of how the disciplined and lost subjects find themselves and reconstruct their subjectivity by writing,narrating,reading,and empathizing with sisterhood,with Foucault’s self-technology theory.In the end,the last part includes a detailed summary of the previous discussions.Combined with Atwood’s creative characteristics and the current situation of contemporary society,it is revealed that as a serious writer,Atwood is devoted to revealing the operation of power in modern society and,in doing so,to warning humanity against the neglect of the construction of the self-subject.