Margaret Atwood in Her Canadian Context

Staines, David

doi:10.1017/9781108626651.003

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“…6 Staines (2006), who comments on the novel's setting, states that "[s]ociety has returned to a constricted re-creation of Puritan New England … [o]nly a Canadian, a neighbor as well as an outsider to the United States, could create such an unsettling vision of the American future" (p. 21). 7 Foucault goes on to say that for successful governments in modern times, "it is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility.…”

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confidence: 99%

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Briedik¹

2021

Ars Aeterna

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Postcolonial criticism offers a radically new platform for the interpretation of science fiction texts. Mostly preoccupied with the themes of alien other and interstellar colonization, the genre of sci-fi breaths with colonial discourse and postcolonial tropes and imagery. Although Margaret Atwood rejects the label of science fiction writer, her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) explores similar ethical concerns to the anti-conquest narratives of postcolonial authors. Atwood’s identification of Canadian identity as a victim of the former British Empire is challenged by her introduction of a female character rejecting their postcolonial subjugated identity in a patriarchal society. Her variation on dystopian concerns is motivated by sexuality, and her characters are reduced to objects of colonial desire with no agency. The protagonist, Offred, endures double colonization from the feminist perspective; yet, in terms of postcolonial criticism, Attwood’s character of Offred is allowed to reconstruct her subaltern identity through her fragmented narration of the past and speak in an authoritative voice. The orality of her narration only confirms the predisposition of the text to interpretation in the same terms as postcolonial fiction.

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Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Briedik¹

2021

Ars Aeterna

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Margaret Atwood in Her Canadian Context

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

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