![]() ![]() The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. It also alludes to the tradition of fairy tales where the central character tells her story. The title echoes the component parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale"). The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of women's reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids", women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, white supremacist, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. ![]() In the last analysis, ‘Happy Endings’ is a kind of postmodern story about stories: postmodern because it freely and self-consciously announces itself as metafiction, as being more interested in how stories work than in telling a story itself.īut within the narratives Atwood presents to us, she also addresses some of the inequalities between men and women, and exposes how relationships are rarely a level playing field for the two sexes.The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. ![]() A woman motorcycling across America on her own would not feel as safe, for one, as a man doing so.) (It is not that she isn’t free herself – she is, after all, carrying on an affair with a married, older man even though society wouldn’t exactly view that kindly – but her freedoms are of a different kind. Relationships are not equal in a society where men have things easier than women, and the third of Atwood’s six scenarios, in which Mary is the key player, makes this point plainly.įreedom, Atwood tells us, isn’t the same for girls as it is for boys, and while James is off on his motorcycle, she is forced by societal expectations to do other things. Of course, as so often in Margaret Atwood’s fiction, there’s a feminist angle to all this. Character motivation is more important than what they do or what is done to them. After all, do they? Perhaps the more important details are, as the closing paragraphs of ‘Happy Endings’ have it, not What but How and Why. By the time we get to the fifth plot, ‘E’, the narrator is happily encouraging us to view the plot details as interchangeable between Fred and Madge, as if they don’t really matter. Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, and after various rocky patches they end up living, in the immortal words, ‘happily ever after’.Ītwood wants to put such plot lines under the microscope, as it were, and subject them to closer scrutiny. It’s a commonplace that happy endings in romantic novels ‘sell’: it gives readers what they want. Why does Atwood do this? Partly, one suspects, because she wishes to interrogate both the nature of romantic plots in fiction and readers’ attitudes towards them. But as the story develops, the author breaks in on her characters more and more, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ to remind us that they are mere ciphers and that the things being described do not exist outside of the author’s own head (and the reader’s: Atwood’s fiction, and especially the short pieces contained in Murder in the Dark, are about how we as readers imagine those words on the page and make them come alive, too).
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