Abstract
Reingard M. Nischik offers an in-depth analysis of how Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale portrays book culture as an icon of humanism, a carrier of democratic culture, and, hence, as a counterforce to totalitarianism and patriarchal oppression. Nischik’s reading expands our understanding of the text’s feminist politics, revealing that the novel’s trenchant critique of misogyny pivots not only on its representation of gender politics but also on its celebratory portrait of print culture. At the same time, the novel’s metafictional close directs the reader’s attention to questions of authorship, editorial intervention, and technological mediation and turns the discussion of the text’s material status into a site for reflecting on the hegemonic practices that inform our use of all media, including printed books.
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Notes
- 1.
See Reingard M. Nischik, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Reingard M. Nischik, Comparative North American Studies: Transnational Approaches to American and Canadian Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 2.
Knut Nærum, “Medieval Helpdesk,” accessed September 18, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQst. Original first broadcast in Norwegian on Norwegian Broadcasting in 2001.
- 3.
See Nischik, Comparative 150, 165; for instance, the quote by Herb Vallow, who in his review in The Sentinel (January 23, 1987) calls the novel by “the strikingly brilliant Margaret Atwood … a fantastic bestseller ‘out-orwelling’ Orwell” (qtd. on p. 165).
- 4.
The novel is ambivalent about the exact time setting. Coral Ann Howells, for instance, places the main plot “around 2005,” which could be supported by Offred’s comments about the documentary (154). See Howells, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake,” in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, ed. Coral Ann Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163. Yet there are more clues that point to the late 1990s as the time of Offred’s experiences in Gilead, such as Professor Pieixoto’s research reported on in the coda of the novel, the “Historical Notes,” where he speaks of a “Late-Twentieth-Century Monotheocrac[y]” (312). Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985 (London: Virago, 1987). Further references to The Handmaid’s Tale in the text.
- 5.
Caroline Rosenthal, “Canonizing Atwood: Her Impact on Teaching in the US, Canada, and Europe,” in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 41–56. On the pitfalls of national designations on the North American continent, see ch. 1 of Nischik, Comparative (7–16).
- 6.
See Nischik, Comparative, 4, 174, 176.
- 7.
See Nischik, Comparative, ch. 4 (93–120).
- 8.
John Updike, “Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard,” The New Yorker (May 12, 1986): 118, 121.
- 9.
See in detail ch. 4 of Nischik, Comparative (93–120).
- 10.
Her later dystopian novels Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam, and The Heart Goes Last are all also set in the former United States.
- 11.
Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 135.
- 12.
See ch. 5 of Nischik, Comparative (121–78).
- 13.
Pat Robertson (∗1930) is an American fundamentalist television evangelist and media tycoon known for his conservative religious views and political commentary. In 1988, Robertson campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the Republican presidential nomination. Today, he is still one of three hosts of the 700 Club and appears regularly on TV.
- 14.
Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) was a prominent American fundamentalist preacher, television evangelist, and political commentator. A cofounder of the “Moral Majority,” Falwell championed conservative religious ideas in politics in the last decades of the twentieth century.
- 15.
Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016), a conservative American activist and author, is known for her pronounced antifeminist propaganda. During the 1970s, Schlafly led a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. She continued to give interviews and promote her opinions until her passing, whereupon her legacy was hailed by the alt-right movement and Donald Trump in particular.
- 16.
Rev. by Gina Allen, Humanist in Canada 20, no. 2 (1987): 3, 37.
- 17.
On the religious and political context of the time see in greater detail David John Marley, “Ronald Reagan and the Splintering of the Christian Right,” Journal of Church and State 48, no. 4 (2006): 851–68; Jeffrey K. Hadden, “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (1993): 113–30; Michael E. Kraft and Norman J. Vig, “Environmental Policy in the Reagan Presidency,” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 3 (1984): 415–39.
- 18.
“Somehow it’s been overlooked. I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they have given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count?” (67).
- 19.
The sentence is not quite correct Latin, because “bastardes” and “carborundorum” are not Latin but only Latinized words. Also, the sentence lacks an obligatory infinitive that would denote what the addressee of “nolite” must not do, “carborundorum” being only the genetive plural of a pseudo-Latin substantive that at first sight may appear to be a gerundive with its characteristic -nd- in the middle, but which is in fact not a verb.
- 20.
On the relevance of Scrabble for the novel, see Joseph Andriano, “The Handmaid’s Tale as Scrabble Game,” Essays on Canadian Writing 48 (1992–1993): 89–96.
- 21.
David S. Hogsette, “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 4 (1997): 267.
- 22.
See, for example, Ildney Cavalcanti: “Lacking the rhetorical sophistication and emotional appeal of the Handmaid’s personal account, the [professor’s speech] consists in a collection of gross misinterpretations, misogynistic asides and jokes, and instances of academic vanity and false modesty delivered to a passive audience” (172). Cavalcanti, “Utopias of/f Language in Contemporary Feminist Literary Dystopias,” Utopian Studies 11, no. 2 (2000): 152–80.
- 23.
See also Hilde Staels: “They [the scholars] do not try to comprehend the articulation of her inner world as a deliberate attempt at survival. Instead, they approach the text in a utilitarian way. From their perspective, more historical data and exhaustive material facts about Gilead would have made the tale a[n] … interesting … object.” Staels, “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance through Narrating,” English Studies 76, no. 5 (1995): 465–66. See also Linda Kauffman, “Special Delivery: Twenty-first Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s Tale,” in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), 221–44.
- 24.
Arnold E. Davidson, “Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale,” in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, ed. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 120.
- 25.
See Kauffman, “Special.”
- 26.
See, e.g., Dominick M. Grace, “The Handmaid’s Tale: ‘Historical Notes’ and Documentary Subversion,” Science Fiction Studies 25, no. 3 (1998): 481–94.
- 27.
Francis Blouin, “A Framework for a Consideration of Diplomatics in the Electronic Environment,” The American Archivist 59, no. 4 (1996): 473.
- 28.
Valerie Martin, “Introduction,” Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Knopf, 2006), x: “Its proper nomenclature excited creative genre-labeling: anti-utopia, dystopia, cautionary tale, political satire, allegory, spiritual autobiography, feminist speculative fiction, futurist fable, and, my favorite, reconstructed postprint novel.”
- 29.
Mario Klarer distinguishes between oral and written cultures as follows: subjectivity, concreteness, immediacy, and context-boundedness (oral culture) vs. objectivity, abstraction of thinking, historical perspective, and objectifying distance (written culture). Klarer, “The Gender of Orality and Literacy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, ” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 15, no. 2 (1990): 153, my translation (in spite of its title, the article is in German).
- 30.
Cf. Adrian Johns’s critique of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s alignment of print culture with “standardization, dissemination, and fixity.” Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10.
- 31.
Hogsette, “Margaret,” 269.
- 32.
Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 61.
- 33.
Ong, Interfaces, 282.
- 34.
Ong, Interfaces, 282.
- 35.
Ong, Interfaces, 281.
- 36.
An “oral culture” has not been influenced by literacy yet. “Secondary orality” develops from or in literary cultures; see Klarer, “Gender of Orality,” 154 n2.
- 37.
Ong, Interfaces, ch. 3.
- 38.
Ong, Interfaces, 85.
- 39.
Martin, “Introduction,” x.
- 40.
In connection with The Handmaid’s Tale, see Reddy P. Madhurima: “The narrator insists that the tale she is telling is a reconstruction which is going to be at some level inaccurate, partial, incomplete, because it is retrospective. But she suggests that this status, neither wholly fact nor complete fiction, is something that her story has in common with other historiographic metanarratives. The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction, but also historiographic metafiction with a confessional journal-style first person narrator.” Madhurima, “The Handmaid’s Tale: The Carving Out of Feminist Space in Margaret Atwood’s Novel,” The Criterion: An International Journal in English 2, no. 4 (2011): 291.
- 41.
See Linda Hutcheon, “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction,” Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (1984): 228–38. See also Linda Hutcheon’s later publications Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) and The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), where she further elaborates on the concept.
Bibliography
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Andriano, Joseph. 1992–1993. The Handmaid’s Tale as Scrabble Game. Essays on Canadian Writing 48: 89–96.
Atwood, Margaret. 1987. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Virago. First published 1985.
Blouin, Francis. 1996. A Framework for a Consideration of Diplomatics in the Electronic Environment. The American Archivist 59 (4): 466–479.
Cavalcanti, Ildney. 2000. Utopias of/f Language in Contemporary Feminist Literary Dystopias. Utopian Studies 11 (2): 152–180.
Cooke, Nathalie. 2004. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood.
Davidson, Arnold E. 1988. Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, ed. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro, 113–121. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Grace, Dominick M. 1998. The Handmaid’s Tale: ‘Historical Notes’ and Documentary Subversion. Science Fiction Studies 25 (3): 481–494.
Hadden, Jeffrey K. 1993. The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527: 113–130.
Hogsette, David S. 1997. Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38 (4): 262–278.
Howells, Coral Ann. 2006. Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, ed. Coral Ann Howells, 161–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Updike, John. 1986. Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard. The New Yorker, May 12: 118–126.
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Nischik, R.M. (2019). “Books and Books and Books … an Oasis of the Forbidden”: Writing and Print Culture as Metaphor and Medium for Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_4
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