Subjugated Women and the Politics of Power in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

While there is plenty of traditional feminist critique of male power structures in Atwood's works, and particularly in The Handmaid's Tale. This study is especially significant because it is the first to adopt Foucauldian-feminist reading of the novel.  Placing the novel in the contexts of Atwood's career, feminism, and dystopian literature, provides a fuller understanding of how the novel functions as an expression of the disunity of women. Thus, present paper focuses of The Handmaid's Tale from the consequences of patriarchal control and "traditional" misogyny, to the matriarchal network, and a new form of misogyny: women's hatred of women. The paper concludes that subjecting women in the novel is a systematic process, which produces them as always, the inferiors.