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Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition
Lois Feuer
a a

California State University , Dominguez Hills Published online: 04 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Lois Feuer (1997) The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 38:2, 83-95, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.1997.10543167 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1997.10543167

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The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition

L OIS F EUER

R eviewers of Margaret Atwood' s The Handma id 's Tale invariably hailed it as a "femini st / 984,"1 and, like many handy tags, this one concea ls a partial truth . A closer look, however, reveal s not o nly the similarities between the two novel s' totalitarian societies, but the ways in which Atwood's work goes beyond Orw ell's, in matters of sty le that become matters of substance as well as in the fem inist debat e over "ess entia lism" that Atwood brings to the dystop ian tradition . The novel tran sform s that tradition stylistically as well as themati call y as Atwo od, aware of her predecessors (a persistent Atwood trait: co nsider the parody of the Gothic in Lady Oracle, for example), both parti cipates in and extend s the dystopi an genre. " That tradition is a significant one in twenti eth -century literature, replacing ea rlier utopian vision s of paradi se regained with the nightmare realiz ation that, by the time industrial technol ogy had mad e the co ntrolled, ordered society possible , we might no longer be willing to pay the cost. The choice-betwe en happiness without freed om or freedom without happiness- is presented by Dostoye vsky's Grand Inqui sitor, by Zarn iat in's Well-Doer, by Huxley's Mustapha Mond , by Orwell's O'Brien , and by Atwood 's Aunt Lydia, trainer of handmaids and explicator of the regime's rationale for its oppression ..1 Becau se Orwell's work is the best known in this series, it is to 1984 that The Handmaid's Tale has most frequentl y been co mpared. The resembl ances are man y, and perhaps inescap able given the totalitarian regim es under which both prota gon ists live. In both , we have the distin ctively modern sense of nightmare co me true , the initial paralyzed powerlessness of the
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victim unable to ac t. Par adoxicall y. g iven this mood of wa ki ng nightmare, both novel s use nighttime dreams and mem or y flash es to recaptu re the el usive past thro ugh which their prot agon ists try to retai n thei r individua l human ity. But individua l hum anity is, of co urse, undesirabl e in the society-as-prison; as in Kafk a 's emblema tic pen al co lony, language (boo ks for wo me n in The Handmaid 's Tale; co nnotative. reflect ive speec h in / 984 ) is res tricted and co ntro lled as an instrument of power; in The Handmaid 's Tale, Har vard itsel f. bast ion of reasoned d isco urse , has becom e the site of torture and mu tilati on of the regime 's enemies. As Oceania both wa s and was not the postwar London of Or well's tim e, Gilead both is and is not the United State s we know. Ser ena Joy, the Command er 's wife, bears an iron ic resemblance to Phylli s Schl afl y, tak ing a publ ic position that women sho uld not take public positions.' Thi s referent ial topi calit y exists because both autho rs envis ion the future by ex trapo lating fro m tendenc ies in the present: as Blak e point s out, a proph et is one wh o tell s us that if we keep on doing .r, y will be the result. Both novel s envision a soc iety in whi ch perpetual war is used as a rati onal e for internal repression. The eas e with whi ch the authorities in / 984 switch the identity of the enemy makes it clear, long before Win ston reads Gold stein 's confirmator y ana lysis, that the "enemy" is a pretext; the epilogue to The Handm aid 's Tale makes ex plici t the sec ret ag ree me nt bet ween the superpowers that enabled them to co nce ntrate on subjuga ting their ow n peopl e (388). Both are soc ieties purged of diversit y and ind ividua lity, based on sex ism, racis m. and e litism, in which private rel at ion sh ips between frie nds and lovers become-or becom e seen as-subve rsive acts." Thus Atwoo d gives us all the hallm ark s of a tot alitari an soc iety set forth in / 984 (Hado mi 209- 17) and origi nated by Zam iatin in We: public spec tacle as means of co ntro l, the two -mi nute hate and Hate Week, and the Sal vagin g and Prayvagan za. Th e fear of spies and betrayal are co nstants: Handm aid s part with the phrase "U nder His Eye," j ust as Oceania ns knew that Big Broth er was wa tching . Lack of privacy and co nsta nt surve illa nce are co mmo n features; thu s the eye is a co ntinuing image in The Handmaid 's Tale, from the name of the sec ret polic e to the sy mbo l tattooed on Offred 's ankle." Th is threat of betrayal-Winston suspects Juli a as Offred does Nick-has alrea dy begun to destroy Offred's relati on ship with her hu sband Luke before he is (pres uma bly) shot wh ile they are tryin g to escape to Canada (232,23 6). Despite thi s threat, both soc ieties have-or have rum or s of- an underground resistance network; at the open-ended co ncl usio n of Atw ood' s novel , it is osten sibl y this network, of wh ich Nick is a member, that enables Offred to escap e to the safe hou se in Maine where she dictates the tapes of which the novel purport s to be a transcription. In both works, loss of identity is an eve r-pres ent threat, th is subme rsion of the se lf represent ed by co lor-co ded uniforms denoting the status of the wearer, wheth er Inner or Out er Party member or Co mmande r, Gu ardi an , or Handmaid. Th e danger is rea l: Offred at times becom es subsume d by her ca tegory and thinks of hersel f as "we" (203), and Atwood uses the moti f of the double throu ghout the 84
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novel to represent this threat. Describing another Handmaid walking away. Offred says. "She's like my own reflection. in a mirror from which I am moving away" (59: also 25. 31. 213). The motif of the double is a continuing one in Atwood's work. easily seen . for example, in the titles of two collections of poetry. DOl/hie Persephone ( 1961) and Tiro-Headed Poems (1978):7 here it suggests the loss of individuality that is the totalitarian regime's goal. We never know Offreds real name . not only because her identity is subsumed by her status as Handmaid (and she is therefore of-Fred, her commander). but hecause that name is a link to her past. her unique individual self, and her soci ety destroys that past as effectively-though less systematically-as Winston's does. The Handmaids recite the Marxist "from each according to her ability ; to each according to his needs:' x having been told that it is from St. Paul (scriptural warrant being the basis of Gilead's social code) . What Handmaid, forbidden access to books, can prove otherwise'? Offred realizes that the next generation of Handmaids will be more docile because "they will have no memories" of other possibilities. their collective past having been rewritten and their individual pasts spent without alternatives ( 151). To forget a past of choices is to be enchained in the present, a process that Gayle Greene has described as "the amnesia imposed by women's roles"(30 I ).'! As in /984. memory is linked with liberation, a theme Greene finds pervasive in feminist fiction . William Steinhoff clarifies this theme in /984: "if one is cut off from the past as Winston is in Oceania, if one's memory is not sustained by objective evidence, and if one has no recourse to history, can one still preserve from the domination of the environment any part of oneself?" (179). The epilogue to The Handmaid's Tale presents a final ironic example of dehumanization through faulty remembering; its satire on the academic rhetorical habit of "distancing" (and thus "objectifying") its subject shows Offreds story, two hundred years later. as fodder for pedantic discussions of the tale's historicity. missing the meaning of Offred's individual experience by committing the historians' sin of viewing the individual only as an example of the larger. more abstract, point. The Epilogue demonstrates also Atwood's consciousness of playing off Orwell. She draws the direct parallel in speaking of the point that the Epi logue exists in part to show that. in this future time. the reign of Gilead is past: "In fact. Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for. He did the same thing. He has a text at the end of /984. Most people think the book ends with a note on Newspeak. which is written in the past tense . in standard English-which means that. at the time of writing the note, Newspeak is a thing of the past" (Hancock 284). The assaults on the individuality of the protagonists reinforce in both the desperate need to make contact; Winston reaches out to Julia and. fatally. to 0' Brien. as the Handmaids (again . significantly, at night) reach out between their cots in the gymnasium to touch hands and exchange names. Thi s need to make contact with others leads Offreds predecessor to carve out the hidden schoolyard-Latin
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message of hope sNolite te bastardes carborundorum: don't let the bastards grind you down). The contact itself is a window to a world outside the prison of one's loneliness: Atwood describes it as like making a peephole, a crack in the wall (28-29, 176). The regime works in a variety of ways to sever these ties; "love is not the point," says Handmaid trainer Aunt Lydia (285) , aware of the subversion inherent in private relationships . But love is indeed the point for Offred as it was for Win ston. It is through Offred's affair with Nick, as through her friendships with other Handmaids, that her re-created self desires and rebels."? As the examples indicate. the commonalities are many, and if Atwood were merely injecting a female protagonist into Orwell's dystopia, we could nod at her "modernity" and move on. But it is not merely that Offred is a female Winston Smith. For one thing, there are differences in style that amount to differences in substance. and for another. the feminism of The Handmaid 's Tale is more subtle and complex than can be indicated by merely noting the change in the protagonist's gender. We can begin to understand the differences and their thematic implications if we start with Atwood's evocation of the texture of daily life, made possible by the choices she has made in ordering her plot. As Malak has explained, the structure of the narrative, moving as it does from brief memory glimpses of Offred's past to an increasingly fuller rendering of that past, provides a contrast between the drab barrenness of her present and the rich texture of her former life . I I 'These shifting reminiscences offer glimpses of a life, though not ideal, still tilled with energy. creativity. humaneness and a sense of selfhood, a life that sharply contrasts with the alienation. slavery, and suffering under totalitarianism" (Malak 13). This "praise of [our] present."? in its untidy surfeit of choices (Aunt Lydia describes the prerevolutionary United States as a society dying of too much choice, offering security and stability in place of that too-demanding freedom)of actions. thoughts, reading matter (even pornography), and, yes, of ice cream flavors-renders a reality more vivid. and more dear, than Orwell can provide in the gray gritty world of Oceania, because his protagonist cannot remember back beyond the grayness. Orwell made the risk-laden choice of creating a protagonist as drab as the world he inhabits; 1:1 Atwood, creating a richer texture of both character and setting, gives us a protagonist whose memories celebrate the variegated past. Offred's clandestine game of Scrabble with her Commander evokes the sensuality of now -forbidden textures and language: "We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance . Quince. Zygote . I hold the glossy counters with the smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp. I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies. made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs. those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime . The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious" (180). This vividly felt reality emerges also in the secondary characters, individually rendered as Orwell 's are not: Offreds mother. a woman on her own, burner of
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pornography and marcher to take back the night. who desired a "woman's culture" much different than the one that has, ironically, come to pass; the Commander, unknowing victim of the society he has helped to create, robbed of his choices in the process of robbing others of theirs; Offred 's "sceptical, irreverent. funny"!' friend Moira, glimpsed for the last time as "companion" in an illicit brothel; even the silly and untrustworthy fellow-handmaid Janine. wallowing in her confession of her former sins (93). And of course, most vividly rendered of all, Offred herself, formerly oblivious to the signs of the coming catastrophe. undramatically heroic, initially passive except in her refusal to become a victim, 15 struggling to hold on to her sanity by reciting childish banalities to herself and lusting after hand lotion , emerging through her pain and loss as a multidimensional character. It is not merely that Atwood's skill in conveying character and texture is more acute than Orwell's-though that is surely part of it-nor even that her narrative structure allows her to render a more particularized reality than his does . Even the relatively minor character Lydia . one of the Aunts whose role is to condition the handmaids to their new lives, takes on a distinctive voice ; "Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen-to be seen-is to be-her voice trembled-penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. She called us girls" (38). This insistence on the texture of felt life and on the fullness of minor characters is a stylistically rich rendering of a central theme . 'The most revolutionary feminist fiction is so by virtue of textual practice as well as content" as Gayle Greene has recently put this point (292). Atwood's textual practice mirrors her novel's content. asserting the primacy of the individual human spirit by evoking it stylistically. In what initially appears to be merely another in a series of remembered conversational fragments, the Commander tells Offred that "Women can't add"; "For them , one and one and one and one don't make four" (240). She thinks at first he's making the customary condescending point about women's mathematical ability: "What do they make? I said. expecting five or three"; but his point is in fact a great if unintended compliment women can't add one and one and one and one and get four because what they always get is one and one and one and one. a sense of the irreducible value of the individual. Women cannot think abstractly, says the commander. quoting Lenin on making omelettes (273) . The point, of course, is that the eggs broken to make the "omelette" are people, and whether women deserve the commander's compliment or not. Atwood's focus is on this affirmation of individual human uniqueness in the face of those who are able to destroy it because they can abstract, can will themselves not to see the individual life. Offred muses later : "What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other" (248) . Orwell, too. uses addition thematically, when O' Brien forces Winston to acknowledge that two plus two can equal five if the Party says so. Both the ComWINTER 1997, VOL. 38, NO.2

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mander and 0 ' Brien use numbers as examples of logical because a priori truth, fundamental to reasoning, and the utilitarian calculus invoked by the controllers of the mass dystopian societies goes back at least as far as Zarniatins Well-Doer, who argues that "Even at the time when he was still wild and hairy, man knew that real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman, and that the inevitable mark of truth is cruelty" (199).1 6 But 0 ' Brien's point is that truth, even the a priori truth of mathematics, is relative and subject to the violence-enforced will of whoever is in power. Atwood 's point is that the truth of human individuality and (only through this individuality) human connectedness is absolute, inviolable. Rooke relates two images to this point of the connectedness of unique individuals, the chain and the Mayday network of underground subverters of the regime (185) . Offred remembers her mother. in a "throwback to domesticity," linking safety pins in a chain (263): the Underground Femaleroad is a human chain: "each one of them was in contact with only one other one, always the next one along" (320) . Rooke sees this recognition of the value of the individual-that politics and "character" go hand in hand-as "at the heart of Atwood's aesthetic and her politics. It requires the reader to position herself both within and outside of the fictive world : and it suggests that empathy and the larger perspective are not opposed" (185) . By transforming style into substance. Atwood has extended the reach of the dystopian genre , so often populated in the past by one -dimensional demonstrations of the anonymity of the totalitarian state. Abstractions about gender are a major threat to individuality, in Offred 's society as in ours. The novel's characters debate the theory of "essentialism," the notion that gender distinctions denote some fundamental and crucial differences between human beings. The Commander's essentialism is evident in his "women can't add" point. and gender abstractions are easily visible elsewhere in the novel, as when the doctor whom Offred visits offers to impregnate her and thus save her from the death accorded to unreproductive Handmaids: "Tt'd only take a minute. honey.' What he called his wife, once : maybe still does, but really it's a generic term . We are all honey" (79) . This gender abstraction is adopted by both sexes , of course: Aunt Lydia refers to all men as "them:' but Nick calls Offred by her real, individual name as evidence of his good faith in helping her escape at the end of the novel. The absolute of the individual distinguishes The Handmaid's Tale from its apparent analogues . It is one of the few absolutes in the novel. for Atwood gives little comfort either to the religious right's desire for a return to " traditional values" and a genderized society or to feminist essentialists. Atwood reveals. in fact, a profound resemblance between these two apparently polarized views. Each sees its opponents as "the Other," abstracting so that it may dehurnanize .!? In each case this abstracting is based on essentialist notions of "feminine" and "masculine" that belie their various mixtures in the unique individual, or deny the possibilities of a life without such labels. I S This insight into the convergence of the two apparent extremes-an insight held while yet distinguishing the two
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sharply. refusing the facileness of a mere "extremes meetv-s-makes the novel's feminism more complex and more subtle than the label "feminist 1984" can con vey. The Commander's critique of women's past (our pre sent) has enough truth in it to make Offred-and us-uncomfortable : he reminds her of the "meat market" degradation of women dependent on finding men (284), and Offred remembers the unwritten "rules" of safety women followed to deal with the threat of rape (32-33). The issue here is what our present freedom costs us, weighed against the price the fundamentalist right exacts for the "protection" of women in Gilead. Part of Atwood's contribution is to show costs at both ends of the spectrum in the essentialist debate : the "woman's culture" that Offreds mother envisioned has eventuated in the oppression she thought she was fighting in burning pornographic magazines. Atwood looks explicitly at the thesis that we are our own enemies ; the fundamentalist conservatives who create Gilead by overthrowing American democracy use as a guide a CIA pamphlet on destabilizing foreign governments produced by that very democracy. In like manner, the essentialism of Offred's mother and her "woman's culture" unintentionally supports the essentialism of the fundamentalist right. As Sage puts it, "What Atwood is after here-one of the book's persistent polemical projections-is the tendency in present-day feminism towards a kind of separatist purity, a matriarchal nostalgia . . . Ithat] threatens to join forces with right-wing demands for 'traditional values" (07). Offred remembers telling Moira that "if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away" (223). As Greene points out. "Atwood offers a cruel refutation of separatism when she has Moira find her separatist utopia with a vengeance at 'Jezebel's.' unofficially-sanctioned nightclub brothel where unassimilable females, professionals and lesbians end up-c-butch paradise.' as Moira calls it."!" Writing at roughly the same time as Atwood, Teresa de Lauretis makes an analogous point discursively rather than fictively. In describing the limitations for feminist theory of the concept of sexual "difference," she says: 'The first limit of 'sexual differenceis).' then, is that it constrains feminist critical thought within the conceptual frame of a universal sex opposition (woman as the difference from man, both universalized; or woman as difference tout court. and hence equally universalized), which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to articulate the differences of women from Woman, that is to say, the differences among women or, perhaps more exactly. the differences within women . . . . From that point of view, they would not be differences at all. and all women would but ren der different embodiments of some archetypal essence of woman, or more or less sophisticated impersonations of a metaphysical-discursive femininity" (25). Precisely this eradication of irreducibly individual women in favor of Wornan-" lies at the meeting-point of essentialist feminism and the fundamentalist right in Handmaid's Tale. Thus, Atwood has critiqued "discourses concerning gender,
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including those produced or prom oted as feminist" (2). an ongoi ng task de Lau retis considers vital to feminism given the persistent tendency to relap se into an excessive ly ge nderized view. In Tire Handmaid 's Tale Atwood anticipates recent efforts to move beyond the esse ntialist/anti-ess entialist split in femini st theory by cri tics such as Lind a Alcoff, who look for a third way, one which will "avoi d both the deni al of sexual difference (nominalism) and an esse ntializing of sex ual difference" (426). Atwood , by giving us the irony of the "w oman 's culture" become totalit arian nightmare, whil e simultaneously leav ing open the possibility of a limited esse ntialism in the " women can' t add" passage, part ic ipates in this d iscussion by offering ev ide nce of the co mplex and ironi c manner of life 's category-crossing." The novel embodies the co nvergence of polarized view s in the ambi guou s image of blood , image of both life and death . The menstrual blood of a handmaid is her sign of failure, and , ultim atel y. her death-warrant, thou gh it is also the sign of her continued fertility (95). The red gowns of the handmaids are the color of the blood of life, but they are also shrouds, and the repeated references to flowers (usually red) in the novel j oin this image of fertility and hope to wounds and suffering: Offred envi sion s her husband Luke held prisoner, "there 's a scar, no, a wound, it isn't yet healed , the co lor of tulip s. near the stem end , down the left side of his face where the flesh split recently" ( J 33 ). The ambi gu ity of the image of blood is one noted in Atwood 's poetry by Lorna Irvine : look ing at the Atwood poem " Red Shirt" that ce lebrates women, Irvine says "Finally, menstrual blood and the blood of birth are symbols of union in this fem ale wo rld. In 'Red Shirt,' the poet and her sister, head s almos t jo ined as they bend ove r their wo rk, sew a red shirt for the poet's daughter. Takin g from the color red its associations with ange r, sac rifice, and death, the sisters purify it. offering it as a fem ale birth -right to join all women to each other" (105 ).22 Tir e Handmaid 's Tale, with its insistent refusa l to resolve ambiguities, reta ins the polar ima ges of red and blood that the poem " purifies." Th e narrative itself enacts the ambiguity suggested in these images. At the first level , we find in the Epilogue that the histori an Pieix oto has put togeth er the text from a set of scrambled tape s: the novel is a reconstruction.P Within the novel itself, Atwood gives us Offred reconstructing the novel's present at so me future time, in the safe hou se in Maine, insisting throughout on the imprecision of the recon struction. Offred laments her inability to tell it exactly (" Its impo ssible to say a thing exactly the way it was," 173), wishes for a less painful , less frag mented tale to tell (343-44), complains of her fading memory (250) and unreliability as a narrator (41 ), even gives two versions of the beginning of her affair with Nick and then says that neither of them is true (3 40).24 In fact, the novel is in a seco nd sense a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a mem oir of Offred 's rebuilding of a self all but obliterated by the pain of her experience and the necessity of forgetting in orde r to surv ive. She must create. or recreate , herself after havin g been "erased" as a per son . When Seren a Joy briefl y
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shows her a photograph of her lost daughter, Offred cannot bear to have been erased from her child's memory: "1 have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph . A shadow of a shadow. as dead mothers become . You can see it in her eyes. I am not there" (296). After this obliteration, Offred rebuilds. recapturing her individuality by recapturing her past in her solitary recitations . Sitting in her room, musing on the multiple meanings of the word "chair" (the precious and pretentious academic in the Historical Notes will reduce this word's possibilities to a sexist joke). she recovers the ambiguity of meaning that totalitarian regimes try to control. "These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself' ( 140) . She composes-puts together, sets down-herself as the novel 's fictive reconstruction composes the story of her struggle to do so. Both senses of "compose" are present earlier in the book: "1 wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born" (86).25 She composes, creates herself in opposition to those who would construct her socially, as an object, a walking womb. Offred 's reconstruction of her self can be seen as a rebirth, a renewal akin to those Catherine McLay sees in The Edible Woman and Annis Pratt notes in 51/,.facing : like these works or like Ladv Oracle. The Handmaid's Tale gives us the descent to a nightmare underworld that is, as McLay reminds us, so central to the romance pattern . Thus situating the work within the romance tradition and within the body of Atwood's own work, we can see that the descent is darker and the rebirth more tentative than in her other novels, in part because of the open-endedness of the ending. By remembering her painful past in order to tell her story, Offred heals herself in a vivid demonstration of Joan Didion's maxim that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live ." Through telling her story, Offred survives by making herself real, speaking her way out of invisibility into her humanity, as the authors of the slave narratives asserted and discovered their humanity by remembering their captivity and their release in the perspective of their new freedorn. ?" All this is in part the now-familiar twentieth century obsession with the unreliability of language." and narrative, part of the self-reflexivity of the novel in our time . But it also conveys a tentativeness, a hesitancy in the face of the murderousness of those who are so very sure of their righteousness (like the Puritan forebears whose "city on a hill" ligures as a subtext in the novel's Boston setting: the novel is dedicated to Perry Miller and Alice Webster, the latter being an ancestor of Atwood's hanged as a witch and the former, Atwood's teacher and a prominent expositor of Puritan certainty). This distrust of certainty becomes part of the linguistic texture of the novel, as Offred ponders the multiple possibilities of language, cherishing the ambiguity that the regime is ultimately unable to control, at least in her own case . Multiple meanings reveal alternate pos sibilities, and Offreds willingness to risk the alternatives appears in her narrative's last lines. Unsure whether the proffered route of escape is a trap, she nonetheless makes the
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leap: "And so I step up, into the darkn ess within ; or else the light." Atwood suggests that the risk is worth taking, because the novel presumes Offred 's successful escape to the safe-house where she tapes her narrative . In an interview with Jan Garden Castro several years before the publication of The Handmaid's Tale, we can see that Atwood has long been concerned with the perils of absolutist certainty: "it' s obvio us now that everything passes through a filter. Doesn 't mean it' s not true in some sense . It just means that nobody can claim to have the absolute , whole, objective, total comp lete truth, The truth is composite, and that's a cheering thought. It mitigates tendencies toward autocracy.v-" The novel thus reaffirm s and transform s a central attitude in the dystopian tradition . Styli stically and thematically Atwood moves far beyond Orwell in her wariness of "passionate inten sity" about one 's righteousness . In the face of such menacing certainty as essentialists and the religious right exh ibit, the novel suggests that the most humane response is an appropriate humility about one's own absolutes. all except that which says that our humanity is dependent upon our remembering that one plus one plus one plus one do not equal the abstract four.
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, D OMINGUEZ HILLS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This essay. tho ugh dr afted ea rlie r, was substantia lly revised during my tenure as a Fell ow of the Am eric an Council of Le arned So cieties , and [ am gra teful for the suppo rt a nd oppo rtunity provided by the ACLS .

NOTES
I. "A Fem inist 1984" is, in fact . the title of Cathy N. Davidson 's review in Ms . Arnold David son, 113- 2 1, asserts that The Handmaid 's Tale has the "s tanda rd fo rm of the dyst opi a," des cribing the se ch ar acte ristics o n 116. See also Bri an St ableford , 97-100. 2. Atwo od 's awareness of her parti cip ation in thi s traditi on is manifest in ways as obvious as he r ca lling The Handmaid 's Tale "a dystopi a, a negativ e utopia." See a 1985 inter view cited by Lucy M . Freibert, 290 n. 3. Peter Rud y. in his Int rodu cti on to Zilboorgs tran slati on o f Za rn iatin's We , briefly explores the ch oice between freed om and happiness as des cribed by Dostoyevsky and Zamiatin . See Ch ad Walsh for the tran sformati on o f utopi a to dystopi a. Other signi fica nt analyses of the utopi an /d yslopi an literary traditi on include Judith Shkl ar and Robert C. Elli ott . 4. Ca thy Davidson (24) notes the co nnec tio n between Serena Joy and Phyllis Schl afly . 5 . Fo r love as a subver sive force in both novel s, see Barb ara Eh re nreich, 34- 36 , es pec ially 34. 6. See. for ex ample , the images o f eyes on pages 9. 29. 65 , 78 , and 84 . Da vid Kette rer (20 9-17) links the eye ima gery to that of mirrors in the novel: I myself would be inclined to see the mirror imagery, whi ch renders Offred as only a "d isto rted shadow," as part of the motif of the double. the dan ger of los ing the self in a world of enforced co nfo rm ity. 7. Sherrill Gra ce look s at mirror ima ges, doubles. du alities, a nd pol arities in Atw ood 's pre-Halldmaid work .

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8. The quotatio n from "S t. Paul: ' attributed to Acts. shou ld be compared wit h Acts 2:44--45: "And all that believed were together. and had all things common: And so ld their possessions and goods. and parted them to all men. as every ma n had need: ' 9 . The quotation refe rs to critiq ues like those of Bett y Frieda n and ea rly feminist fi cti on such as The Bell j ar. 10. See. on this point and many others . the fine discussion in Cons tance Rooke. 178. II . Greene finds the alternation of past and prese nt episodes and varia tions of this form to be so frequent in femi nist fic tion "as to be practically a defin ing charact eristic" (306-307). T hough her chief Atwood examp le in the Signs paper is Lad v Oracle. she refe rs spec ifica lly to The Handm aid 's Tail, as an example of this alternation of scenes . 12. Lorn a Sage. 30 7. 13. Ge rald A. Mo rgan sees Orwe ll as tellin g his tale "in reverse: ' from S mith's point of view rathe r than that of the less limi ted O'Brien. This is. for Morga n. a "wilful or unconscious desig n in tell ing a tale as badly as it cou ld be told. with some purpose unformed or undeclared" (8 1). 14. T he phrase abo ut Moira is Sage's . 15. Th is refus al of victim status and the the me of victim izat ion are persistent threads in Atwoo d 's work. from the beginn ing of the last chapter of Sl//ji/("illg- 'This above all. to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do noth ing"- to the assertion of this theme in Ca nadian literatur e in Survivu l. (Sl//jiIC;lIg and Survival were both published in Toro nto in 1972.) 16. Steinhoff notes some possible sources for Or we ll' s use of the 2 + 2 eq uation as rep rese nting objec tive reali ty: he cites G. K. Chesterton 's The Mall Who Wa s Thu rsdav ( 181and shows that the use of the formula goes back a long way in Orwe ll's ca ree r. He notes as we ll its prese nce in Dostoyevsky 's Note s [ nn n Underg round ( 173 ). Orwe ll himself. in a lett er to H. J. Willmett on May 18. 1944. uses the examp le for Hitler. who "can't say that two and two are five. because for the purposes of. say. ball istics. they have to make fou r. But if the sort of wor ld that I am afraid of arrives. a world of two or three great supersta tes which are unab le to co nquer one anothe r. two and two co uld become five if the fuehrer wished it" (cited in Irving Howe. ed .. Orwe ll 's 1984: Text, Sources . Cr iticism, 2nd Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace . 1982.279-80) , 17. Malak quotes Simone De Beau vo ir 's The Second Sex to this effect on p. 12. Ehrenre ich. Sage. and Stim pson a ll make the point about the co nverge nce of radical feminis m and the re ligious right in the ir reviews of the novel. 18. Ca roly n Heilbrun 's Toward A Recognition o fA nd rog vnv is now the classic text. but see also her Reinventing womanhood and Writillg a WOlllall 's Life, 19. Ga yle Gree ne. "Choice of Evi ls." 14-1 5. 20. Barbara Hill Rigney ( II ) qu otes Atwood as wanting to "take the cap ita l W off Wom an : ' 21. de Lauretis ( 1989 ) says ..It is one of the projects of this paper to sh ift the focus of the de bate fro m ' fem inist esse ntialism: as a category by which to classify fe minists or fe rninisrns, to the histor ical spec ificity. the esse ntial difference of femi nist the ory itself ' (6 ). I am inde bted to Critique' read er for sharpe ning my focus on this point. 22. Here as elsew here. we are made aware of the them atic co ntinuity betwee n Atwoo d's poetry and her ficti on: this co ntinuity is apparent as we ll in the motif of the do uble. discussed above. 23. On this point see Linda S. Kauffman. 226. 24. Offred 's insistence on her story's unreliabi lity has many literary antece de nts. of co urse. but it evokes most power fully Vladimir Nabo kov 's Bend Sinister. Na bokov 's narrator also gives alterna tive vers ions of rememb ered events- both novels are. in part. abo ut memory- as his protagon ist. initially appa rently paralyzed into inaction aga inst a tota litarian regi me. like Offrcd strugg les with the unbearabl e reme mbrance of a lost child . What Bonnie St. Andrews says of the narrator of S urfac ing : that she " becom es reliable. She becomes res pons ible for. quite simp ly. her true life 's story" ( 106) could be said of Offred . 25. Harri et F. Bergm ann (847-54) exp licates the linguistic themes of the novel ab ly. 26. Hen ry Loui s Gates . Jr. makes this point abo ut slave narratives in "Writing. ' Race : and the Differe nce It Makes:' in his Loose CallOIlS (New York: Ox ford UP. 1992 ). Frei bert notes the ana logy to the slave narratives as well as other poi nts of de liberate ly intended com parison. such as the Unde rgro und Railroad. with its safe ho uses and eve ntual escapes to Ca nada (286 ). 27. Ca theri ne R. Stimpson. in her revie w of the novel. describes this distrust of langu age: "In part . she pays an ob ligatory ho mage to the weary modern awa reness of ga ps between the word and the thing: sign and meaning: culture and nature. Welco ming the death of syntax. Atwood is also paying

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the now eq ua lly obligatory hom age to a di strustful postm odern awa reness of the ab ility of the powerful to co ntrol disco urse ." O n the reflexivity of the mode rn novel. see Robert Alte r. 28 . Rein gard Nisc hik also sees anti-abso lutism as a focal poin t of the nove l.

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Sage. Lorna. "Project ions from a Messy Present : ' Times Literarv Supp leme nt (March 2 1. 1986): 307 . SI. Andrews. Bonnie. Forbidde n Fruit: 0 11 the Relationship Between Wome ll alld Knowled ge ill Doris Less ing, Selma La ger/ of: Kate Chopin. and Margaret Atwood. Troy. NY: Whiteston. 1986. Shkla r, Jud ith. After Utopia . Prince ton: Princeto n UP. 1957. Stablefo rd. Brian. "Is There No Balm in Gilead" The Woefu l Prop hecies of The Handmai d 's Tale :' Foundation No. 39 (Spr ing 1987): 97- 100. Stein hoff. William. George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 1975. Stimpson. Ca therine R. "Atwood Woman:' Nation 242 (May 31. 1986 ): 764~7 . Walsh. Chad. Fro m Utopia to Nig h/mare . New York: Harpe r. 1962. Zamia tin. Eugene. We. 1924. rev. ed . Trans. Gregory Zilboo rg. New York: Dutto n. 1959.

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