Modern Language Studies

The World as It will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in "The Handmaid's
Tale"
Author(s): Stephanie Barbé Hammer
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 39-49
Published by: Modern Language Studies
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 The World as it will be? Female Satire and the Technology
of Power in The Handmaid's Tale

Stephanie Barbe Hammer

Atwood's futurist novel of 1986 is an important book for many

reasons. In particular, The Handmaid's Tale plays a significant role in the
evolution of women's writing in so far as it represents one of the few
commercially successful and critically recognized (if not universally
acclaimed) contributions by a woman writer to a literary genre domi-
nated by men-namely, satire.' Curiously however, despite its necessarily
subversive status as a female invasion of male literary territory, The
Handmaid's Tale possesses many formal and thematic features typical of
traditional satire, as it is defined by contemporary literary theory. In fact,
according to the understandings of satire put forth by accepted critics of
the genre, Atwood's novel in many ways presents a satiric text-book case.
The author employs a variety of themes and motifs commonly found in
classical and modern satire: complex rhetorical devices such as formal
disguise (a satire which masquerades as a novel which in turn masquer-
ades as an autobiography) and irony,2 a static or nonprogressive plot
where very little actually seems to happen,3 the character of a common-
sense, average narrator who speaks in a seemingly straightforward
manner, and the scene of a dystopic nightmare city.4 Furthermore,
Handmaid boasts what is perhaps the most crucial element of satiric
writing, namely, the clear existence of a topical political target, which here
is very obviously evangelical Christian fundamentalism.5
The presense of these features indicates that Handmaid is an
excellent candidate for admittance to the canon of satiric literature-a
state of affairs which, given the novel's subject matter, does not reassure,
but rather unsettles and disturbs the female critic. After all, Atwood's
narrative focuses specifically on men's domination of women by means of
other women, and more generally portrays women's physical and mental
imprisonment within a particularly sinister male regime. In this manner,
the fact that Handmaid fits so well within a male literary canon raises
potentially disturbing questions as to the true value of this novelist's
achievement. In writing satire has Atwood indeed invaded a male literary
bastion in order to produce a new female writing or is her writing itself
penetrated by masculine assumptions as to what satire should be and do?
Is The Handmaid's Tale a subversion of male writing or is this subversion
itself already subverted by the regulations of an established male art
form? Perhaps equally important is the question of aesthetic judgment;
according to what standards should the quality of female satire be mea-
sured-should we base our assessment on traditional male conceptions
of what satiric literature should be or upon an as yet undefined aesthetic
of female satiric writing?
Mary McCarthy unwittingly raises these very issues in her review
of the novel for the New York Times.6 Tellingly, she compares Handmaid

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unfavorably to established male works of futurist satiric literature-1984,
Brave New World, and A Clockwork Orange-and she remarks that
Atwood's contribution to this subgenre lacks the ironic bite and linguistic
imagination of the other three works.' And yet, should not female satire by
definition make us redefine our traditional male notions as to what consti-
tutes "good" satire? Barbara Ehrenreich's review for the New Republic
(the most valuable essay written thus far on the novel)8 is more sensitive to
this problem. While she readily admits to her own impatience with what is
for her a "fantasy of regression" on the part of a heroine who is a "sappy
stand-in for Winston Smith," she also recognizes that the book concerns
itself successfully with complex feminist issues.9 In this way, Ehrenreich
implies that the novel's very betrayal of certain aesthetic expectations is
somehow linked to its satiric purpose.
How then, we might ask, does the challenge of writing female
satire connect with Handmaid's atmosphere of male domination and with
the author's ultimate satiric statement?
Such queries as to the value and function of female satire appear
unnecessarily complicated when we first read Atwood's novel, for we
discover that, on one level at least, Handmaid's satiric thrust is straight-
forward and unambiguous. Atwood's condemnation of Gilead's born
again theocracy is never in doubt, because Handmaid relentlessly exposes
the total hypocrisy of a regime which preaches biblical virtue but where
vice reigns everywhere-from the brutal executions of dissidents to the
institutionalized sexual promiscuity enjoyed by the commanders. The
representatives of the new way are consistently monstrous. The sadistic
aunts are frustrated older women who brutalize their younger, fertile
charges out of jealousy and fear. The seemingly mild-mannered com-
mander Fred cheats on his wife with alacrity and calmly justifies the
oppressive regime which he partly masterminded with the observation
that in the old society men felt they were no longer needed by women; he
thereby suggests that women's liberation forced American men to take
this drastic action; ergo the present regime is ultimately the women's
"fault." And Atwood's most ironic portrait is certainly that of Fred's
resentful and cruel wife Serena Joy. Neither serene nor joyous, this
high-ranking wife is a former "total Woman" activist who is enraged and
embittered by the existence which her successful advocacy now imposes
upon her.
Within this demonic scheme even the victimized handmaids are
forced into an existence which is no less hypocritical than that of their
oppressors; in order to survive they and the narrator among them are
constantly obliged to pretend to espouse a system of values which deni-
grates and threatens to annihilate them. In this manner, an allegedly
profoundly Christian society ironically transforms every citizen into a
sinner in so far as each person must become a liar and a hypocrite in order
to exist within the system. This is, of course, the supreme irony of
Atwood's fictional future world; this is a theocracy where not one person
is devout and where such notions as faith and morality simply have no
meaning.
Thus, on the level of topical satire, Handmaid's message unfolds

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with a cartoon-like clarity and is consequently not particularly surprising;
American Christian fundamentalists are fanatical and dishonest, and
therefore highly dangerous; they seek to erode the liberties which all
Americans-and especially American women-cherish.
And yet, this topical satire represents only one very superficial
layer of Atwood's critique in The Handmaid's Tale; simultaneously a far
more complex critical process is unfolding here. This second satiric
dimension lies embedded and partially concealed within Offred's own
narrative procedure. Despite the heroine's apparent straightforwardness
and despite her seeming fitness to give a true, woman-in-the-street report
of a nightmare situation, Offred surreptitiously offers the reader a very
different kind of narrative.
Significantly, the narrator reveals that she becomes Fred's mistress
and that she later has secret erotic rendez-vous with Nick, the strong and
silent chauffeur who is possibly an agent of the secret police. A strange
kind of live triangle now develops, a bedroom farce of multiple assigna-
tions under one roof, which would be comical if Offred's life did not
depend on her successful juggling of these two sexual relationships. The
plot as it now unfolds is weirdly reminiscent of popular gothic romance,
for in such stories the heroine, like Offred, is often made a helpless
prisoner by an evil and sexually desirous male force, until she is finally
liberated by the romantic hero.
Offred's predicament recalls that of a romantic heroine in other
ways as well. First, she is desired by and must eventually choose between
two men who, second, embody an impressive combination of male
stereotypes drawn from gothic romance and romantic comedy: on one
hand, Fred, the older, paternal, established authority figure who connotes
at once a lord of the manor and a seasoned military campaigner; and on
the other hand, Nick, the ambiguous, delinquent, dangerous and there-
fore more sexually attractive younger man of inferior social position. The
fact that Nick is a chauffeur is replete with erotic overtones from the
movies, while the lower-class upper-class connection between him and
Offred also recalls D.H. Lawrence's steamy love-affair in Lady Chatter-
ly's Lover. Finally, Offred's choice of the younger man seems romanti-
cally validated by the novel's ending, in which Nick miraculously effects
her escape from imprisonment in Commander Fred's household.
From the reader's point of view these fragments of romantic
fiction are ironically jarring, to say the least; the grim realities of Offred's
actual existence resemble those of a concentration camp inmate, far more
than those of a gothic heroine. But while we read Offred's predicament as
a grisly parody of a romantic conundrum, Offred herself is far less certain
as to how to interpret her relationships with Fred and Nick. Despite
herself, she takes pleasure in her status as Fred's mistress,'0 and although
she recognizes the fallacy of reading romance into her affair with Nick,
she is unwilling to regard him and her feelings for him in any other light:

Being with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together

while the storm goes on outside. This is delusion of course. This room is
one of the most dangerous places I could be. If I were caught there would

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 be no quarter, but I'm beyond caring ... I dismiss these uneasy whispers,
I talk too much. I tell him things I shouldn't ... I make of him an idol, a
cardboard cutout. (Handmaid, pp. 269-70)

Offred's choice of metaphor is as important as it is sinister; the cave

is the site of sexual pleasure for two of classical literature's tragically
doomed love-affairs-that of Dido and Aeneas (where Dido fatally mis-
understands Aeneas' intentions toward her) and that of Isolde and Tristan
(who have fled briefly from society in order to consummate their love).
Her use of this image under these circumstances is very revealing. With
her reference to the cave Offred simultaneously demonstrates her cultural
literacy (as a liberal arts college graduate), her as yet unspoken awareness
of the disastrous implications of her relationship with Nick (a truth which
she consciously recognizes an instant later, "This is delusion . .."), as well
as her unconscious reliance on the romantic tropes of male literature in the
ordering of her own erotic experience. Troublingly, it is the "truth" of
male literary discourse which triumphs over Offred's common sense-
those "uneasy whispers" which tell her that her relationship with Nick is
not safety but danger. Thus, although Offred suspects that her feelings for
Nick are unfounded she cannot help but choose to romanticize her
predicament, to "idolize" the man into a hero of epic proportions, "a
cardboard cutout."
Offred's conscious choice in favor of a romanticism which she
herself acknowledges as mistaken becomes even more disturbing when
we scrutinize her behavior throughout her story. When we do so, we
cannot fail to notice that she reacts to her situation with a consistent
passivity. She makes no effort to escape the Handmaid's training center
although her best friend Moira is planning such a prison break and she
rejects the overtures of the resistance underground. Even more surpris-
ingly, Offred refuses to take advantage of her relationship with the
commander, who clearly likes her and who, strangely enough, looks to her
not for erotic pleasure, but primarily for companionship and for some
kind of moral reassurance:

Sometimes, after the games, he sits on the floor beside my chair, holding
my hand. His head is a little below mine, so that when he looks up at me
it's at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience ... It's
difficult for me to believe that I have power over him, of any sort, but I
do; although it's of an equivocal kind ... There are things he wants to
prove to me, gifts he wants to bestow, services he wants to render,
tenderness he wants to inspire. (Handmaid, p. 210)

Comically but chillingly Offred responds to these opportunities with a

request for hand-lotion and an indifferent question about current events;
as already noted, she later simply surrenders her fate to the desirable but
unreliable Nick.
Admittedly, Offred justifies her choice of non-action indirectly, by
showing us that any form of self-assertion against this new society must
fail. Significantly, the rebellious females of Offred's world are all
defeated: Ofglen commits suicide in order to protect the May Day under-

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ground; Moira's escape attempt is thwarted and she is imprisoned in the
city's brothel; Offred's own mother is glimpsed in a film-documentary
about the dreaded toxic-waste colonies. To survive, Offred seems to
suggest, one must surrender.
But despite this evidence, the description which Offred gives us of
her own life prior to the Gileadian coup casts increasing doubt upon her
apparently reliable narrative point of view. We learn, for example, that
she was formerly the mistress of a married man, and the novel obliquely
suggests that her husband Luke may have chosen her over his first wife for
the same reasons that the commander favors her over his spouse-Offred
is younger, more sexually attractive, and fertile (significantly, Luke seems
to have had no children by his first marriage. More disturbingly, despite
her intelligence and education, Offred seems to have exercised as little
control over her former life as she does over her present existence.
Uninspired by politics-a disinterest which her husband actively en-
couraged-Offred remained on the sidelines of political questions, just as
she waited for Luke to make up his mind to marry her, and she worked,
not as an explainer or analyzer but as a transcriber of books to disks in a
predominantly female task force-an act which curiously prefigures her
own present narrative recording. She is a woman who has, for the most
part, lived by watching others do.
Seen from the point of view of her past, Offred's current existence
begins to look less like a nonsensical metaphormosis and more like a
horrible but nightmarishly appropriate extention of her former life; one
might even argue that, in a larger sense, Offred has always been a
handmaid-a woman who serves others, but never herself. Once the
reader makes this connection, the apparently huge contrast between the
idealized good old days and the bad new days shrinks considerably. We
should keep in mind that, from the very beginning of the novel, Atwood
ironizes the gap which Offred establishes between her seemingly golden
past and her ghoulish present; early on we witness a confrontation
between these false opposites when Offred encounters some curious
Japanese tourists on the street:

The skirts reach just below the knee and the legs come out from beneath
them, nearly naked in their thin stockings, blatant, the high-heeled shoes
with their straps attached to the feet like delicate instruments of torture.
The women teeter on their spiked feet as if on stilts, but off balance; their
backs arch at the waist, thrusting the buttocks out. Their heads are
uncovered and their hair too is exposed in all its darkness and sexuality.
They wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like
scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before. I stop walking. Ofglen
stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these
women. We are fascinated but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has
taken so little time to change our minds about things like this. Then I
think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom ... (Handmaid, p. 28)

Offred makes an error here which is all the more troubling because
of its familiarity; she mistakes the outward appearance of freedom for the
thing itself. Her misguided equation of western fashion with feminine

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liberation-already signalled stylistically through Atwood's description of
the high-heels which emphasizes how very much this clothing imprisons
rather than frees-is especially ironic given the fact that the person wear-
ing it is not western but eastern, and is a representative of a culture noto-
rious for its oppression of women, at least from a western point of view.
Here we arrive at the second level of Atwood's satiric message: this
moment of inter-cultural confrontation suggests very clearly that both
Offred and the Japanese tourist are prisoners of their societies. The only
difference between them lies in the fact that Offred's culture has abol-
ished the benevolent "western" toleration of women's hard-won but still
relatively small and superficial prerogatives. But true personal freedom
exists for neither woman in the world which Atwood is describing, which,
by implication, reflects not a future reality but a present actuality. This is
not the world as it will be, this is the world-symbolically at least-as it is.
In this manner Atwood employs her narrator-heroine to provoke
two very contradictory reactions in the female reader. On one hand the
very fact that Offred is not a revolutionary but an average, college-
educated working mother makes her both recognizable and sympathetic
to us. But at the same time Atwood turns our empathy for Offred against
us, suggesting that her protagonist (and thus we too, in so far as we
resemble her) acts or fails to act based on a dangerous amalgamation of
gender asumptions which have governed women's behavior for centuries
and which have guaranteed their oppression by men:" a vicious circle of
passivity and helplessness-wherein passivity perpetuates impotence
which in turn justifies and excuses passivity; a dehabilitating narcissism
which continually deflects the individual from her real self-interest and
needs; a maschositic belief in salvation through erotic love no matter how
unlikely and potentially dangerous to the individual. This last point is
emphasized by the fact that we do not know whether Nick saves Offred
or betrays her. Further, even he does successfully effect her escape from
the Republic of Gilead, his motives remain ambiguous; does he really love
her, or does he simply resemble the other men of Gileadian society in that
he becomes so enraptured at the thought of fathering a child that he
decides to protect the vessel carrying it?12 If the latter motive is indeed the
case then Offred's relationship with Nick is not very different than her
relationship with Fred. In both cases she is a breeder rather than a person
in her own right.
But there remains yet another, more universal dimension to
Atwood's satiric critique in Handmaid. One of the most striking features
of this futurist novel is its lack of futuristic technological trappings-be
they gismos, robots, or outlandish scientific theories, advances, or prac-
tices. This is in striking opposition to those futurist satiric novels touted by
McCarthy-1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, or even
Fahrenheit 451. These works all present worlds which are techno-
nightmares--systems which dehumanize their citizens, forcing them to
operate like machinery, rather than like individuals. Each boasts an espe-
cially demonic invention: the video-surveillance of Orwell, the quasi-
poisoned test-tube babies of Huxley, the behaviorist Ludovico treatment
of Burgess, and the insidiously efficient book-burning fire brigade of

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Bradbury. Correspondingly, these fictions propose a return to nature and
to old-fashioned customs and values as a probably unattainable but
certainly superior social ideal: Winston's and Julia's old-fashioned love-
affair in 1984, the Shakespeare quoting Savage in Brave, the whiskey-
drinking priest who affirms the centrality of free-will in Clockwork, and
the hippylike book people living in pastoral harmony in Fahrenheit.
In Handmaid on the other hand, the exact opposite process seems
to be at work. The Republic of Gilead strikes us, not as a techno-dystopia,
but as a reactionary step backwards in time, to a kind of government
and lifestyle that resembles that of the Middle Ages-based on one part
biblical patriarchy, one part Islamic militantism, and one part Hindu caste
system. Technology as we usually think of it-as the tools, mechanisms,
machines and expertise that either make our lives easier or threaten to
destroy them-seems to have been banished from this society with the
exception of a few cars and a couple of computers. Perhaps the most
chilling aspect of this technological banishment is Gileadian society's
absurdly inefficient rejection of any of the medical techniques for pre-
venting and curing infertility-which seems to be this society's major
problem.
Or is it? I cannot help but suspect that if infertility were really such
a pressing concern this profoundly hypocritical society would find a way
either to justify fertility technology or to at least provide it unofficially (as
it does with sexual pleasure)."13
I would suggest that, as is typical of Atwood's satiric strategy, this
apparent technological absence in Gilead, is not what it appears to be.
Instead, a very different kind of technology is at work here-insidious
because it is at once invisible and all pervasive-and that is, very simply,
the technology of power which Michel Foucault has called discipline:

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes

power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain
connected distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrange-
ment whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individu-
als are caught up .... Consequently, it does not matter who exercises
power ... Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him. He
who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes
responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spon-
taneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation; in
which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his
own subjection.'4

This invisible, all-subjugating technology is exactly what drives

Gileadian society. Significantly, we see no rulers in Atwood's fictional
world,'15 but everyone in it from Commander Fred to his domestic ser-
vants, from the doctor who inspects Offred to Offred herself is caught up
in a network of surveillance and counter-surveillance.16 The novel con-
stantly emphasizes the omnipresence of the scrutinizing gaze; the word
"eye" is everywhere; the secret police are called "Eyes," and the farewell
greeting "under his eye" refers to the divine gaze but also testifies to the
fact that everyone is indeed under the eye of someone else. Aunt Lydia

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gives her "girls" better advice than she knows, when she tells them to be as
invisible as possible, because "to be seen is to be penetrated" (p. 28). And
even the apparently spontaneous, orgiastic group outlets for frustrated
violence, such as the Salvagings, reveal themselves to be carefully orches-
trated, closely supervised exercises in which the actors are painfully aware
that they are being watched:

It's a mistake to hang back too obviously in any group like this; it stamps
you as lukewarm, lacking in zeal. (Handmaid, p. 278)

The constant monitoring of behavior of everyone by everyone

(with an efficiency which makes a Big Brother unnecessary) coupled with
the ever-present threat of clearly defined punishments represent the
components of a technology of social control which is in no way medieval
but which is rather radically modern.17 Seen from this point of view
Gilead's emphasis on child-bearing, the outlawing of reading for women,
and the other bizarre rules and values which characterize this society
reveal themselves to be the instruments which serve to make docile, not
just women-although the bulk of these devices seem to be aimed at
them, probably because they represent the most subversive threat-but a
whole social body. It is total social control, the perfection of the exercise of
power, that Gilead strives for; this is no theocracy, it is a world turned into
a perpetual penetentiary.
Such a view of Gilead explains why for all its freakishness, the
social order of The Handmaid's Tale seems weirdly familiar,18 and in this
familiarity lies the ultimate political thrust of Atwood's satiric argument.
As was the case for Offred's apparent transformation from free mother to
indentured surrogate, the social metamorphosis from democratic US of A
to totalitarian Gilead is an ironic one, for this disciplined society of the
future is a grotesque mirror image of our own-a society that controls our
behavior so efficiently and discretely that we fail to notice the degree to
which we are manipulated.'19
With this ironic future portrait Atwood suggests that we are also
Gileadians, constantly under scrutiny by the plethora of institutions with
which we must have contact from the IRS audit to the university examina-
tion. And we are also the auditors and examiners who scrutinize the others.
In conclusion, I believe that The Handmaid's Tale is at once a
text-book example of modern fictional satire and at the same time a clever
appropriation of a predominantly male literature for feminist purposes. It
subverts as it borrows from this literary canon, enabling us to admire it
both as a satiric model and as a pioneering satiric effort. More impor-
tantly, the novel manifests satiric critique at its most complex; it offers
itself as a satire for women and to a certain extent of them, while it
simultaneously attacks both the insidious disciplinary mechanisms of
contemporary society as well as our willful ignorance of them. Offred
herself signals the importance of political self-recognition early on in the
novel:

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you

have to work at it. (Handmaid, p. 56)
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And certainly, self-recognition is equally and dramatically absent from
the academic conference assembled to discuss the Handmaid "docu-
ment" in Atwood's parodistic "Historical Notes." Here the plenary
speaker compounds the errors of the past with his pompous, unself-
critical assumption of his own culture's superiority. Fittingly, his lecture is
replete with both sexist jokes and an unwillingness to confront the moral
questions posed by the past:

Surely, we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity

culture-specific. Also, Gileadian society was under a good deal of pres-
sure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which
we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to
understand. (Applause). (Handmaid, p. 302)

By means of these negative exempla, Atwood urges us to recognize

the flaws of our culture and to refuse passive acceptance of them. Hand-
maid is, above all, a book about responsibility, at once emotional, sexual,
intellectual and civic.
Seen from this perspective, the satire in The Handmaid's Tale
directs its criticism towards all of us-feminists and non-feminists,
women and men. It warns us of the imperceptible technology of power,
of the subtle domination of women by men, and of our unconscious
imprisoning of each other and ourselves by ourselves.

University of California, Riverside

NOTES

1. There can be no doubt that the history of satiric writing has been do
by the "virile" irony of such writers as the Romans Horace and Juven
18th Century's Swift and Voltaire and such moderns as Orwell, Hux
Burgess. And even now, when we consider non-literary forms of sati
as the comic-strip, we see primarily the names of men, such as G
Trudeau.
2. David Worcester argues that satire consists of precisely such a complex
rhetorical infrastructure. See The Art of Satire (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1940; rpt. New York: Roosevelt Russell, 1966), p. 231.
3. In The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), Alvin
Kernan uses Pope's The Dunciad to illustrate the regressive plot structure
of satiric narrative, pp. 223 and following.
4. Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp.
14-18.
5. Gilbert Highet goes so far as to maintain that satire is always essentially
topical. See The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957), pp. 5-6.
6. "Breeders, Wives, and Unwomen," New York Times Book Review, Febru-
ary 9, 1986, p. 1.
7. McCarthy takes particular exception to Atwood's "inability to imagine a
language to match the changed face of common life" ("Breeders," p. 35).
But, she fails to take into account the linguistic deprivation which deter-
mines the lives of all Gileadians, but especially the Handmaids. These
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 women have no access to the written word, very little access to even oral
information, and only the most limited opportunity for speech. Since they
are forbidden meaningful contact with any other person, they, and Offred
among them, exist in a constant state of linguistic impoverishment-hence
the thrill of playing Scrabble. Thus, what McCarthy ascribes to Atwood as a
lack of imagination points instead to Offred's excruciating predicament-
that of a person who is systematically being robbed of her language
capability.
8. "Feminism's Phantoms," The New Republic, March 17, 1986, p. 33.
9. Ehrenreich, p. 34.
10. The Handmaid's Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 162-3.
11. Ehrenreich argues that the book's "ultimate" satiric attack targets "a repres-
sive tendency in feminism itself" and points to the insidious similarities
between ideas of the anti-feminist right and those of the cultural feminist
militants. See "Feminism's Phantoms." While this aspect of Atwood's satire
is clearly an important one, I wonder if this mise en question of current
feminist strains is not less crucial to the novel's critique than the attitude of
the heroine herself-which typifies the female "yuppie"'s indifference to
political issues, as Ehrenreich also notes. After all, Offred repeatedly reveals
that it was the average citizen's renunciation of political activism which
permitted the lunatic fringe to take over the country and transform it into
Gilead:

There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the

woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated ... How awful we would say,
and they were, but they were awful without being believable ... They
were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension
of our lives. (pp. 56-7)

Thus, while Handmaid admittedly expresses an indictment of extremist

gender ideology of right and of left, it no less certainly damns the passive
non-resistance exhibited by its anti-heroine.
12. Such an interpretation of Nick's motives are suggested by the ironic Histori-
cal Notes at the end of the novel, p. 311.
13. Again, the Historical Notes ironize the birthrate drop by noting that only
Caucasian births were lessening, p. 304.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),
p. 202. The cited section pertains to Foucault's description of Bentham's
Panopticon, which the author sees as an idealization of the disciplinary
mechanism. Such a model, according to Foucault, can be used "whenever
one is dealing with a multiciplicity of individuals on whom a task or a
particular form of behavior must be imposed" (p. 205). Therefore, a regime
of any political persuasion can and (in Foucault's opinion, necessarily does)
use discipline to control the behavior of its citizens.
15. Aptly, Ehrenreich wonders why it is never clear in the novel, "who is in
charge." See "Feminism's Phantoms."
16. The omnipresence of discipline helps explain why, as Joan L. Slonczewski
remarks, so many of the characters in the novel strike us as passive. See "A
Tale of Two Handmaids," The Kenyon Review, 6:4 (1986), p. 123.
17. Foucault notes that "the problem lies ... in the steep rise in the use of these
mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which,
throughout the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them,"
Discipline, p. 306.

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18. Catherine R. Stimpson notes that Gilead's domesticated totalitarianism
"become[s] even more frightening because its monstrosity seems .
absurdly normal." See "Atwood Woman," The Nation, May 31st, 1986, p.
764. Given this state of affairs, again I disagree with Mary McCarthy's
assessment, which claims that the element of recognition of our own society
is missing from Handmaid. See "Breeders," p. 1.
19. Foucault comments on our contemporary society in the following manner:
"We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on stage, but in the panoptic
machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since
we are part of its mechanism," Discipline, p. 217.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING ASSISTANT

PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

The Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program offer

educational institutions an opportunity to engage a native
French, German, Italian and Spanish speaker for their language
programs. Under the auspices of the program Chinese, French, Au
German, Italian and Mexican university students or young teacher
to U.S. schools, colleges and universities as native informants
in language departments or in language houses on campus.
The duties of the assistants may consist of teaching, serv
resource persons in conversational situations, working in langu
ratories, animating clubs, directing a language house or table,
extra-curricular activities, etc. In return for the services of the as
U.S. host institutions provide the FLTA's room and board, a w
tuition and a stipend, which usually ranges from $150 to $300 per
In some cases, homestays may be arranged in lieu of room an
Assistants from the Federal Republic of Germany may be eli
a grant from the German Marshall Fund of the United States t
ment award offers.
Candidates are chosen first by personnel in their home co
IIE reviews candidate dossiers and submits dossiers of app
candidates to participating U.S. institutions which then make t
candidate selection. IIE coordinates placement and provides
istrative supervision throughout the academic year. Parti
institutions are charged a nominal fee of $100 for each candidate a
as a language assistant and are billed at the start of the acade
that the assistantship begins.
For information, contact: Bonnie Sachs, Assistant Manager
Institute of International Education, 809 United Nations Plaza, New
NY 10017. Phone: (212) 984-5494.

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