《使女的故事》的女性哥特主义分析

论文总字数：51993字

摘 要

玛格丽特·阿特伍德是当代加拿大著名的文学评论家、诗人和小说家，被誉为“加拿大文学女王”。她的作品有着很强的女性主义和生态主义意识，长篇小说《使女的故事》描写的是未来之事，却不是通常意义上的科幻小说，它讲述的是已成历史的未来。小说通过一位基列国的使女录在磁带里的声音，即小说的女主人公奥芙弗雷德，向读者讲述发生在那个时间之前的未来二十一世纪初的荒诞经历。本论文从女性哥特主义理论出发，从女性空间、性别角色和人际关系这三个方面展现女性艰难的生存境况，揭示其所隐喻的女性逃离之路。

除去引言和结论外，本篇论文包含三个章节。第一章从被束缚的女性空间出发，着重分析小说里的物质空间和精神空间营造的女性哥特主义恐怖氛围。女主人公住在一个不愿称之为自己的房间的地方，生活起居都被限制与监视着，连同伴之间的交谈都是机械式的问候，身体和心灵都被束缚着。第二章从被禁锢的女性角色出发，主要分析使女和夫人这两种女性角色。使女作为当权者的生育机器，只是作为一个工具而活着，而大主教夫人，则只是空有主教妻子的头衔。第三章从被异化的人际关系出发，通过分析畸形的两性关系和对立的同性关系，窥视整个基列国极权统治下的扭曲的人性。通过上述三个方面的分析，可以加深我们对女性哥特主义的理解，也为我们对《使女的故事》的理解提供新的角度。

关键词：玛格丽特·阿特伍德；《使女的故事》 ；女性哥特主义

Contents

Acknowledgements I

Abstract II

摘要 III

Introduction 1

Chapter One The Confined Female Space 7

1.1 Confined Physical Space 7

1.2 Stifling Mental Space 9

Chapter Two The Bound Gender Roles 12

2.1 Handmaid as an Instrument 12

2.2 Wife as a Decoration 14

Chapter Three The Alienated Interpersonal Relationship 17

3.1 Distorted Relationship between Man and Woman 17

3.2 Antagonistic Relationship between Persons of the Same Gender 19

Conclusion 22

Works Cited 23

Introduction

Margaret Atwood and her book The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood, born in 1939, is not only a poet, literary critic and environmental activist, but also a great Canadian novelist who is hailed as “the Queen of Canadian Literature” and regarded as “one of the finest novelists, poets and storytellers this country has produced”^[1]. She first appeared in public view as a poet while she may be best known for her work as a novelist. Atwood’s novels, including The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale , Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin , etc., are famous for her distinctive figures of writing style, and she has received multiple literary awards and nominations in her writing career. The Handmaid's Tale , her sixth novel, appeared in 1985 and was the winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award, 1985 Governor General's Award, and finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize. Cat's Eye won the Booker Prize in 1989. Because of her father’s research, Margaret Atwood spent most of her childhood in north of Canada which bestowed her lots of writing inspiration.

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale is told in the first person by Offred—a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead — who is kept for reproductive purposes in an era of declining births due to sterility from pollution and sexually transmitted diseases. As Offred tells the story of her daily life, she frequently slips into flashbacks, from which the reader can reconstruct the events leading up to the beginning of the novel.

Offred, the narrator and protagonist of this story, records her story onto cassette tapes. She once married a man who had divorced, but when the new government Gilead was established, all divorces were nullified, making Offred an adulteress. Having proven fertile, she is assigned to bear a child for the Commander Fred and his wife Serena Joy after her capture.

As a Handmaid, she is confined physically and mentally in Commander’s house. She only can leave the house in twos on shopping trips. And she only can secretly read and play games in Commander’s study. She is living on the margins of survival.

In fact, all women in Gilead have no command over themselves. They are classified into different classes on the basis of their function. The Handmaids, having no real names, are instruments for bearing children. Even the Wives, the highest ranking women in Gilead, are only instruments for helping Commanders to manage family.

Such being the case, every gender-oriented relationship in Gilead under authoritarian rule is twisted and alienated. It is forbidden that the Handmaid meets alone with the Commander but Offred did so at the risk of being delivered. At the same time, she has to have impersonal and wordless sex with the Commander. The relationship between them two is weird. The relationship between Commander and Wife is also strange. Fred has no feelings for Serena who is his lawful wife while Serena can do nothing about it. Under this circumstance, there is only alienation and prejudice between the Handmaid and the Wife.

As the novel concludes, Offred is being taken away by the Eyes, but her fate after that is unknown. In the story, everyone is actually the victim of Gilead’s totalitarian rule. Among them, women are the most vulnerable groups who are confined and watched, living with fear. They are treated as instruments not people. In this case, gender relationships are distorted to the extreme. Few people can escape this vicious cycle.

Literature Review

In the 1970s and 1980s, western critics paid attention to Atwood's work, focusing more on her poets. In the 1990s, with the publication of several award winning novels of Atwood, such as The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye, western research emphasis was shifted to novels and domestic research on her novels also had a new development.

Overseas research on Margaret Atwood has made great achievements after four decades, producing many monographs, journal articles and book reviews. To study her well, scholars even established an international association called “the Margaret Atwood Society” for the scholars, teachers and students exchanging ideas about her works. For her works, critics usually pay attention to three perspectives: feminism, nationalism and ecologism.

At present, a feminist perspective is the mainstream when it comes to the research of The Handmaid's Tale. Many critics have focused on the reflection of the second wave of feminism in the novel, for example, Fiona Tolan(2005). Tolan’s book Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, in thorough perspectives, elaborates the development of Western feminist thought and Atwood’s process of creation, which is very instructive and valuable. The book “attempts to demonstrate the existence of a dynamic relationship between her fiction and feminist theory” (Tolan 1). In Tolan’s view, Atwood has generated a new and contribution to feminist discourse.

It is obvious that The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian fiction, but it is difficult to separate the future human situation and female issues apart. One example is C. A. Howells’s essay “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”. This dissertation makes a comparison between two fictions, indicating that The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on the abuse of human rights and the oppression of women in a centralized system, and suggesting that it is also difficult to distinguish between Atwood's dystopian view and her consistent feminist stance. Another example is Amin Malak(1987) who also focuses on the dystopian tradition represented in The Handmaid’s Tale, arguing that this novel not only carries on the dystopian tradition of Huxley and Orwell, but also develops the feminist theme.

There are also a lot of other different perspectives, such as ecologism, post-colonialism and narrative strategy, but a female consciousness can also be found.

With the publication of the article The Man from the Mars in 1983, Margaret Atwood was first introduced to China. And Atwood research really began in the 1990s. The first monograph of Atwood is the book Margaret and Her Writing, authored by professor FuJun from Nanjing Normal University, who is one of the most authoritative experts proficient in Canadian literature and devotes much time to the research of Margaret Atwood.

Compared with the abundant studies abroad, Chinese research that focuses on The Handmaid’s Tale is not too much. There are only several papers. At present, the domestic research mainly focuses on the following four aspects. The first one is the theme of dystopian. It sets off alarm bells through depicting the horror picture of Gilead, where women become different functional instruments of the country. For example, Fu Jun and Chen Qiuhua(1999) focus on its dystopian features and realistic significance.

Secondly, it starts from the perspective of ecological feminism, focusing on the relationship between women and nature. In the polluted environment, women suffer more damage than men. Lian Yajian(2014) conductes a study of ecological feminism, the relationships between men and nature, men and women were deeply reflected. Zhang Dongmei analyzes the novel in a comparatively profound ecocritical way in her master dissertation. Thirdly, it carries out the study from the angle of living space and power politics in Gilead. Wang Ping and Zhang Jianying(2005) conducts a study of the power strategies in Gilead, revealing the relationship between power and body, and responsive resistance, such as female oppression, pursuit of subject, feminist writing and language subversion, etc.

Another one is the perspective of textual features and narrative techniques. For example, Yan Youping(2005) combines postmodern theory with the text in her master dissertation. However, interpreting the novel from the perspective of female Gothicism is very few. Therefore, this thesis will analyze The Handmaid’s Tale from the perspective of female Gothicism with regard to female space, gender roles and interpersonal relationship.

Female Gothicism

The word “Gothic” is originally used to describe a style of architecture which developed in northern France and spread through western Europe from the middle of the 12th century to the early 16th century. With the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel the Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story in 1794, the Gothic novel—a new literary genre came into existence. Therefore, the word Gothic can also refer to a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and mysterious or violent incidents.

Walpole’s groundbreaking novel establishes the basic pattern of this literary genre: a medieval, dilapidated or gloomy castle, wandering ghosts or unreasonable supernatural phenomenon, and an innocent and vulnerable heroine. This stereotyped characterization is actually an expression of patriarchy thinking, presenting the theme of sufferings and struggling of powerless heroines in the male-dominated society by exaggerating the strength of male while belittling the ability of female. The whole Gothic story is full of mysteries and chilling terror, and filled with a desolate and horrible atmosphere. Many writers use these Gothic elements as a tool to build suspense and tension which can stimulate the reader’s deep sense of fear.

Although this literary genre is created by male writers, female writers have also made a great deal of contribution to the development of Gothic fiction, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Although in the western academia, critics have already made ambiguous gendered distinctions in Gothic traditions. They did not introduce gendered perspective into Gothic studies until the British writer Ellen Mores first created the new term “Female Gothic” in her book Literal Women: The Great Writers in 1976. She suggested that the female Gothic is “easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (Mores 90). This definition may not express this new literary genre comprehensively but it has laid the foundation for a new space for feminist literary studies in the patriarchal society. It is a significant breakthrough of Gothic studies.

Meanwhile, Ellen Moers advocated that the primary difference between male Gothic novels and female Gothic novels lies in the root of fear. With a definition of “it has to do with fear” (Moers 90), female Gothic can be generalized as a literature genre which follows certain literary mode that has something to do with causing interior fears to the characters and to the readers. Namely, female Gothic novels also have horrible settings and plots, while the roots of these fears are not the mysterious or supernatural elements that comprise the traditional Gothic novels. These horrible elements derived from the various pressures in the real world which may cause the inner anxiety and fear to females.

In fact, a lot of critics came up with a series of feminist views combining different literary angles from Marxism to Psychoanalysis. But one certain thing is that Female Gothic pays more attention to the realistic characteristics of the work and weakens the traditional Gothic supernatural factors from the beginning. According to Lin Bin’s research Female Gothic Studies in the West and Feminist Theories of Gender and Genre, female Gothic emphasizes the anxiety and fear of women that comes from both inner and outer world. The haunting agency is not the mystical power but comes from the real life, comes from the imprisonment of gender, gender-oriented relationships and constraints of female space, especially the patriarchal relations.

The typical example is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Goober’s critic book The Madwoman in the Attic, which tries to tell the fact that almost all women in the nineteenth century were in some sense imprisoned in the patriarchal society. In essence, the female Gothic is a branch of the Gothic novel, which also creates some horrible landscapes, settings, and plots. The difference is that the sense of fear comes along not from supernatural elements but from the realistic conditions of the realistic society which makes heroines feel anxious, isolated and fearful in their inner world. To some degree, female Gothicism is the real attribute of patriarchal society in which women are placed in difficult circumstances.

Margaret Atwood is a renowned writer with a strong sense of femininity, responsibility and social consciousness. She has a strong interest in Gothic novels, which has deeply influenced her in later literary creation, and she has made a detailed study of Gothic novels at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. As Edina Szalay says, “All the heroine’s mind and life under Atwood’s pen are penetrated with Gothic elements”. (Edina, 2001: 217) Combining unique feminist consciousness with Gothic elements, Margaret Atwood has created extraordinary works. In this essay, female Gothicism will be adopted to help to analyze the situations of women with regard to female space, gender roles and interpersonal relationship.

Thesis Structure

The main body of this thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, the physical space and mental space of female characters will be analyzed separately. Confined in a room that has no privacy, the Handmaids have no freedom, and their words and actions are watched by others. In the second chapter, female characters oppressed by power will be discussed, taking the Handmaids and the Wives as examples. The Handmaids work as instruments. It is their duty to bear children for the Commanders. The Wives can have their dominance in the household but live as decorations. The last chapter mainly focuses on alienated gender relationships. It separately analyzes distorted relationships between men and women such as the Commander and the Handmaid, and hostile relationships between women and women such as the Wife and the Handmaid.

Chapter One The Confined Female Space

Representative of the Handmaids in the Republic of Gilead, Offred is a typical example who is completely restricted, and suffering from both physical and spiritual oppression. She does not have her own privacy, neither does she have the freedom to read and write. She can not talk freely, for every word and deed of hers is under close observation.

1.1 Confined Physical Space

According to the book The Gothic, “it is generally accepted that the primary defining trait of female Gothic is the consistent focus on the heroine and the house” (David and Byron 280). So when The Handmaid’s Tale is put in the context of female Gothic, the relationship between female characters and the house must be mentioned. The house in the novel is not a place that provides the sense of safety but a space that confines people’s body and mind.

Female Gothic works, since the day of its birth, has been concentrating on the haunting agency that constantly makes females anxious and disturbed. These troubled feelings might come from a constraint on females’ development space. Some gloomy, mysterious, horror scenes and settings, such as graveyard, castles and even the house, are demonstrated to stimulate strong feelings like fear and strangeness. For the handmaids in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, their living house and room may remain more prison-like, which cannot provide a sense of safety or comfort.

In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the heroine is assigned to serve the Commander Fred. Although the heroine Offred has her own room in the Commander’s house, she is not the owner of the room. She refuses to call the room her room which even “doesn't shut properly” (Atwood 4). In addition to this, the room looks like “a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors” (Atwood 3), Offred wonders whether the room is decorated in accordance with the order of the government so they handmaids “have the same print, the same chair, the same white curtains” (Atwood 3).

When it comes to the relationship between the protagonist and the Gothic space, female Gothic tends to represent heroine’s “attempts to escape from a confining interior” (Punter and Byron 278). However, the confining room in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale has taken every escape into consideration. Offred’s description is as follows:

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge. (Atwood 3)

Anything in the room they could tie a rope to has been removed. Compared with the handmaids’ escaping from the room, the government is more afraid that they may commit a suicide, escaping from the world. Knowing her own situation, Offred tries not to think too much in order to survive. After all, this room is “not a prison but a privilege” according to Aunt Lydia (Atwood 4). Because she is at least alive and has a decorated room.

As we all know, the most obvious function of clothing is to improve the comfort of the wearer. Physically, the most basic purpose of wearing clothes is keeping us warm. Apart from this function, clothing is also a symbol of civilization, because it is embarrassing if you do not wear clothes in front of others. However, in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, clothing acts as government’s instrument to imprison women’s body, even to fetter their mind.

I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, pull them onto my hands, finger by finger. Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us. The skirt is ankle-length, full, gathered to a flat yoke that extends over the breasts, the sleeves are full. The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen. (Atwood 4)

In the story, different classes have their own color-coded clothing. The handmaids are forced to purify the heart and diminish the passion like a nun. Ironically, they have to wear “red shroud” (Atwood 18), which symbolize sexuality and fertility. They have no control over their own bodies which is not their personal property. When Offred takes a bath, which is not only a “requirement” but also a “luxury”, the naked body under the cover of overdress is “strange” to her already (Atwood 54). The white wings can keep them from both seeing their bodies and keep their bodies from being seen. They are featureless, just “nondescript women in red” (Atwood 15). In general, they are confined in the clothing.

Like prisoners who are let out for an exercise or to relieve themselves everyday, the Handmaids also can leave the house on shopping trips. But they do not have the right to move freely. When the driver Nick whistles and winks to Offred, she surmises a lot of times in mind. One of the possibilities is that he is an Eye. She becomes so frightened because Handmaids’ every move is under surveillance and they are vulnerable to denunciation by the people around. Here is another example showing their situation under close guard:

We aren't allowed to go there except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers. If either of us slips through the net because of something that happens on one of our daily walks, the other will be accountable. (Atwood 15)

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