The Handmaid's Tale. A Feminist Dystopia

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: Even in our contemporary society men and women are not equal, and social, political and economic discrimination based on gender exists, and there are several countries where women get oppressed and discriminated systematically by the regime. Only now, on the 24th of June 2018, did Saudi Arabia enact a law which annulled the prohibition of women driving. Thus, feminist movements are of great importance to finally achieve equality between the sexes. However, in our present society exist two extremes and both of them pose danger to this equalization. On the one hand, there are people who still do not take feminism and gender equality seriously and even override these social changes. This leads to the necessity of examining feminism and feminist criticism in literature to raise awareness that women are individual beings and no replaceable objects that should be dominated by men. On the other hand, radical feminism with radical beliefs to create a 'women's utopia' can end up being used by anti-feminist organizations or even regimes for their own purposes. Therefore, it is important to examine how current feminist tendencies are criticized in literature by showing what they might lead to.This paper reads Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a feminist dystopia which provides feminist criticism through the representation of women's oppression and their display as 'Others' in the patriarchal society Gilead. It will be shown that Atwood simultaneously criticizes current feminist tendencies through satire to raise awareness of how radical utopian feminist dreams can end up in dystopias.