An Ecofeminist Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood is one of the most distinguished women writers in the contemporary Canadian literature. She has received numerous literary awards and is honored as "the queen of Canadian literature". Atwood concerns herself with the environmental crisis as well as the oppression of women in male-dominated society and links two issues together because she thinks that the struggle for ecological harmony and the struggle for the equality between male and female are interlinked. Her combination of environmental problems with women issues is clearly reflected in her novel The Handmaid's Tale which is regarded as a representative work of ecofeminism literature.The Handmaid's Tale, her sixth novel, gained immediate success upon its publication in 1985 and made Atwood win her another Governor General's Award. The novel calls much attention in the critical world. In spite of the fact that the scholars have taken great efforts to study The Handmaid's Tale, few of them have offered a systematic and comprehensive analysis from the ecofeminist point of view. This thesis tries to explore The Handmaid's Tale from an ecofeminist perspective. The purpose of this thesis is to draw on ecofeminist theory to explore Margaret Atwood's remarkable insights into feminism and ecology in The Handmaid's Tale. This research will break new grounds in Atwood study and throw new light on the understanding of her work from a fresh perspective, while at the same time calling on both men and women to participate in saving the earth and constructing a harmonious society where people can live in harmony with each other and with nature.