Probing Into The Nature Crisis And Gender Crisis:An Ecofeminist Analysis Of The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood is a female writer with strong ecofeminist consciousness in contemporary Canada.The Handmaid 's Tale is one of Margaret Atwood's most outstanding works and it is a paradigm of explaining the ecofeminism.Based on the theories of Karren J.Warren and several other ecofeminist critics,this thesis analyzes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale from ecofeminism.The novel takes ecological crisis as its background and different females characters to depict a male-dominated society named Gilead Through depicting people who are suffering from severe ecological crisis,the novel portrays that Handmaids are taken as scapegoats of Commanders for environmental problemsThrough close reading,the thesis aims to explore gender crisis and nature crisis in The Handmaid's Tale.On the one hand,the thesis explores the oppression of Commanders over Handmaids from body control,economy control and social control.As a result,Handmaids gradually develop their female awareness and revolt the oppression overtly and covertly On the other hand,the thesis investigates the oppression of Commanders over nature by starting nuclear war,abusing the advanced technology and chemical toxicant Consequently,human beings suffer from the crazy revenge of nature which causes existential crisis and spiritual crisis in Gilead society.According to patriarchal oppressive conceptual framework,the thesis reveals that the main cause of gender crisis and nature crisis is the ideology of the logic of domination.It is an ideology function to explain,maintain,and justify the relationships of unjustified domination and subordination in the worldThrough analyzing the gender crisis and nature crisis in The Handmaid's Tale,this thesis appeals to set up an ideological system of ecofeminist spirituality to replace the traditional patriarchy so as to realize the harmoniously co-existence between men and women as well as human and nature.