A Study Of Power In The Handmaid’s Tale

Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s work The Handmaid’s Tale is meaningful and has multiple themes.Not only does it deal with a range of social issues but it also reflects the author’s visions on the issue of power.This paper analyzes the oppression to the people by those in power in Gilead and the resistance to it under the light of Michel Foucault’ s theory of power,exploring the relationship between the body,discourse and power in this process,as well as the author’s thoughts on the issue of power and how it brings inspiration to the public.The text is divided into five parts.The first part is introduction,which introduces Margaret Atwood and her book The Handmaid’s Tale,reviewing the current research on the book at home and abroad,summarizing the innovations of this paper,while briefing the theoretical basis of it.The second part analyzes Gilead’ s oppression to the people and the resistance to it from the perspective of the relationship between the body and power.The body is the fundamental of human existence,the carrier of all ideas and culture,the smallest unit of society and the smallest carrier of social culture.For those in power in Gilead,in order to achieve complete control over the people they had to start with the control of the body.This is the first step of ruling by the government,and the first step for the Gilead government to stabilize its power,too.The Gilead authorities first used the art of space allocation to segregate the body,and then completed the management and regulation of the body through the control of daily behavior,the regulation of physical needs,and the regulation of sex and reproduction.In the face of the physical discipline of the regime,the people of Gilead rebelled physically,breaking the segregation methods of Gilead and defending their physical freedom.The third part explores the relationship between discourse and power.Discourse carries power and power controls discourse.By replacing,reconstructing,monitoring,and maintaining the discourse of state power,the Gilead State makes the religious beliefs of the Gilead Republic the supreme truth,establishing moral codes and behavioral norms under the Gilead State discourse in the form of knowledge,it thus penetrates from the external environment to the individual,making people ideologically the advocates of Gilead,making the beliefs of Gilead the beliefs of the masses,and making people the disciplinarians of themselves,from the body to the soul.They then became the instruments of Gilead’ s power.The Gilead government first destroyed the public memory of the past by forceful repression,destroying books and buildings,and then completed the ideological infiltration of the people through education,propaganda,repentance,supervision and punishment by establishing a new discourse system.The people who were not willing to be oppressed completed their ideological resistance by holding on to their memories and defending their freedom of soul.The fourth part explores the author’s insights on the issue of power through his concern with the issue of power,in conjunction with the previous study of the issue of power in Gilead.Growing up in a liberal and relaxed family atmosphere,the author had a questioning and rebellious spirit toward authority since she was a child.During her college years,her awareness of human rights emerged,and not only did she pay attention to power issues and actively participated in them,but her thoughts on power issues led her to write this novel.Through the novel,the author reflects on the current social problems,anticipates the two extreme developments brought about by the imbalance of power,points out the importance of resistance,and warns people against the submersion of individuality in the grand history.The fifth part,the conclusion,concludes that in The Handmaid’s Tale,those in power have completed their control over individuals’ bodies and minds through their bodies and words.In today’s era of development and diversity of thought,power has begun to penetrate in a more covert way after combining with the Internet and new media.In this new era,how to understand the issue of power and the important role of power in our daily life more clearly is a question that the author leaves us to ponder.