Discipline,Concession And Resistance In The Handmaid’s Tale And The Testaments

In 1985,Margaret Atwood created Gilead,one of the most famous dystopias in the history of contemporary literature,in her masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale.Scholars began to study it through power theory.In 2019,Atwood launched the sequel The Testaments,which enriches the history of Gilead and provides fresh ideas and materials for the study of Gilead’s duology.This thesis has three main chapters with the theme of “discipline”,“concession”,and“resistance”.The first chapter will explain the operation of disciplinary power from three aspects: hierarchical observation,normalizing judgment,and examination,and then analyze the living conditions of the people in Gilead under the control of disciplinary power.The second chapter will discuss the effects of the people at the bottom and their concession and identity reconstruction to adapt.The third chapter will analyze the different resistance strategies made by different classes,both people at the bottom and the ruling class.The thesis will analyze the relationship between the totalitarian state and individuals under the disciplinary power in Gilead’s duology.Through Foucault’s disciplinary power theory,the thesis will present the helpless concession of different people and analyze their resistance and sacrifices to get out of the predicament of existence and pursue freedom and equality.The innovation of the thesis is to treat men and women as equal individuals instead of gender-oriented.The conclusion will clarify the practical significance of the thesis:discipline,concession,and resistance are interrelated and influence each other as an organic whole.Discipline power is everywhere,so people not only need to recognize the reasons for compromise but also dare to resist appropriately.