On The Handmaid's Tale

Hailed as "the Queen of Canadian literature", Margaret Atwood is a famous poet, novelist, story-writer and essayist in contemporary Canada. Her novel The Handmaid's Tale gained immediate success upon its publication in 1985, and the next year won Atwood her second Governor General's Award. This thesis attempts to combine postmodern theory with the text, analyzing the postmodern characteristics of The Handmaid's Tale from two aspects: themes and writing techniques. It is composed of four chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale. Chapter Two discusses postmodern themes of the novel, in which mainly two sets of binary oppositions, namely, male / female and reality / imagination are dispersed. Besides, postmodern view of history is suggested in the novel. Chapter Three discusses several postmodern writing techniques in The Handmaid's Tale, i.e., meta-fiction, uncertainty, fragmentation, open ending and transgression of genre boundaries. Chapter Four is the conclusion, pointing out that in this postmodern novel, Atwood still leaves a mark of strong social responsibility.