An Analysis Of The Handmaid's Tale From The Perspective Of Foucault's Theory Of Power And Discourse

Known as the Queen of Canadian Literature,Margaret Atwood is the leading novelist and social critic in contemporary Canada.Through the keen insight into power politics and strong concern for women's situation in today's society,the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood presents us a great speculative novel The Handmaid's Tale.The novel wins her the second Canadian Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C.Clarke Award,and the author becomes even more famous and the sales continues to rise immediately after the publication of the novel.The interweaving of power and discourse in the novel together builds a strict hierarchical system,and restricts everyone in Gilead to a closed cage.Michel Foucault is a famous French postmodern theorists in the 20 th century.Based on Foucault's theory of power and discourse,this thesis is intended to answer the following questions by analyzing the totalitarian suppression of the handmaids' discourse: What kind of means does the totalitarian regime Gilead use to manipulate the handmaids' discourse? What is the representation of the effect of power discourse on the handmaids? How do the members of Gilead resist Gilead's power discourse to achieve their own salvation and rebirth?Chapter One introduces Margaret Atwood's life and literary achievements,briefly summarizes the background and plot of the novel,Foucault's theory of power and discourse and the exterior procedures of discourse control such as the prohibition,the opposition between reason and madness,the opposition between truth and falsity,research questions as well as the structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review of researches on the novel domestically and abroad.Since the publication of the novel,many scholars and critics at home and abroad have analyzed the novel from many different angles.From the perspective of feminism,some scholars have found that the root cause of women's despair and destinyin the novel lies in the oppression of the patriarchal society.Therefore,obtaining the female subjective consciousness is the key to resisting oppression.From the perspective of the eco-feminist concerns,the relationship between women and nature,and the terrible ecological environment in the novel are the key focuses that ecofeminists often pay attention to.In their viewpoints,the novel fully expresses Atwood's strong ecological care and female consciousness.In terms of the dystopian perspective,most critics are more inclined to analyze in the aspect of the novel's inheritance of traditional dystopian genre.Based on that,it is concluded that Atwood's innovation is mainly reflected in the use of irony rhetoric and the maintenance of women's rights.Some critics also analyze the operating mechanism of totalitarian politics in the novel and the role of discourse in the operation of power from the perspective of power politics,but their analytic framework does not organically combine discourse,rights,and knowledge,which provides a void for other researches from the perspective of Foucault's power and discourse.Chapter Three analyzes the two means of discourse manipulation by Gilead government in the novel: institutional manipulation and delimitating manipulation.The former monitors the handmaid's behavior and use of words closely through the constant use of “gaze”.The latter refers to the three exterior procedures of the production of discourse on which the Gilead regime relies to strip the handmaids of their right to communicate freely,reduce their discourses to the invalid madman's speech and take biblical words as the core discourse to permeate the whole Gilead.Chapter Four analyzes the representation of totalitarian power discourse on handmaids.The handmaids' bodies degenerate into the tamed docile bodies;the handmaids have no opportunity to acquire true knowledge,and lose their cognitive ability as well as the judgment of things;the deprivation of the handmaids' discursive power relegates them to silent lambs.Chapter Five introduces the various measures that the members of the Gilead have taken to achieve their self-rescue and rebirth.The resistance of the underclass is manifested in the members' unyielding spirit of either fighting alone or establishingunderground organizations to fight in secret.The member even endeavors to create a new political discourse to completely replace Gilead's power discourse through the storytelling strategy.The resistance of the ruling class is manifested in seizing the discursive power of female fertility and subverting the phallocentric discourse.The conclusion summarizes the means of the totalitarian regime to manipulate the discourse and the representation of the power discourse on the handmaids.It also reveals that in the process of handmaids' resistance to totalitarian rule,the struggle for the discursive power has always been the key point of resistance.Only by firmly grasping the key factor of the discursive power can it be possible to resist totalitarian rule and more effectively defend the rights and interests.Therefore,the revolter shall be masters of discourse who can manipulate the discourse as the powerful weapons to defend our power and interests.Simultaneously,in the process of resisting totalitarian manipulation of the truth,the intellectuals should give full play to their own roles.In addition to being good at discovering the truth hidden behind the power politics,they must constitute the new political discourses as well as change the political,economic,and cultural mechanisms of truth production.As the maker of the truth,the intellectual should be brave enough to act as the guide of the long struggle against the totalitarianism.Only in this way can the resistance of totalitarian manipulation be successful.