Voice And Authority:An Analysis Of Narrative Voice In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale(1985)is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood from a female perspective.Its writing on totalitarianism,gender oppression and fundamentalism endow the work with profound cautionary effect.After the novel was adapted into a TV series in 2017,it once again received a heated discussion around the world,reflecting its practical significance and literary value.This thesis aims to study Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale within the theoretical framework of feminist narratology.By adopting the concept of “voice”proposed by Susan S.Lanser,this thesis examines how its textual strategies functions in revealing gender politics,so as to have a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationship between social context and the writing of contemporary female writers.In Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice(1992),Lanser breaks the long-term opposition between first-person and three-person point of view by proposing a new method of division.She adopts the term “narrative voice” to illustrate a combination of point of view with self-consciousness,and further raises a different mode of communal narrative voice.This paper attempts to discover the communal voice shown in the text and the female authority represented by it.The analysis begins with an introduction on the social and historical background,focusing on identities of Atwood and general literary background during the creation of the novel.The main body is divided into three chapters.The first chapter explains the construction of communal voice constructed by the extradiegetic narrator from story level and the intradiegetic “I” on discourse level.The plural “we” shown in narrative voice breaks the presupposition of narrative as an individual act in western fiction tradition.The second chapter examines the marginalization of the traditional malecentered image and discourse,followed by an analysis on the subversion of maledominated text by its narrative framework.The third chapter combines feminist views to show three kinds of authority that the text embodies through its discourse: the establishment of other living space,the expression of female subjectivity in public,and the formation of a female body politic of discursive subject.The significance of female perspective to literary history is proved by examining Atwood’s adoption of communal “I” in The Handmaid’s Tale.Through a subtle design of textual form,this novel brings those unspeakable topics such as female fertility,abortion and motherhood from private to public.It has formed a strong authority of female discourse and become a feminist classic that can act as an effective signifier in real world politics.