“We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

Creating a Utopia in the Gaps of a Patriarchal System in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

In the near-future USA, the totalitarian theocracy Gilead enacts an oppressive patriarchal system. As Gilead’s natality is low, the protagonist Offred serves as a handmaid, producing children for an upper-class family until she is deported into the unknown and on the way, records her memories. Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale feels painful to me. However, the protagonists find gaps in the patriarchal narrative and use its oppressive tools to undermine the system.

One gap opens in the male gaze that projects erotic fantasies onto passive women,[2] as Laura Mulvey´s 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema explains. The professor of film studies at the University of London attacks oppressive patriarchal structures through the lens of psychoanalysis. She points to the necessity of destructing scopophilia, the pleasure of observing others as “objects of sexual stimulation through sight.”[3] Offred does so by obverting the purpose of her headpiece from oppressing her to controlling the male gaze: She allows a guard a glance before hiding under the headpiece, enjoying “[…] the power, […] passive but there.”[4] Through the resistance to the rule, [the] tiny peepholes,”[5] Offred hollows out the omnipotent male “power of the erotic look.”[6]

Within the gap created in the male observation, Offred enacts resistance by subverting the “language of the dominant masculine order.”[7] In Gilead, women are silenced, limited to ritualized language patterns, for example the greeting “Under his eye.”[8] Under their headdresses, however, the women exchange information, the basis of the underground resistance. According to Mulvey, the oppressive language makes women “the bearer, not maker, of meaning.”[9] In recording her memories, Offred resists this passive status and creates meaning by forming her narrative.

Offred searches for the gaps in the patriarchal system by controlling the male gaze and telling her story. In these “blank white spaces at the edges of the print,”[10] she constructs a nameless self, a utopia she could develop into. It`s memory then, becomes the origin of another gap. Post-Gilead scientists working on the recordings, construct Offred´s identity through their male gaze. Through their voyeurism I realize that I observed Offred in the aesthetic of Atwood´s writing. Mulvey writes that “analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”[11] The scientists question the reader’s voyeurism and destroy the pleasure of looking. The ending, “Are there any questions?”[12] prompts me to follow Offred, to find the gaps in the system and use them to resist by asking another question, opening another “blank white space,” and imagining a utopia beyond patriarchy.

Works cited:

Atwood Margaret. The Handmaid´s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Mulvey Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3.

Picture: Frannie Jackson. “Seven New Books to Read After The Handmaid’s Tale.” Paste Magazine. 2019. https://www.pastemagazine.com/books/the-handmaid-s-tale/novels-read-after-handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood/.

[1] Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, New York: Anchor Books, 1998, 57.

[2] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3, 62.

[3] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 60, 61.

[4] Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, 21–22.

[5] Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, 21–22.

[6] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 64.

[7] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 60.

[8] Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, 45.

[9] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 59.

[10] Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, 57.

[11] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 60.

[12] Atwood, The Handmaid´s Tale, 311.