Abstract:

Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, delineates a futuristic dystopian society in which a male chauvinist society debars women from self-identity, subjectivity, self-esteem, and power. Women are incarcerated in oppressive societal imperatives of a totalitarian theocratic state which restricts women’s individuality; simplifies and manipulates language; erases their inborn identity; discharges women from their jobs; confiscates their properties and bank accounts; and imposes strict bans on reading, writing, speaking, and thinking. Creating bleak dystopian tale of oppression vis-à-vis female freedom, Atwood manifests how women are politically, economically, biologically, sexually, and psychologically exploited, controlled, restricted, manipulated, and subjugated by socially circumscribed roles. The present study is primarily concerned with fragmentation of female identity, objectification and subordination of women within oppressive patriarchal regime. In this regard, it aims to speculate how patriarchal social order strips women of their rights and asserts control over female body by reducing to walking wombs through religious fundamentalism, constant surveillance, limited language, inflicting violence and fear, repressing freedom, and brainwashing. The study also shows how the biological and psychological oppression on women and otherness lead them to the loss of an internal identity; how women internalize social conditioned gender norms; and how subjugating women is maintained by disciplining and alienating female bodies, idealizing female selfsacrifice, and institutionalizing feminity within patriarchal society.

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