The Handmaid's Tale Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elizabeth Mahoney

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Mahoney

SOURCE: Mahoney, Elizabeth. “Writing So to Speak: The Feminist Dystopia.” In Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham, pp. 29-40. London: Longman, 1996.

In the following essay, Mahoney examines how women challenge male authority and inherited gender stereotypes in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Vlady Kociancich's The Last Days of William Shakespeare.

Why … not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety?

Virginia Woolf¹

We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative, teleological, or dialectical.

Homi K. Bhabha²

A ‘supplementary space’ where ‘women might figure’: the space delineated in an ironic fashion by Woolf and positively by Bhabha aptly describes the feminist dystopia, the future fiction set in a ‘bad...
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