The Handmaid's Tale Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Critical Essay by Stephanie Barbé Hammer

SOURCE: “The World As It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid's Tale,” in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XX, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 39-49.

In the following essay, Hammer discusses Atwood's use of satire and ironic appropriation of male literary convention to portray female domination and the dynamics of social control in The Handmaid's Tale.

Atwood's futurist novel of 1986 is an important book for many reasons. In particular, The Handmaid's Tale plays a significant role in the evolution of women's writing in so far as it represents one of the few commercially successful and critically recognized (if not universally acclaimed) contributions by a woman writer to a literary genre dominated by men—namely, satire. Curiously however, despite its necessarily subversive status as a female invasion of male literary territory, The Handmaid's Tale possesses many formal and thematic features typical of traditional satire, as it...
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