مشخصات پژوهش

After the coup d'état, the regime of Gilead controls all aspects of public and private life, manipulates history and language, and creates a state of constant fear and violence. Women, at the core of the oppression, are dehumanized and abused merely for reproductive purposes which guarantees absolute male control over them. Nevertheless, when there is power there is resistance; the four female narrators (Offred, Aunt Lydia, Agnes Jemima, and Nicole) rebel against the tyranny in many different forms but what they share is that, by giving voice to silenced voices, using the power of words and language, and in one word speaking up they not only regain their identities and freedom, but also put an end to the Gileadean dictatorships. Scrutinizing the two distinguished dystopian novels of Margaret Atwood—The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel The Testaments—will contribute to the reader's vision of a dystopic society, totalitarianism, and most importantly oppression, notably female oppression. Language like a two edged sword has the power both to imprison and to liberate; Gilead, by restricting language, literacy, and knowledge creates a logocentric and limited society; the female protagonists on the other hand, by using the power of words and telling their stories liberate themselves from the shackles of the patriarchal government. Using different forms of personal discourse namely slave-narrative, auto-biographies, confessions, and testimonies results in the creation of subjective meaning and multi-version realities (polyphony) as a form of verbal rebellion. By emphasizing the importance of having an awareness of the past events, the thesis obligates a meticulous and impartial study of history in order to prevent the rise of dystopias; furthermore, by analyzing the final Historical Notes — herstory versus history— this study will demonstrate the bias in the historian's (Pieixoto's) account of the female documents, and will demonstrate the essentiality of telling herstory.