The feminine as an obscene supplement in The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how the narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), female dystopia by Canadian Margaret Atwood, can dialogue with Slavoj Žižek's (2003) concept of "obscene supplement" to understand the formation of the dystopian universe of the Republic of Gilead. More than a scapegoat, the sexualized and emancipated female figure of the old United States, whose revolutionary character was co-opted by capitalism to make it one of the pieces for the functioning of economic liberalism, becomes devoid of all of their civil rights in the transformation of the USA in the Republic of Gilead. In this nation, women are respected only as an instrument of reproduction, deprived from fundamental rights, including that of being protagonists of their own stories. In this way, the concept of obscene supplement seems to aid in the understanding of how an ideology is capable of creating its own surplus, and then wishes to rid itself of it and persuade the population to exterminate it. The Handmaid’s Tale, by revealing the processes involved in this strategy, critically reflects on how even a nation with apparently consolidated democratic foundations carries within itself the phantasmatic dimension of radicalism and fundamentalism in its own fissures, subject to rise and to restrain individual freedoms as much as in totalitarian societies. Or, in the words of Žižek (2003: 71), it portrays fascism as a latent obscene excess of capitalism, maintaining, in the words of Walter Benjamin (1987), a real barbaric situation, parting from the closing of history and the silencing of the voice of the oppressed.