Governing of Women by Men 'Under His Eye' Reading The Handmaid's Tale as a Tale of Gender Colonization

The Handmaid's Tale can be read as a futuristic survival text that dramatizes a dystopic world faced with the colonization of a whole gender by not only the Biblically inflected misogynists' regime of Gilead but also the gynocentric misogynists. In the area of gender studies, gender colonization and its representation through literature has always been a relevant area of research. The Handmaid's Tale can easily be read alongside any text coming from erstwhile or presently colonized nations lending weight to the presumption that post-colonialism and feminism are very loosely knit critical discourses. Both dwell on the issues of inequality, oppression, fundamentalism, ideological crises, and possible resistance to colonial subjugation. The dominance imposed upon the women in The Handmaid's Tale is akin to that of any colonized nation dominated by the imperialist colonizer. Therefore, Gilead, the setting of the novel is a colonized country and a microcosm of the postcolonial society. Judging by the postcolonial theoretical framework, this paper is a critical analysis of the different aspects of the novel that put it on the common ground with some classical postcolonial texts like Things Fall Apart, Midnight's Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and others.

Automated summary

The Handmaid's Tale can be interpreted as a futuristic survival text that explores gender colonization and its representation in literature, shedding light on issues of inequality, oppression, fundamentalism, and resistance to colonial subjugation.