Surveilled and Silenced : a Study about Acquiring and Maintaining Powerin Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Sammanfattning:

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood indirectly exposes frightening and undemocratic traits in societies of our time when she applies them to a fictive future in which these factors have caused horrible consequences. A group of men has formed a new state, “Gilead”, in which they ruthlessly control the population. This essay studies how this dictating power gains and, essentially, maintains power in the fictive society. The essay argues, and comes to the conclusion, that by surveilling the population and by restricting its means of communication the dictatorship is able to control the people and keep them docile.