Title: From irony to affiliation in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale by Jennifer A.
Wagner-Lawlor
Since its publication in the mid-1980s, some readers have objected to Margaret
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on political grounds. One version of this objection
asserts that the novel is not simply dystopian but anti-utopian in that the novel's
ironized ending, the "Historical Notes," short-circuits any hope for political
effectiveness that Offred's open-ended conclusion might hold out. Offred herself is a
problematic heroine from a feminist standpoint. (1) She is politically complacent
before the Gileadean takeover--thus to some degree complicitous in it, as she is
honest enough to acknowledge, at least in retrospect. Her final step into the Eyes'
black van can hardly be called a brave or political act, in as much as she has no real
choice, not having in hand the means to kill herself even if she wanted to, which
seemingly she did not. The narrative itself--Offred's mode of presentation--can be
faulted on similar grounds particularly because it is retrospective and seems, for all
the vivid description of life as a handmaid, (2) too artful and self-consciously
constructed, (3) too distant, too noncommittal both about what has happened and
what will happen.
Put in another way, Offred's narrative is simply too ironic. The Handmaid's Tale is
pervaded by irony at every level, and numerous scholars before me have explored
various aspects of the multilayered irony of the novel as a whole. In this essay,
however, I propose to reconsider the problem of the ironic Offred to argue that the
ironic stance finally taken by Offred, and arguably by Atwood, is more than selfprotection and a political cop-out. By considering the function of irony as a rhetorical
trope and by extending that consideration to Richard Rorty's discussion of irony and
liberalism, I argue that there is something importantly progressive in this novel-something, as Rorty would put it, "socially useful."
Discovering irony in The Handmaid's Tale is nothing new, given the novel's satiric
nature, (4) but critics have meant different things when they use the term. They
sometimes mean situational irony, the irony of the novel's plot--what Lois Feuer
describes as "the irony of the 'woman's culture' [becoming a] totalitarian nightmare"
(90). More broadly and most often they mean the structural irony or ironies of the
novel, exemplified by its multilayered narrative structure. Numerous scholars have
written about Offred's discovery of the "multiple possibilities of language" (5) without
mentioning "verbal irony" as a linguistic term. Lee Briscoe Thompson is an
exception, noting more specifically than most the important role that verbal irony
plays in the novel's peculiar sense of humor:
In The Handmaid's Tale the humour is widely varied: irony,
including humorous reversals and incongruity; clever
wordplay;
subversive obscenities; comic self-denigration; in-jokes;
and
satire. [...] Since irony thrives on discrepancies between
the
real and the ideal, between surface and substance, between
the
literal and the metaphoric, it is plain that Gilead is a
rich
ground for the many strains of ironic wit. (73)
Thompson details some of the more notable ironic incongruities and reversals in the
context of the novel's black humor and notes that Offred "specializes" in certain
varieties of ironic reversal. But even he pays too little attention to the pragmatics of
Offred's reported "actual" conversations in which she shows a growing awareness of
the pragmatic effects of verbal irony--both the satisfactions and the risks of using it.
Through her gradual understanding of irony, we can see Offred becoming educated
both to a certain kind of more complex linguistic competency and to a broader ironic
stance that finally motivates her to autonomous action. An example is the scene in
which Ofglen first "tries out" Offred with the apparently safe, formulaic "It's a beautiful
May day." Offred, not registering any irony as such, nevertheless picks up on a
paralinguistic cue that this remark is not entirely "straight" or direct: "I feel rather than
see her head turn towards me, waiting for a reply" (58). Offred later understands that
she has undergone a test, for which irony serves as a crucial tool. She is being
interrogated, and not about the weather--the "other" meaning is "Do you know of the
resistance group, Mayday? And are you with them or against them?" Irony for the
handmaids offers a means of communicating despite the formulaic strictures on
speech; it creates a three-dimensional "languagescape" (to use the term that
Catherine Stimpson in her 1986 review knowingly "steals" from Annette Kolodny
[764]). Those who are part of the Mayday network, in particular, have made the
Gileadic formulae "mean" in another, entirely subversive way.
The discovery of ironic double talk, the ability to communicate in a way that
apparently toes the party line while allowing for secondary meanings to resonate, is
crucial to Offred's shifting sense of position within Gilead. These fleeting moments of
mutually acknowledged irony open a small space of freedom; they are, as she says,
"possibilities, tiny peepholes" (29). Possibilities for what? Choice? Peepholes into
what? Freedom? Characteristically, she does not say, or at least not here, not
directly. Irony is something more than either a rhetorical trope or "an extended
attitude toward life"; it is a discursive strategy that is always engaged in the social
and political, according to Linda Hutcheon's recent study (10). (6) Irony in The
Handmaid's Tale "means" only within the context of the repressive Gileadean regime
and its ideology of mindless authority. Gilead's own, often corrupted, allusions to a
variety of texts, biblical, (7) political, and popular, create an actively intertextual
discourse shot through with irony, which Offred herself becomes more and more
skillful at perceiving, interpreting, and using. After she understands irony's charge,
she herself must test a new Ofglen with the same linguistic strategy--"'Around the
first of May I think it was. What they used to call May Day'" (365)--and wait for the
response. It is a risky test each time, and Offred's blood chilis after she feels the new
Ofglen apparently rebuffs her:
She isn't one of us.
But she knows. I walk the last blocks in terror.
I've been stupid, again. (366)
This exemplifies the great risk, as well as the great possibility, of the conscious
employment of irony: the risk of betrayal, the possibility of affiliation and of freedom.
The general difficulty with irony is its inherent doubleness, if not duplicity. Hutcheon,
in her taxonomy of nine pragmatic functions for irony, describes a positive and a
negative valuation for each function. The function most relevant to the problem of
Offred is the "provisional," which is closely linked to the "selfprotecting" function of
irony. Irony can be called provisional, says Hutcheon,
at least in the sense of always offering a proviso, always
containing a kind of built-in conditional stipulation that
undermines any firm and fixed stance. The disapproving
associations here are with the evasiveness of equivocation
[...], hypocrisy, duplicity and deception. [...] Irony can
also hedge: [...] This is the fence-sitting provisionality
of irony as "the attitude of one who, when confronted with
the choice of two things that are mutually exclusive,
chooses both. Which is but another way of saying that he
chooses neither [Chevalier]. (51, emphasis in original) (8)
The ambivalence inherent to irony's rhetorical charge becomes, from a feminist
standpoint, the political crux of Offred's ironic bildungsroman. For all the risk-taking
with Ofglen, or later with Nick, Offred is continuously afraid of making any choices.
When the examining doctor offers to "help" Offred by inseminating her himself, she
experiences a kind of terror--simply because she is given an opportunity to act: "I put
on my clothes again, behind the screen. My hands are shaking. Why am I
frightened? I've crossed no boundaries, I've given no trust, taken no risk, all is safe.
It's the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation" (80). Each time a choice is
offered, Offred baulks. "Dear God, don't make me choose. I would not be able to
stand it, I know that; Moira was right about me. I'll say anything they like" (366). Even
worse, she is flooded with relief when the first Ofglen kills herself, because it means
that no one will learn of her own disobediences and indirect affiliations with Mayday.
Immediately afterward, she realizes that in feeling so, she has betrayed herself: "I
am abject," she says. "I feel, for the first time, their true power" (368). Critics find
moments like these most objectionable. Even in the final lines of her narrative, she
appears to be fence-sitting:
Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of
knowing:
I have given myself over into the hands of strangers,
because it
can't be helped.
And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the
light. (378)
Although Offred, with deliberate irony, describes Aunt Lydia as "in love with
either/or"(10)--in love with manipulating the handmaids into thinking that they are
actually making the choice between one alternative and another--she is in love with
"either/or" as well. Her fallback is on the slash in-between the two. As Hutcheon
observes:
[It] has for centuries been a commonplace to assert that
irony is
the trope of the detached [...] and the witnessing: "the
knowledge
of irony is usually reserved for observers rather than
participants"
[Niebuhr]. [...] Distance can, of course, suggest the noncommittal,
the inferred refusal of engagement and involvement [...],
and so its
more pejorative associations are with indifference [...] or
even
Olympian disdain and superiority. (49, emphasis in
original) (9)
Hence the problem with remarks from Offred like "One detaches oneself. One
describes" (123). We can forgive her when we realize that this is said during the first
so-called ceremony of ritualized intercourse; psychologically this is a rape, and
detachment is one coping mechanism. Indeed, Offred has erased the "I" altogether
by describing the ceremony as a sort of out-of-body experience for "one." The
situational irony is that she is indubitably a participant in, and not only a witness to,
this ceremony. But the effect of her irony here is to remove affect.
Similarly, the narrative as a whole swings back and forth between forced action and
withdrawal, between furtive risk taking and fearful pulling back. Her provisionality is
deepened by the structure of the narrative itself, which makes Offred even harder to
pin down. The multilayeredness of her narrative, with its different versions and its
alternative plottings, has intrigued scholars. Offred's narrative is famously
indeterminate; its very structure is characterized by ironic provisionality, the refusal
to commit to any one version. For that reason, it seems to me that despite all we
know about Offred, she remains peculiarly distant.
If the negative valuation of Hutcheon's provisional function for irony seems to
condemn Offred as being distant and noncommittal, we must remember that the
positive valuation of this function is
usually framed by some sense that irony's doubleness can
act as
a way of counteracting any tendency to assume a categorical
or
rigid position of "Truth" through precisely some
acknowledgement
of provisionality and contingency. Its laconic reticence
would
then be interpreted as an undogmatic alternative to
authoritative
pronouncements. [...] When such a provisional position is
seen as
valuable, it is often called demystifying. (Hutcheon 51-52,
emphasis in original)
By demystifying Gilead through a narrative that comprises a series of "scenes of
irony," (as Hutcheon might call them), Offred makes her irony valuable. In the
passage in which Offred turns down the doctor's offer of insemination, she tells us
that it's "too risky," that "It's the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation" (80).
What is the choice being offered? Offred articulates it and then locates its irony:
"Give me children, or else I die. There's more than one meaning to it" (79, emphasis
in original). Presented with another "either/or," she recognizes that even the
statement of the option is ironic. After all, she already has had a child, who was
taken from her. Furthermore, to accept this doctor's "gift" to go through with the
covert (and technically illegal) insemination, is to submit entirely to the Gilead
regime, to give herself over to the idea that "salvation" is having a baby; that to be
childless is to be useless, condemned. Offred recognizes that the offer is not a "way
out," but the way into truly abject complicity.
More than just the risk terrifies Offred. Her perception of the truly profound irony of
her situation is terrifying: the "choice" is no choice; the "way out" is in fact a "way in";
this "salvation" is a damnation. (10) She is not fooled by the doctor's suggestion that
she has some kind of "free" will here; "it's your life," he responds, when she turns
him down (80). And that too is said with the utmost of, probably unintentional, irony.
Her life? It is, and it isn't. The common expression "well, it's your life" generally
means "go ahead, you're free to mess up your life if you want to." But in this new and
repressive social context, the casualness of the expression in "the time before"--our
time--resonates ironicly (12). First, her life is not her own because according to
Gilead her body is not hers to control; second, the likely consequence of "messing it
up if you want to" is exile or death. This scene of irony demystifies the falseness of
both Offred's and the doctor's positions.
The deeply dishonest assertion that Gilead gives women the true "choice" for
fulfillment initiates the ironizing of words and of actions among Gilead's inhabitants.
The assertion also shapes the multiple narrative structures of Offred's tale. In Gilead,
the "right to choose" must always be the wrong choice because for handmaids there
is never any freely given choice. Surely it is one of Atwood's intended ironies that
Gilead's offer to a woman of the "right to choose--"freedom from," rather than
"freedom to," as Aunt Lydia puts it (33)--grossly perverts the slogan of the feminist
political platform on abortion. To lose control of one's body, as Gilead shows us,
means losing control over identity. Hence Offred's terrible willingness to remain so
long in the either/or, in the tension of irony, of not choosing. If one considers the
scene with the doctor as a moment of ironic demystification, Offred's apparent
paralysis, however characteristic, may be less objectionable. The ways in which
verbal ironies demystify the structural ironies of Gilead itself are becoming
increasingly apparent to Offred. Her obsession with the endless possibilities of
allusion and connotation in language, her interest in etymologies and in the Scrabble
games, her invention of numerous versions of stories--all of these aspects of her tale
set in motion ironic resonances that, as Hutcheon puts it, "[remove] the security that
words mean only what they say" (14). What more valuable tool could one have
against a society such as Gilead, which abhors ambiguity and whose most fanatical
adherents are deaf to irony? (11)
Nothing becomes more ambiguous than Offred's sense of "truth":
The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them
must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions
of
Luke [...] This contradictory way of believing seems to me,
right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever
the
truth is, I will be ready for it. (135)
Her sense of belief, of truth, is contingent, context-dependent; she herself says,
"context is all" (187). This contradictory way of believing, itself fundamentally ironic,
allows her again to resist choosing. However, given her growing awareness of how
much information, either about family or about the political situation of the regime of
Gilead she is denied, her way of believing begins to feel more like a new kind of
common sense, an undogmatic (to use Hutcheon's term) stance toward truth, rather
than simple evasion. Throughout the novel Offred gradually learns not to accept
"authorized" versions of any story or text. In perhaps the deepest irony of the novel,
because of Gilead, Offred understands what freedom was, and how limited it is now
when she must risk so much to regain even a little. Self-awareness is the real gift of
such scenes of irony, and ironized awareness eventually colors everything she says
and, finally, does.
Initially, I characterized Offred's entering the van as another moment of
indecisiveness. Now, that moment can be judged differently. It is another scene of
irony: even as Offred "snatch[es] at" the offer of help in Nick's "Trust me," she has no
idea whether it means what it says. "It's all I'm left with," she concludes selfdeprecatingly (376-77). But there's more to her acceptance of Nick's instruction to
"Go with them" than following another order. He too is offering her a choice--whether
or not to acknowledge an affiliation with Mayday. Having finally made the choice that
frees her, even though she is unsure of its consequences, she confronts the
Commander, Serena, and the purported Eyes at the door without panic. Through her
education in irony, which here forces her to acknowledge the possibility of betrayal,
she has come to understand that being an ironist does not preclude choice or action.
Offred takes a self-consciously autonomous step into solidarity with a wider group
from which she has shied away until now. The commitment seemed too great; she
was too concerned with "I," with preserving herself and her sense of her past to feel
any affiliation with the "we."
The step into the van, however, no matter whether it belonged to the Eyes or to
Mayday, acknowledged a new commitment to stepping out of that prison, which, in a
peculiar way, had become comfortable. It was a choice, to join the world outside,
regardless of what that world might be or whether she would survive in it. At this
point, Nick's words can only be interpreted ironicly, as Offred does: "'Trust me' he
says; which in itself has never been a talisman, carries no guarantee" (376). Why
trust anyone in Gilead? Yet her education in the wider influences of irony, which has
revealed to her the ultimate cruelties of this autocratic regime, encourages her to
take the only truly hopeful action that she describes in her narrative.
II
In his Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Richard Rorty defines an "ironist" as
someone with the following attributes:
(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final
vocabulary she currently uses, because she been impressed
by
other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people
or
books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument
phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite
nor
dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes
about
her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is
closer
to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power
not
herself. [...] So, the more she is driven to articulate
her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds
herself of her rootlessness by constantly using terms like
"Weltanschauung," "perspective," "dialectic," "conceptual
framework," "language game," "redescription," "vocabulary,"
and "irony." (73, 75)
Atwood's portrait of Offred fleshes out Rorty's silhouette of "the ironist." Offred
obsessively redescribes her reality, with both deliberate and nondeliberate irony and
with a widening sense of perspective--not just her own, or Moira's, or the other
handmaids', but also Serena's, Cora's, the Commander's, and Nick's. Offred's
education in irony leads her into a multiperspectival view, even with the blinder-like
wings of her habit. Also Offred's language games are many, once she realizes it is a
game that she too can play. The ludic nature of language is troped in the novel by
her Scrabble matches with the Commander. It is no accident that as time goes by,
Offred's language games become more and more creative; she and the Commander
begin to cheat and to make up words, perhaps the clearest sign of the subversive
potential of language in a society whose corrupt authority depends entirely on the
truth claims of Gileadic texts. It is also no accident that she begins to engage in
increasingly risky behavior, beyond the Scrabble matches or the visit to "Jezebel's"
with the Commander, which are in a sense sanctioned. With Fred, she has begun to
feel unafraid: "It's hard to be afraid of a man who is sitting watching you put on hand
lotion. This lack of fear is dangerous" (272). This lack of fear within the household
extends to her dealings with Nick. She initiates visits to Nick that are unauthorized by
Serena, a behavior she describes as "reckless" (344). She plays little language
games here as well:
"Is it too late?" I say.
He shakes his head no. It is understood between us by now
that it
is never too late, but I go through the ritual politeness
of asking.
It makes me feel more in control, as if there is a choice,
a decision
that could be made one way or the other. (345-46)
It is more than "ritual politeness"; she is edging toward choice, edging toward
"control" of action. These moments are a kind of test of herself; and when her final
choice arrives, she is better prepared than she might have expected.
But the larger question for Rorty, for Offred, and for Atwood is whether the ironist
renders herself anything but "futile, obsolete, powerless" (Rorty 90, emphasis in
original), given her unwillingness to accept any "version" even of her own life, given
her desire continually to redescribe, to accept "this contradictory way of believing,"
as Offred put it (135). Rorty considers this possibility, observing, "Irony is, if not
intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have
doubts about, something from which to be alienated" (88); therefore, the ironist
"cannot offer the same sort of social hope as metaphysicians offer. She cannot claim
that adopting her redescription of yourself or your situation makes you better able to
conquer the forces which are marshaled against you" (91). The ironist is often
blamed for "an inability to empower" (91), and this has been one criticism of Offred
within the text and of her author outside it. For all the "demystifying" irony, does
Offred--or Atwood--offer any real hope?
Certainly Atwood does not present us with a coherent feminist vision, political, social,
or theoretical. If anything, the novel seems to point at the ineffectiveness of the
feminist movement as represented by Offred's mother: "Mother, I think. Wherever
you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is
one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies" (164). But
delineating some kind of feminist utopia was not, I believe, Atwood's intention. An
ironic perspective the ability, the willingness at least, always to redescribe ourselves
against a constantly changing context--requires a constant process of selfinterrogation that will always foreground the politics of location, contingency, and the
complicated complicity, sometimes willing, sometimes not, of our identity with our
culture. In an interview just a year or so before the publication of the novel, Atwood
remarked: "it's obvious now that everything passes through a filter. Doesn't mean it's
not true in some sense. It just means that nobody can claim to have the absolute,
whole, objective, total complete truth. The truth is composite, and that's a cheering
thought. It mitigates tendencies toward autocracy" (quoted in Feuer 92). This
resonates with a Rortian conception of irony, which he says can never claim
"incommensurability" (101).
This view seems politically questionable because it does not seem necessarily to
commit one to action. Yet Atwood's comment points toward Rorty's notion of a liberal
affiliation or solidarity that does motivate the private individual to respond to
demands for a public commitment. That affiliation is based not on a solidarity that
"urg[es] us to recognize" a set of principles "that exists antecedently to our
recognition of it" but rather on a solidarity that "urg[es] us to create a more expansive
sense of solidarity than we presently have" (196, emphasis in original). That kind of
solidarity promotes a more inclusive category of "humanity," with whom we
acknowledge imaginative identification; it promotes what Romantic artists and
political philosophers referred to as Sympathy. That imaginative identification with
other humans, a category that Rorty sees the ironist-liberal as eager to expand,
makes less imaginable the kind of cruelty and, especially, humiliation that "we" seem
capable of inflicting on "them." (12) For Rorty, relativism does not cancel out the
possibility of political action, and he returns to that point in a way that is directly
relevant to Atwood's project. Art is a powerful way of bringing together private and
public demands on the self; indeed, Rorty focuses on the "ironist-novelist," whom he
regards as more likely to effect political change than the ironist-theorist. There are
few more effective ways to promote that identification than through literature ("plays,
poems, and, especially, novels") that helps "to increase our skill at recognizing and
describing the different sorts of little things around which individuals or communities
center their fantasies and their lives"; furthermore, at its best, literature "can help us
attend to the springs of cruelty in ourselves, as well as to the fact of its occurrence in
areas where we had not noticed it" (93, 95).
Although Rorty cites Orwell and Nabokov as fiction writers who best exemplify his
notion of the ironist-novelist, his remarks are clearly relevant to both Offred's
narrative and to Atwood herself. Even if one faults Offred for her inaction during the
"real time" of the narrative, she achieves a kind of modern, muted heroism through
the act of telling her story, which records not the sentimental education of past
heroes and heroines but the ironic education of our present. Although her narrative
ends at possibly her first moment of true autonomy in Gilead, the fact that she tells
her story moves her from the private and into the public, even more than her step up
into the van. As previous critics have noted, Offred makes clear that this narrative is
not just "for herself," but for some anticipated audience. (13) This open-ended
projection of private experience to the public is crucial to a final judgment of Offred.
She knows well that she was no heroine during her time in Gilead. She is honest
about her quietism, particularly as she compares herself with her mother, with Moira,
and with the first Ofglen. Her narrative is full of self-criticism and retrospective irony:
"[...] I laugh, from time to time and with irony, at myself" (210, my emphasis). The
open-endedness of the tale's final lines endorses the irony that the novel has
discovered as a source of hope: "Multiple meanings reveal alternative possibilities,"
Feuer reminds us in her reading of the novel: "Offred's willingness to risk the
alternatives appears in her narrative's last lines [...]. Atwood suggests that the risk is
worth taking, because the novel presumes Offred's successful escape to the safehouse where she tapes her narrative" (91-92). Offred embraces a solidarity that is all
the more poignant because she suspects that her narrative, which is so honest not
only about the "springs of cruelty" in others but also in herself, may never be heard.
Atwood, for her part, offers no blueprint for a just society, no how-to agenda for
overthrowing a corrupt and quintessentially illiberal regime, but she does what Rorty
regards as equally important: she teaches us to see ironicly, to think about irony in
terms of both its narrowest usages and its widest influences. In doing so she warns
us against any "final vocabulary," which by nature forbids the free thinking essential
to any truly (as opposed to nominally) liberal society. The "'militancy' of irony,"
reminds Hutcheon, is that it "is seen to function in a corrective way" (53); and in
Offred's many scenes of irony, Atwood consistently holds before us the multiplicity of
ideological incongruities that characterize Offred's situation and experience. The
novel traces her education into irony--and in doing so affects our own. We begin to
question not only the incongruities of Gilead but also, more to the point, those of the
"liberal" America from which Gilead emerged.
Atwood underscores her point by her intensely ironic--in the sense of mocking-portrayal of the tale's reconstruction and reception by Professor Pieixoto and other
scholars of the future, who have pinned their own assumptions to Offred's story. For
academics, this extremely satiric epilogue leaves a particularly bad taste in the
mouth. Far from "authenticating" Offred's narrative with all their source hunting,
Pieixoto's revelation that the narrative itself is a construction does more to question
its authenticity than to affirm it. Dominick Grace pointedly adds that the effect of this
subversion is crucial: "If history is fixed and final, as Pieixoto would have it, if facts
are just data [...] we can learn nothing here. Instead, the novel undermines that
notion of history, requiring us to recognize that gleaning truth from this text requires
accepting its fictionality as the medium for that truth" (490).
With that epilogue Atwood drives home the point that "we intellectuals" especially
must strive to be ironists, for that alone will lead not to Truth with a capital T, for that
is inaccessible, according to both Atwood and Rorty, but to a true possibility of
freedom, not only for ourselves but for our wider culture. Hutcheon teaches us that
irony should be thought of as a discursive strategy that makes social change
possible because it is a "'possible model for oppositionality whenever one is
implicated in a system that one finds oppressive' [Chambers]" (Hutcheon 16). (14)
In an early review of The Handmaid's Tale, Catherine Stimpson saw Atwood's
playing with language as "an obligatory homage to the weary modern awareness of
the gaps between the word and the thing" and as an "equally obligatory homage to a
distrustful postmodern awareness of the ability of the powerful to control discourse"
(766). However, there is nothing weary or wearying about Atwood's insistence on the
necessity of irony in a culture in which those "gaps" become virtually the only spaces
for negotiation and for the possibility of real freedom. Indeed Stimpson clearly
admires the novel's "repudiation of the victim's role" (766), and she is certainly
correct in regarding that repudiation as the benchmark of Atwood's gradually
deepening sense of politics. In The Handmaid's Tale, that sense extends beyond
repudiation toward a commitment to affiliation, to what I believe can accurately be
described as a Rortian liberalism.
Therefore, The Handmaid's Tale cannot be characterized simply as hopelessly
dystopian precisely because the force of irony in the novel can lead us away from
that judgment. Recent theorists of utopia have argued that utopia is a process of
social transformation, rather than a "place" where transformation already has taken
place. Surely irony, long recognized as inherent to utopia's double-vision, has a role
to play in this open-ended conception of "utopia"--a place we know we will never
reach but are always seeking. This essential connection between utopia and irony
casts a different light on Atwood's novel. Beyond insisting on personal responsibility
(and illustrating the cost of avoiding it), the novel promotes a way of affiliating oneself
to an ever-more-inclusive--what Rorty would call "liberal"--category of "humanity."
This affiliation repudiates not only the abjectness of any victim but also the
arrogance of any victimizer. To affiliate oneself ironicly is to accept contingency; it is
also to accept that one's affiliative choices must always be reviewed and revaluated.
To the extent that the novel outlines irony's methods in a form of "liberal learning,"
The Handmaid's Tale might be deemed not a dystopia but an instantiation of this
new notion of utopic process, which leads us to places we can call "better" but to
nowhere we will ever call "perfect"
THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
NOTES
I would like to thank my former colleague Ron Sundstrom, now at the University of
San Francisco, for introducing me to more philosophical notions of irony,
(1.) See, for example, Stephanie Barbe Hammer: "Seen from the point of view of her
past, Offred's current existence begins to look less like a nonsensical metamorphosis
and more like a horrible but nightmarishly appropriate extension of her former life;
one might even argue that, in a larger sense, Offred has always been a handmaid--a
woman who serves others, but never herself" (43). Madonne Miner is particularly
critical of Offred, finding her generally unwilling to look squarely at "the hardest truths
of her life" and particularly at the nature of her relationships with men. Miner finds
Offred's acceptance of "romance" as typical of her complacency as she refuses to
see the similarities--which Miner enumerates--between her affairs with Luke, the
Commander, and Nick. Miner (164) refutes some critics' argument that the novel's
"only truly subversive force appears to be love," as it is put by Ehrenreich (34), and
she does not see Offred's final faith in Nick as anything more than Offred's
acceptance of a fairy-tale construction in which Nick plays the role of savior (164).
Offred's "love," she concludes "colludes in the very foundation of Gilead" (166).
Patricia Kane concurs in even stronger terms: "By choosing as the central character
a woman who, with or without autonomy, does not identify with victims and cares
only about a man's love, Atwood warns how a Dystopia for women could succeed"
(10). Finally, Karen Stein, although ultimately less suspicious of Offred, emphasizes
the ways in which Offred's narrative "remains suspect" in its instability and thus
undermines the hope that "storytelling" is "powerful enough." "Can women gain
power through language alone?" (276).
(2.) On the "vividly felt reality" not only of Offred's present but also of her past, see
Feuer 86-87.
(3.) See Deer, who objects to Offred's narration as too artful and sophisticated to
make her a believably "innocent" reporter (230).
(4.) Hammer opens her essay with a discussion of the genre of satire and refers to
irony's general role in that genre (39-41). Similarly, Karen Stein outlines the ways in
which Atwood's text, following Swift's "Modest Proposal," "[plays] with the range of
possible irony" (63). Lucy Freibert refers to "irony [that] works simultaneously on
multiple levels" (281). In an excellent essay, Vernon Provencal considers precisely
the connection of irony and satire in this novel as he explores the "presence" of
Plato's Republic in the novel, noting Atwood's "subtle irony" (59) in "re-employ[ing]"
this classical utopian text to "construct the equally subversive patriarchy of the
Gilead household" (59). "The subtle irony of Atwood's satire [...]--and of her use of
Plato's Republic--lies in its presentation of these extremes as belonging to each
other, as twin pillars of an infernal society of inhumanity" (63-64).
(5.) On this novel's exploration of the political nature of language use, the way that
language "manages alternatively to oppress, alienate and liberate its heroine"
(Nelson-Born 4), see Freibert, esp. 285-89; Hogsette; Johnson; Klarer; Lacombe;
Mahoney, esp. 33-37; and Staels, who sees Offred "cross[ing] the boundaries of
accepted meaning by giving voice to an alternative perspective and an alternative
discourse that continuously cut through the rigid logocentric texture of the
superstructure" (459).
(6.) In this context, Burwell summarizes Mary Louise Pratt's argument from
"Linguistic Utopias" (59) that "the relationality of social differentiation [...] means that
dominant and dominated groups are not comprehensible apart from one another"
(Burwell 66). Hutcheon's study builds from just this notion of relationality with respect
to the functioning of irony.
(7.) For two studies looking into the nature and significance of the Biblical echoes in
the novel, see Filipczak and Larson.
(8.) Hutcheon 51 is quoting H. M. Chevalier 79.
(9.) Hutcheon 49 is quoting Reinhold Niebuhr 153.
(10.) For an interesting reading of the figure of the medical doctor, particularly during
this scene's complicated dynamics of power and vulnerability, examination and
violation, see Cooper 54-57. Although the clinical doctor appears at first to be most
objective "[i]n his scientifically impeccable role as healer," "ironicly" this same doctor
"alters the terms of his engagement with his female patients in an effort to usurp the
Commanders" generative function" (53). The situational irony Cooper describes
resonates in the conversational irony that my reading highlights.
(11.) Lois Feuer hints at this view in her conclusion that Offred's
distrust of certainty becomes part of the linguistic
texture of
the novel as Off red ponders the multiple possibilities of
language,
cherishing the ambiguity that the regime is ultimately
unable to
control, at least in her own case. Multiple meanings reveal
alternate
possibilities, and Offred's willingness to risk the
alternatives
appears in her narrative's last lines (91).
From my perspective, Feuer approves of Offred for accepting just the provisional
ironic stance that Hutcheon and Rorty describe, and Feuer concludes by seeing the
novel as, beyond any particular feminist politics, anti-absolutist. Jill LeBihan sees the
novel as resisting the Gileadean notion that there exists one officially sanctioned
version of reality: "the novel constantly reiterates its uncertain, problematic
relationship with the concept of a single reality, one identity, a truthful history'" (Stein
69, quoting Jill LeBihan 106).
(12.) "She [the ironist] thinks that what unites her with the rest of the species is not a
common language but just susceptibility to pain and in particular to that special sort
of pain which the brutes do not share with humans--humiliation" (Rorty 92, emphasis
in original).
(13.) On the resistance of narrative closure and the consequent opening of a "postnarrative" space of action see Feuer 91; Mahoney 35-39; Staels 463-67; and Stein
273 ft. Each of these critics concurs with the view that Offred "survive[s] by making
herself real" (Feuer 91), even as each notes the obvious irony put in play by the
"Historical Notes.'"
(14.) Hutcheon 16 quotes Ross Chambers 18.