Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s most distinguishing novel is The Handmaid’s tale. The novel has two narrators. First, the story is told in the first person through the eyes of a protagonist and ostensible narrator called Offred. Atwood describes the course of Offred’s daily life under the oppressive regime of a patriarchal theocracy governed by religious fundamentalists. Second, the entire meaning of Offred’s story is altered by the thirteen-page appendix ‘Historical notes on The Handmaid’s Tale’ narrated by Professor Pieixoto. He shocks and disorients the reader who encounters it after having spent nearly 300 affecting pages with Offred and her narration. In this regard, two possible worlds are constructed in The Handmaid’s Tale as the results of Offred’s narration and Pieixoto’s narration. This paper aims to study these two worlds from the viewpoint of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Following Lacan, Žižek argues that fantasy provides a framework through which we see reality. They are anamorphic so that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an objective account of the world. Accordingly, there are two anamorphic symbolic orders, or two anamorphic levels, in the novel: the first phase of anamorphic perspective attributes to the handmaids’ fantasy and the second phase relates to readers of the novel