Bearing Witness: Gender, Fundamentalism, and the Construction of History in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

Rabab Taha  Al Kassasbeh

doi:10.35516/hum.v50i2.4934

Authors

Rabab Taha Al Kassasbeh Department of English Language and Literature, Mu’tah University, Jordan https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4913-5395

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35516/hum.v50i2.4934

Keywords:

Dystopia, fundamentalism, testimony, feminist theory, Margret Atwood, Azar Nafisi

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines the feminist testimonial depiction of patriarchy and fundamentalism in The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004) by the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi.

Methods:. This paper incorporates diverse ideas about dystopian literature, testimony, and feminist criticism by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance.

Results: Each book possesses its own narrative conventions of space, time, and character. While The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist dystopia which imagines a future United States governed by a totalitarian theocracy, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a realistic account of a university professor about her life during the fundamentalist revolution in The Republic of Iran.

Conclusions: What these apparently two disparate texts have in common is that they attack patriarchy in all its forms, giving testimonial voice to the otherwise voiceless, with hope of promoting political change in contemporary societies.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Afshar, H. (1985a). Women, state, and ideology in Iran. Third World Quarterly, 7(2), 256-265.

Afshar, H. (Ed.). (1985). Iran: a revolution in turmoil. Springer.‏

Atwood, M. (1986).The handmaid's tale. NewYork: Anchor Books.

Barazangi, N. (2004). Women's identity and the Qur'an: A new reading. Florid: University Press of Florida.

Beverley, J. (1992). The margin at the center: On" testimonio"(testimonial narrative). Modern Fiction Studies, 35(1), 11-28.‏

Daly, M. (1978). The materials of radical feminism. Boston: Mass., Beacon Press.

De Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice doesn't: Feminism, semiotics, and cinema. Bloomington: Indian University Press.

Deer, G. (1992). Rhetoric strategies in The Handmaid's Tale: Dystopia and the paradoxes of power. ESC: English Studies in Canada, 18(2),215-233.

Dworkin, A. (1982). Our blood: Prophecies and discourses on sexual politics. London: Women’s Press.

Eisenstein, H. (1984). Contemporary feminist thought. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin.

Feldman, R., and Clark, K. (1996). Women, religious fundamentalism and reproductive rights. Reproductive Health Matters, 4(8), 12-20.

Felman, Sh., and Laub, D. (1992). Testimony crisis of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history. New York and London: Routledge.

Gordon, H. (2018). A Foucauldian-Feminist understanding of patterns of sexual violence in conflict. The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence, 11(1), 22-40

Gilmore, L (2001). The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony. Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell University Press.

Hafez, Sh. (2014). Bodies that protest: The girl in the blue bra, sexuality, and state violence in revolutionary Egypt. Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, 40(1), 20-28.

Greene, M. (1999). Body/language in The Handmaid's Tale: Reading notes. In Dvorak, Marta (ed.), Lire Margret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale.(101-112). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.

Gunne, S., and Brightly, Z. (2010). Literature and rape narratives: Violence and violation. New York and London: Routledge.

Hooker, D. (2006). (Fl)orality, gender, and the environmental ethos of Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". Twentieth Century Literature, 52(3), 275-305. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479773.

Howells, C. (1996). Science fiction in the feminine: The Handmaid's Tale. In Margret Atwood: Modern Novelists. (pp.126-147). London: Palgrave.

http://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24265-8-7

Humm, M. (1995). Feminist criticism: An introduction. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Jeffreys, Sh. (1985). Prostitution. In Dusty Rhodes and Sandra McNeill (Eds.), Women against violence against women, (pp. 59-70). London: Onlywomen Press.

Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman. New York: Cornell University Press.

Lewis, J. (1981). Women lost and found: the impact of feminism on history. Men’s Studies Modified, 55-72.‏

Nafisi, A. (2004). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books. London: Fourth Estate.

O’hara, M. (1985). Prostitution – towards a feminist analysis and strategy. In Dusty Rhodes and Sandra McNeill (Eds.), Women against violence against women, (pp. 70-90). London: Onlywomen Press.

Passerini, L. (1989). Women’s personal narratives: Myths, experiences, and emotions. In Personal Narratives Group (Ed.), Interpreting women’s lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives, (pp. 189-197). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rich, A. (2017). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. In Julie Rivkin, and Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory:An Anthology. (pp.925-939).Blackwell. http://people.terry.uga.edu/dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm.

Rine, A. (2013). 'In Love with Either/Or': Religion and Oppositional Logic in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Chapter 3 of Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction).‏

Spivak, G. (1986). Three women's texts and a critique of imperialism. In Gates, H. (ed.), 'Race', writing, and difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Staels, H. (1995). Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Resistance through narrating. English Studies, 76(5), 455-467.

Thompson, P (1988). The voice of the past, oral history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tohidi, N. (1991). Gender and Islamic fundamentalism: Feminist politics in Iran. In Chandra Mohanty, & Ann Russo & Lourdes Torres. (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism, (pp. 251-267). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Watson, N. (2003). Feminist theology. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Wadud, A. (1999). Qur'an and women: Reading the sacred text from a women's perspective. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Webb, G. (2000). Windows of Faith: Muslim women scholar-activist in North America. Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press.