Confined in themselves: social death and the isolation of the subject in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

In The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, the Republic of Gilead submits the women who are still fertile to a series of acts that result in a particular condition of death in life, a condition which can be called social death, which appears in its more extreme form, according to Patterson (1985), in the institution of slavery. From Patterson’s study, Lisa Gunther (2013) investigates the apparatus involved in making and unmaking someone’s personhood both externally (socially) and internally (subjectively). This paper proposes that the interpretation of the Handmaid’s condition as a condition of slavery allows for the understanding of the social practices that generate the effect of these subjects’ social death, as well as the understanding of the conditions of possibility of the regime presented by Atwood’s dystopia, which might seem extreme and far-fetched, but has its roots on a familiar apparatus of exclusion and violation.