“From a Distance it Looks Like Peace”: Reading Beneath the Fascist Style of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale reveals the danger of using visual culture to create what Rey Chow calls a “glossy surface image” that oversimplifies complex ideologies and social relationships. Atwood suggests that individuals can resist visual manipulation by learning to “read beneath” images. Commentators on fascism and its use of the visual image, such as Walter Benjamin and Chow, note that people’s receptivity to visual culture makes it the perfect vehicle for propaganda, a view substantiated by Nazi Germany and Atwood’s fictional community, Gilead. In the novel, “fascist style” is associated with the eliding and/or reshaping of history, accomplished through the editing of visual scenes. The Commanders of Gilead orchestrate visual tableaux, such as a display of corpses on the Wall, in order to regulate the eyes and minds of lower social orders. More generally, Atwood uses notional ekphrasis to interrogate Gilead’s treatment of women, an exploration focalized through her protagonist, Offred.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".