The Psychology of the Handmaid: Margaret Atwood’s Novel Parables of the Possessed Canadian Character
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The protagonists of Atwood’s novels are most often both Canadian and female, and their stories feature a common struggle for possession of themselves and their bodies, given various colonizing forces. In relation to her other novels, which I will explore in this essay, the handmaid is a symbol for Canada in relation to the U.S, which stands for “yet another” imperial power infringing upon the lives of Canadians. Atwood herself has stated that the States are extreme in philosophy, while Canadians are more middle-of-the-road. This middle-of-the-road-ness of her main characters gets them into trouble and makes them vulnerable to outside forces. Her protagonists are typically female because the female body itself is particularly open to possession—by pregnancy, rape, cancer, and the physicality of sex. Women in Atwood’s novels are also possessed by spiritual forces, including gods of the wilderness; by men who represent different nations and woo the female “territory”; and by women who represent distinct national traditions or, increasingly, the new Multicultural Canada that is displacing the British-French one. Atwood repeatedly depicts her characters as territories of others, refugees, trespassers, foreigners even on their home ground, and internally divided entities that are inhabitable by others and inaccessible even to the self. They harbor repressed memories that are foreign to their own psyches. Thus Atwood’s novels undercut the Canadian nationalist project that she embarked upon with her 1972 book on a unified Canadian literature. Her novels essentially suggest that, ironically, the uniqueness of the Canadian character lies in its propensity to be possessed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".