Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid's Tale*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is an explicitly political novel which became an immediate bestseller when published in Canada in 1985 and the United States in 1986.1 The novel emerges from the long traditions of Utopian fiction, particularly the anti-utopia or dystopia, which, prominent since Swift's Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, has become a common feature of this century's political and literary landscape. Atwood also joins the ranks of the writers of specifically feminist Utopias and dystopias. This sub genre, rejuvenated in the early seventies with the women's liberation move ment, includes works such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. The feminist novels show that power is gendered, that gender distinctions are pervasive and extensive, and that the personal and political interweave. In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's narrator tells a very personal tale of under standing and ignoring, activity and complicity, fidelity and betrayal, in the political settings of the contemporary United States and the future dystopian society of Gilead. Many commentators on The Handmaid's Tale have characterized the narrator as a heroine, a developing consciousness, or an emerging woman. Some have looked to the pre-Gilead period (our present) as a happy (or tol erable) alternative to the Gileadean nightmare; others have interpreted the Gileadean society as, in part, a by-product of cultural feminism; and a few have found hope or assurance in Gilead's obvious demise before 2195, the date of the epilogue's academic conference.2 But these interpretations are unseated by a close reading of the text and attention to its dystopian context,3 which demonstrate the need for sustained political, feminist con sciousness and activity among women by exploring what may happen in their absence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".