Telling Tales: The True Story of The Handmaid’s Tale

Title: Telling Tales: The True Story of The Handmaid’s Tale
Creator: Rolls, Alistair
Relation: Studies in Canadian Literature Vol. 47, Issue 1, p. 95-116
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1095238ar
Publisher: University of New Brunswick
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2022
Description: Margaret Atwood’s The handmaid’ s Tale is nothing if not reflexive; it is, in short, a story about storytelling. For Karen F. Stein, “the novel is a provocative inquiry into the origins and meanings of narrative. Among the issues it explores,” she continues, is “the narrator’s relation to her tale: the simultaneous fear and desire to narrate one’s story, and the attempt to create a self through language” (“Scheherazade” 269). My ambition in this article is to take Stein’s argument one step further by proposing that this tension between desire and fear produces a double narrative or two stories: the one that occupies the principal space of the text I shall consider a fantasy inspired by this mix of fear and desire; the other, which remains virtual for the most part, I shall read as the true story from which the fantasy of Gilead emerges.
Subject: storytelling; Handmaid's Tale; narrative; fear and desire
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1491642
Identifier: uon:53131
Identifier: ISSN:0380-6995
Language: eng
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