Double Handmaid: Tales of Law and Literature

Abstract

This thesis is about representations of women in law and literature. It is also about relations between law and literature as practices of representation. I explore these ideas through a sustained, close reading of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The trope of the double and the practice of doubling recur in Atwood’s work, beginning with her very first publication, Double Persephone. In The Handmaid’s Tale this doubling is both thematic and structural. Thematically, the Handmaid is twice doubled: she is the madonna/whore paradox given form and she is both a ‘made thing’ of the Gileadean regime, and its caustic, ironic observer. Atwood uses the doubling of the Handmaid to expose ..