Women’s Complicity, Resistance, and Moral Agency: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Abstract

This article explores women’s complicity in and resistance against Gilead’s totalitarian patriarchy in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019). It approaches complicity from a broader theoretical perspective, according to which individuals cannot escape being complicit with the political system in which they live since they are inextricably implicated in a web of social interactions and structural relations. Furthermore, it understands complicity as also always shaped by an individual’s active role in upholding the given socio-political structures, a form of complicity that is not only tied to one’s self-understanding but also to the social roles and scripts available in society. Specifically, the article parses the variegated positions of power and/or powerlessness that grant and/or deny Atwood’s female protagonists different privileges and powers, which make possible varying degrees and kinds of complicity in and resistance against patriarchal oppression. Rather than evaluating the female characters’ guilt in normative, i.e. legal and moral terms, the focus lies on the women’s entanglements in Gilead’s dehumanization of and violence against women. I argue that the acts of complicity and resistance of Atwood’s protagonists are not only contingent on their specific situatedness but also ambiguous, contradictory, and, at times, strategic. Because Atwood’s women characters repeatedly raise the question of moral responsibility, in the end, I also attend to the question of whether the novels provide us with a viable direction regarding questions of moral agency in the context of women’s violation and subjugation by the state of Gilead.