マーガレット・アトウッドの『侍女の物語』における文学的審美性
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概要
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Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale drew great public attention since its publication in 1985. Its literary aesthetics, however, has been undermined by the overt political concerns on problems of women's right, fundamentalist theocracy, environmental crisis, authoritarian academism, etc. For the fair evaluation of the novel, we should reexamine its literary merits over its political messages. The novel consists of the two parts: "The Handmaid's Tale" and the epilogue entitled "Historical Note." The former main narrative is told by Offred, a "Handmaid" in the 21^<st> century fictive Giledean Republic. Offred's story carries literary aesthetics, which appeal to postmodern readers today. Her stories are painfully fragmented just as her body is violently mutilated by the strict regime. Offred, then, as any other literary-minded person, is highly selfconscious of her act of story-telling. She self-reflectively refers to how she is dealing with her stories for survival. Deprived of freedom to read and write, Offred is vigilant on the power of words including one's own name. Then, almost obsessed with the word, she insists on the act of reconstruction. What she produces is not the truth but always reconstruction. Her openness to plural interpretations manages to represent what has and might have happened in and to herself. The epilogue works as a frame narrative to "The Handmaid's Tale" and reveals how Prof. Pieixoto and his co-researcher compiled the random cassette tapes into the "The Handmaid's Tale." He only values it as a historical resource for his study. Consequently, Offred's accounts of her troubled existence are totally lost for him. Then, it seems that Atwood has deliberately characterized Pieixoto to indicate how readers should not approach Offred's Tale. Moreover, if we should curtail this novel as merely, for example, a feminist-dystopian novel, we must leave out the essence of the literary aesthetics of the novel. In order to avoid such misreading, we should be careful to pay our attention to the literary merits of the novel in its act of story-telling and not to yield to the political messages it carries. Though the political feature of the novel need not be at all denied, the literary aesthetics of the novel should be properly estimated for the fair evaluation of the novel.
- 神戸女学院大学の論文
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