Nitra Symposium

Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a dystopic novel that presents manipulative practices primarily annihilating elementary women’s rights.The setting of the novel is the United States turned into the Republic of Gilead - a country that masks the infringement of human rights and its totalitarian structure by noble interests of life preservation, and service to God. Situating the existential dillemmas of the protagonist (Offred) in the highly decorative setting of theocratic state, Margaret Atwood, allows for the reading of the text through the conceptual framework of the carnival. The spectacle of the carnivalesque in Handmaid’s Tale, moves away from its liberating quality erasing boundaries and distinctions, on the contrary, it is complicit to reinforce, and maintain the existing order. The female body cloaked in the crossform of  Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini’s Marriage is subjet to gaze, manipulative practices, and sexually abusive rituals projecting thus the uncanny, alien, grotesque world of demonic forces. The paper focuses on the examination of representational practices that convey the “exclusion of already marginalized”, such as the function of the narrative frame, grotesque and carnivalesque elements.