The Operation of Hegemony in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian fiction setting up in the near future where human population is facing its extinction due to the unhealthy and polluted environment. The story is narrated from the point of view of a Handmaid, Offred, who faces many difficulties, struggles, and oppression living in a totalitarian and conservative country named the Republic of Gilead. This research aims to find the operation of hegemony in the novel because the novel emphasizes the act of controlling and manipulating from a certain group to another group using religious ideology. Through Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, I reveal the hegemony operation in the novel to find its political hegemonic position in the real world. The analysis begins by textual analysis to find the five stages of hegemony as what is explained by Gramsci. To find the ideological construction of the text, I use discursive analysis with the author as the connector between the text and context. The result of this analysis shows that the novel constructs the operation of hegemony from how the government indoctrinates religious doctrines to legitimate the presence of Handmaids. From the discursive analysis, it is found that the depiction of hegemony in the text is related to the hegemony of neoconservative ideology and patriarchal society in the United States. Atwood criticizes religiosity practice used for political purposes that is found in neoconservative ideology through the depiction of women oppression in a hegemonic society that uses religion as its political tool. Thus, as a social product, The Handmaid’s Tale is a form of resistance to conservative and patriarchal ideology.