Foe and the Handmaid's tale
Old and new truths in J. M. Coetzee's and M. Atwood's prose
Maja, Ćuk
Kultura
143
187
199
0023-5164
10.5937/kultura1443187c
http://scindeks.ceon.rs/article.aspx?query=ISSID%26and%2611818&page=0&so...
2014-2021/06/18/12:09:58
Analysing the novels Foe and The Handmaid's Tale from Michel Foucault's theoretical views in his work What Is an Author?, we may notice how the unclear parts or unexplained details in urtexts, such as the novel Robinson Crusoe and The Bible, give possibilities for different interpretations, truths and new prefigured novels inspired by the original texts. In Coetzee's and Atwood's rewritten versions of the canonized stories, there are oscillations of a few different perspectives: postmodern, feminist, postcolonial and postfeminist. The novel Foe, a classic story about Robinson Crusoe has been reconstucted from a postmodern perspective, while in the novel The Handmaid's Tale, we come across a prefigured version of an episode and a character from The Bible, set in the context of a dystopian society in the future. Challenging imperial and patriarchal discourse at the beginning of the novels (by Susan Barton in Foe and Offred in The Handmaid's Tale) resembles approaches of feminist works. However, certain scenes and characters (Susan's attitude of ''the colonizer'' toward Friday in Foe or the position of rebels in The Handmaid's Tale) may refer to writing stories from postcolonial discourse. Coetzee's implicit irony, when he depicts mood swings in Susan and Atwood's implicit condemnation of the Aunts's cruelty towards the Handmaids, may be interpreted as a postfeminist reaction against contradictions of feminist ideals. All in all, apart from those diverse possibilities for interpretation which the two authors offered during their (re)writing of novels, other truths (notions, speeches and parts of the texts in literature, culture, and religion) were also destabilized and examined in the novels Foe and The Handmaid's Tale, as our analyses reveal.
