postmodern subversion of patriarchal symbolic order: a lacanian review of margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale

Margaret atwood’s fiction aspires to focus on various female issues through progressive subversive notions addressed in her versatile texts. in most of her novels, including the handmaid’s tale, atwood portrays revolutionary female protagonists who, at least at some point, choose to subvert the phallogocentric symbolic order and undermine the presupposed assumptions of patriarchal order. thus, the present research aims at investigating the ways through which margaret atwood self-consciously deals with gender-encoding experiences which subvert postmodern applications of lacanian theories of symbolic order. for this purpose, the current paper sets to analyze margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale through lacanian theories in order to expound how atwood subverts lacanian symbolic order in order to have her the female characters destabilize the patriarchal phallogocentric conventions and its definitions of world order. the main finding of the study is that offred, the revolutionary female protagonist of atwood’s the handmaid’s tale, deconstructs the patriarchal assumptions about the world order through her revolutionary actions such as her journey’s away from ordered world of her commander’s, that is the gilead, which stands for lacan’s symbolic order. the implication of the research is that atwood’s the handmaid’s tale presents a postmodern subversion of lacanian order through female protagonists who subvert the lacanian order and achieve what lacanian phallogocentric assumptions consider impossible, that is, returning from the masculine symbolic order to the ideal imaginary order where mother and child are united in a symbiotic harmony.