SOURCE: Mahoney, Elizabeth. “Writing So to Speak: The Feminist Dystopia.” In Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham, pp. 29-40. London: Longman, 1996.

[In the following essay, Mahoney examines how women challenge male authority and inherited gender stereotypes in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Vlady Kociancich's The Last Days of William Shakespeare.]

Why … not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety?

Virginia Woolf¹

We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative, teleological, or dialectical.

Homi K. Bhabha²

A ‘supplementary space’ where ‘women might figure’: the space delineated in an ironic fashion by Woolf and positively by Bhabha aptly describes the feminist dystopia, the future fiction set in a ‘bad place’ for women. In this chapter I will argue that the dystopia offers a potentially radical fictional space in which women can unravel and re-imagine existing power relations. My interest here is in one particular sphere of authority—that gained through control of narrative and articulation—but the formal tension contained by the genre (at a distance from the socio-political real, but always in relation to it) ensures that the dystopia is always concerned with the workings of power at different historical moments. When women subvert the generic tradition in feminist ‘bad place’ narratives, these networks of power can be seen through ‘a different lens’, as Christa Wolf puts it, one which has gender as its focus.³

Two recent feminist dystopias—Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Vlady Kociancich's The Last Days of William Shakespeare (1990)—self-consciously foreground relations of gender and power in inherited, established types of discourse, and speculate on ways in which women might begin to challenge such authority. The Handmaid's Tale is set in the Republic of Gilead, a right-wing religious regime, occupying the former United States. Women are divided into three groups according to their reproductive potential and class position: wives, econowives and handmaids who act as surrogates for barren women. The Last Days of William Shakespeare depicts a ‘Campaign for Cultural Reconstruction’ in a South American state, focusing in particular on the fanaticism of the politicians who impose a ban on all non-indigenous cultural production. Each novel includes two competing, gendered narratives (narrative authority coded as masculine, silence as feminine) which clash in a power struggle within the fictional space: a masculine spoken or written discourse (the Historical Notes section of The Handmaid's Tale and the chapters of Kociancich's text which focus on the prize-winning author, Santiago Bonday) and a feminine, autobiographical text (Offred's story and Renata's letters and diary). Although these cover the same ground and are linked to the same plots, different narratives emerge from these antithetical spaces; this difference is crucially connected to power. While the dominant masculine text is the site of plot detail, history and tradition, the women's narratives occupy a much more tenuous, marginal place. As well as describing the cultural place occupied by the dystopia (as a conventionally popular, non-realist form), I want to suggest that the term ‘supplement’ can also be used productively in a reading of Offred and Renata's texts; they write in a supplementary representational place from which binary oppositions (such as masculine and feminine, articulation and silence) can be confused and destabilised:

The supplement is one of these ‘undecidables’. In French, as in English, it means both an addition and a substitute. It is something added, extra, superfluous, above and beyond what is already fully present; it is also a replacement for what is absent, missing, lacking, thus required for completion or wholeness.⁴

Derrida argues that it is the in-between status of the supplement—something ‘added’ and ‘what is absent’—that makes it threatening: ‘Its slidings slip it out of the simple alternative presence-absence. That is the danger.’⁵ Thus the power relations between any discourse and its supplements are not fixed but fluid (‘slidings’), and this is because the supplement occupies a position beyond interpretation or containment. My reading of these two dystopias will focus on the ‘slidings’ of power within the texts and, in particular, the site of this battle: narrative authority and control. The struggle which we witness in these texts has, of course, a symbolic value: Offred and Renata's attempts to construct their narratives represent in microcosm feminist projects to uncover neglected women writers and to voice a different perspective from that articulated by the literary and historical canon. Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (1973) offers a strikingly suggestive theoretical and metaphorical parallel to the power struggles represented in these narratives, as it develops gender-specific components (plaisir and its supplement jouissance) in an erotics of reading. I want to begin by looking at the representatives of control and authority in each text, aligning them with Barthes's notion of plaisir or ‘pleasure’, before moving on to examine the narrative supplements: the women's writing which threatens existing textual order and brings jouissance or ‘bliss’ into the narrative. I conclude with an examination of the clash between these two orders and the uneasy resolution offered by each.

The male protagonists of these dystopias occupy central positions within literary and historical establishments:

… the tall elegant figure, the attentive gray eyes, the pipe held in his hand like a small intellectual torch; the prize-winning writer, Santiago Bonday, or ‘The Master’ as he is known.⁶

Keynote Speaker: Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Archives, Cambridge University, England.⁷

The ‘Master’ and the ‘Professor’ are at one with tradition and culture, part of the academic or literary mainstream: ‘prize-winning’, ‘Director’, ‘Keynote Speaker’. Pieixoto works with archive material at Cambridge and has ‘Darcy’ as his second name, while Bonday invents himself in the text as the sensitive artist with his ‘tall elegant figure’, ‘attentive gray eyes’ and pipe. Each of these details aligns them both with Barthes's description of the reader/text of plaisir, and situates them absolutely within dominant discourses:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.⁸

Such texts reaffirm some archaic order; they reinforce values and systems of dominance rather than challenging them. In this definition of the text of pleasure we begin to see that this ‘pleasure’ includes power: these texts ‘fill’, ‘grant euphoria’ and ‘come from culture’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this power is gender-specific: throughout The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes describes a male reader taking ‘his pleasure’ (P [The Pleasure of the Text] 3); both the spectator and the pleasure are delineated as specifically masculine. The trope of ‘voyeur’ is introduced to describe the reading subject of criticism or commentary, and a voracious reader who skips passages of a text is compared to:

… a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer's striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual.

(P 11)

Although Barthes replaces the usual ‘I’ or ‘he’ of his text with ‘we’, so that ‘we resemble’ this spectator (and become implicated in the violation of the ‘tease’), ‘we’ tear off the dancer's clothes (or perhaps ‘unknot’ from dénouement, which is presumably what ‘we’ are hastening towards), this ‘spectator’ is unquestionably male; the female dancer is also in the same order, trapped and objectified in ritual. Thus within The Pleasure of the Text, the woman is contained by an ‘order’ of sexual and textual exploitation, and it is this same order that is in place—then contested—in Atwood and Kociancich's texts.

Both Pieixoto and Bonday knowingly occupy a position of mastery and their texts are constructed to perform this mastery—of history and literature, but also of the feminine subjects (or objects) of their narratives. This is clearest in Professor Pieixoto's academic paper entitled ‘Problems of Authentication …’ within the Historical Notes coda to The Handmaid's Tale. Like the voracious reader of plaisir who ‘speeds up the dancer's striptease’, Pieixoto's text moves obsessively towards a dénouement, a denuding of the handmaid's text. The ‘pleasure’ of this text is inextricably linked with interpretation, and this act of historical interpretation is an attempt to keep the handmaid and her narrative in ‘the same order’ of supplementarity or subservience. Pieixoto is concerned only with definition, rationalisation, finding and demonstrating ‘proof’ or truth, essentially epistemic questions. Much of his paper is taken up with trying to establish the handmaid's identity so that ‘we might be well on the way to an explanation of how this document—let me call it that for the sake of brevity—came into being’ (HMT [The Handmaid's Tale] 315). Pieixoto's performance is driven by a desire for closure, to ‘arrange’ (314), ‘to make some decision’ (314), to ‘understand’ (315), to ‘deduce’ (323) or ‘decipher’ (324) the handmaid's tale. His irritation at the text's resistance to this process of interpretation, both in terms of what is said and the way in which it is spoken, is clear: ‘we had to go over it several times, owing to the difficulties posed by accent, obscure referents, and archaisms’ (HMT 314, emphasis added).

This division also structures Bonday's narrative in The Last Days of William Shakespeare:

I do not answer him as Santiago Bonday, the writer, but as Santiago Bonday, the man.

After a lifetime dedicated to art for art's sake, I feel it unnecessary to justify a body of work translated into more than fifteen languages, which, over the past decades has won every major national literary prize and even the congratulations … of our country's Presidents. However, I wish to correct your critic's crude interpretation.

(LD [The Last Days of William Shakespeare] 95)

In this rare example of first person narration which, as in Pieixoto's paper, appears only within a context of formulaic, clichéd language (epitomised by ‘art for art's sake’), ‘I’ is used to signify the writer's claims to intellectual superiority. As with the sudden change of pronoun in Barthes's text, we should be immediately suspicious; the textual effect is not what we might expect: the use of ‘I’ actually serves to depersonalise and distance Bonday's discourse further. The ‘I’ here is a universal subject, which can transcend all cultural and historical specifics, ‘translating’ into any language—and one which can unquestioningly assert itself as both the ‘writer’ and the ‘man’. Bonday's main, hyperbolic sentence aligns his ‘body of work’ with both the literary (‘every major national literary prize’) and political establishment (‘our country's Presidents’), and it is this alliance with dominant discourses which empowers him to state, ‘I wish to correct …’. Bonday writes in confidence; it is a formal, rhetorical, polished text (thus the use of ‘I’ is to produce a specific rhetorical, textual effect, marking this text as that of a man of letters).

His status as literary ‘master’ is performative and self-conscious:

As happened for a few minutes every day, the contents of his workroom injected Bonday with a dose of literary adrenalin. The armchairs upholstered in soft fragrant leather; the exquisitely bound books that lined the walls; the table piled with the Greek and Latin classics for easy, though always postponed, reference. In his office there was his electric typewriter, half a ream of A4 paper, notebooks full of jottings …

(LD, 7)

Bonday masquerades as artist, surrounding himself with signs of artistry and success. He spends much of his time maintaining what he considers to be an appropriate public image, carrying with him (rather than reading) Dante in winter and Shakespeare in summer: ‘Both fitted his image as a man of letters, but above all they helped him to believe in his passion for the classics … He didn't often actually read the book’ (LD 65). However, he is bored by his own success and the ease with which he writes, and this is confirmed by the details of his workroom: the ‘few minutes’ of enthusiasm each day, the full notebooks, the half-used ream of paper. We rarely see Bonday write anything at all, and it increasingly seems as if his work emerges effortlessly, almost slides from literary tradition itself, rather than from ‘The Master’. The attention to sensual and surface detail here reinforces this feeling; the upholstery, binding, lining, books used as accessories foreground material and domestic possessions, rather than the introspection and reflection we might expect and which we come to associate with Renata, the struggling woman writer in Kociancich's text.

Yet this effortlessness is a sign of authority, and in both texts the control of language and utterance is mirrored structurally in the division of the novels: it is in Bonday and Pieixoto's narratives that we find the ‘controlling’ elements of plot and time foregrounded. For example, in the Historical Notes we get most of our detailed information about the Gileadean regime, and through this Offred's tale is placed in an historical and cultural context. Bonday's narrative details the ‘Campaign of Cultural Reconstruction’—both the escalation of power and his involvement in it—in a thinly-disguised future Argentina. This political fanaticism is only obliquely referred to in Renata's diary and letters. It is important that both of these dominant discourses—the ‘Master's’ and the ‘Professor's’—are shown to have survived the ‘bad place’: Pieixoto's paper is a commentary on the historical past of Gilead, and Bonday returns from exile after the Campaign has been defeated.

However, it is clear from the titles The Last Days of William Shakespeare and ‘Problems of Authentication’ that the power of Bonday and Pieixoto's discourses is challenged by Renata and Offred's antithetical narratives; the masculine texts are threatened with extinction by the supplements. I want to move now to these voices which threaten to dislocate existing textual power relations, or in Barthes's terms from the realm of pleasure which is delineated as masculine, to that of ‘bliss’ or jouissance, which is implicitly feminine. This involves a shift of attention from that which ‘grants euphoria’ to ‘the absolutely new’ (P 40); from the voyeur/spectator tearing his way towards control of discourse to that which disrupts ‘the order’ through a relocation; to the women who speak from a different place:

I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

(HMT 62)

… this dry husk of a world that closes in and chokes you before you find your real voice. Here we don't mature, we just grow old in darkness and silence … It's the flow of a river not its origins that interests me, so I'll never find the fountainhead.

(LD 96-7)

In these excerpts from Offred and Renata's texts it is immediately clear that we are outside ‘master’ narratives. Here, a supplementary perspective and voice is articulated and an idiolect, the language of the individual subject, replaces the language of the establishment or institution. This ‘tiny writing’ occupies a tenuous place; it is only ‘scratched’ skin-deep, almost tattooed ‘with a pin’ in the darkest corner. The tools for writing, a pin or fingernail, are the antithesis of Bonday's ‘exquisite’ and ‘fragrant’ study and his typewriter; the women are writing primitively. Despite being hidden in darkness, the feminine voice is under threat before it has spoken from a ‘dry’ world which ‘closes in and chokes’ the beginnings of its ‘flow’. For the woman whose ‘tiny writing’ Offred discovers it is already too late: she hanged, choked and silenced herself. In her text, which translates as ‘don't let the bastards grind you down’, she has, however, managed to appropriate and subvert dominant and oppressive language. Because of where it is written or how it is spoken, the message becomes potentially radicalising. Renata and Offred's texts are written and spoken in the shadows, through ‘darkness and silence’ and it is their origins in this darkest corner which marks them as texts of ‘bliss’.

Barthes associates jouissance more with creative or writing processes, than with the activity of reading which is aligned with pleasure (we can note here that Bonday and Pieixoto write little or nothing, while Renata and Offred are constantly concerned with issues of narration and pulling their texts together from the dark corners). Barthes also seems to designate ‘edges’ and ‘shadows’ as feminine:

There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow … but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text … The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject.

(P 32)

That this ‘shadow’ should be both fecund and fragmented in discourse (‘a bit of representation’) signals it as a space in which a feminine spectre, ‘a bit of subject’, can be located. If we consider for a moment the places in which the feminine texts are written, this link becomes even clearer. The Historical Notes suggest that Offred's tapes may have been recorded in attics or cellars of ‘safe houses’; the message in Latin is found closeted in the wardrobe; and some of Renata's letters and diaries are written from the ‘red office’. Atwood and Kociancich's protagonists both produce fragmented texts: Offred's account is divided into the speculative ‘Night’ sections and other chapters dealing with the daily, lived reality of life in Gilead; Renata's narrative is composed of letters to a writer in exile, Emilio Rauch, and private (and again, more speculative) diary entries. While these divisions are not fixed—and indeed they begin to dissolve as the texts progress—the narrating subjects emerging from these texts are fragmented. Each narrative posits a feminised idiolect being constructed in the margins, away from the mainstream. The women's narratives are constructed in a safe place, a supplementary cultural space; for Renata this is in the form of letters that will never be sent—‘I write you letters which aren't real letters’ (LD 71)—and for Offred, the ‘supplement’ is rendered possible by the freedoms of anonymity and the random, spoken word in her autobiographical tape-recordings.

One of the most striking ways in which these feminine texts declare their otherness is by exposing the very moments of their construction:

I'm all beginnings. Here I am, docile and lazy, into the first lines of a blank notebook … I've nothing to say. Perhaps there's no such thing as a writer's destiny and it's all just a pathetic exploration of loneliness, a search for an escape route out of all the confusion and silence.

… Good grief, I've actually started the diary. But nothing I do comes out right. This doesn't read like a page in a diary.

(LD 5, 6)

It isn't story I'm telling.

It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.

… I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

(HMT 49, 76)

We see Renata and Offred at the moments of composition, moments which are screened in the Professor's and Master's narratives: at the ‘beginnings’, ‘blank’, with ‘nothing to say’, exploring, searching through confusion (‘It isn't a story … It's also a story …’), in composition. It is not only the texts but the subject which is in crisis; the self is seen as other: ‘I'm all beginnings’, ‘I compose myself’, ‘I call up my memories and see myself’ (LD 52). Subjectivity is ‘composed’ in language, in the text, moving from ‘confusion and silence’ to a narrative identity. Offred's statement that she composes herself ‘as one composes a speech’ suggests that these compositions are not only synchronous, but the same process; ‘language, or the signs of language, or subjectivity itself are put into process’.⁹

The self-reflexive quality of Offred and Renata's narratives foregrounds both the act of narration itself—‘I've actually started the diary’, ‘a story I'm telling’—and the unease experienced in this position. This unease manifests itself in subjects and texts which are contradictory and unstable; Offred uses the space of her text to wonder whether or not she is ‘telling’ a story. Renata's narrative also posits a problematic relationship between speaker and text and subjectivity. From the beginning of her text she details obstacles to her writing and, unlike Bonday, has no image of herself as a writer. As the oppression escalates in the novel, her hold on textuality and subjectivity becomes increasingly precarious: ‘I can't find the words to express myself’ (LD 160), becomes ‘I slowly drift further and further away from myself’ (LD 205). She even describes the emptiness of her life in a textual analogy: ‘It's like a novel without a plot, a short story without a story’ (LD 11). Thus writing and narrating in these texts are inextricably bound up with being; rather than using the centripetal discourse of Pieixoto (interpretation) or Bonday (plot), Renata and Offred attempt to move through or beyond the text to subjectivity.

Thus far we have seen how the feminine discourses distance themselves from those described as dominant; they eschew traditions not recognised as their own and attempt to speak or write another. However, it is particularly through their resistance to closure and to the interpretative filter of ‘plaisir’ that these narratives present their greatest threat:

… you'll repeat your name, in nights to come, in your dream of another struggle, alive and writing in the sun, Renata, tomorrow. …

(LD 230)

Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can't be helped.

And so I step up, into the darkness within, or else the light.

(HMT 307)

The most obvious manifestation of this resistance is the way in which the women's texts end. Indeed, both refuse to end, referring speculatively to the post-narrative; Offred and Renata ‘step up’ and out of the narrative, to the unknown, to ‘strangers’, a dream, ‘tomorrow …’. The openness of these final sentences, epitomised by the classic antitheses in Offred's text and the obscurity of meaning at the end, coupled with the possibility that this is in fact ‘a new beginning’, radicalise the women's narratives. These endings can be compared to Pieixoto's and Bonday's texts, which end, respectively, with ‘Any Questions?’ and ‘The Master’ back at the top of the literary establishment, literally back where we started. Renata and Offred's narratives resist any dénouement, and thus they are not allowed to have the final word (they are not ‘the end’ of either novel); as we shall see in a moment, the dominant discourse asserts itself and attempts to fill in, to speak/write the ending.

However, it is not only the endings which work against closure; the women's texts as a whole are non-linear, at once self-conscious of narrativity and at the same time denying and disrupting narrative. As we have seen, they refuse to give the reader an ending; we, with Offred, ‘have no way of knowing’, not just at the end but throughout the text. These discourses foreground reconstruction, layering, ‘flashback’, spoken or written by an anonymous narrator: ‘It didn't happen that way either. I'm not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction …’ (HMT 275). Narrative works here as ‘a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface’ (HMT 153); this reminds us of the handmaid carving out her Braille-like message on the smooth wood of the wardrobe, and emphasises the arbitrary narrative identity of these texts: indistinct, indefinable ‘shapes’. Spatial metaphors predominate in both texts; Renata is drawn to labyrinthine spaces such as the National Theatre: ‘There's so much mystery in its empty rooms, in the spaces opening out onto nothing. I admit it: I love these long random walks, these inexplicable voids’ (LD 37, emphasis added). It is within such textual and subjective spaces that they arrange the ‘shapes’ that constitute their narratives. Offred's most speculative narration comes in the series of chapters simply entitled ‘Night’ in which she seems freed from the constraints of chronology, place and narrative order: ‘But night is my time out. Where should I go?’ (HMT 47).

The non-linearity of these narratives is further emphasised by the surfacing of memory:

All I have left now is my memory … In the memories that keep me poised on the edge of the abyss, until they open the door, I seem such a stranger.

(LD 221)

Are they old enough to remember anything of the time before, playing baseball, in jeans and sneakers, riding their bicycles? Reading books, all by themselves?

… after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent.

(HMT 231)

Renata makes explicit the role memory plays in stabilising a dangerously precarious subjectivity, keeping her from ‘the abyss’—the confusion and silence which threatened her early texts. Offred too recognises that memory may prevent women from being pushed back to the ‘edges’, losing their idiolect, being ‘silent’ in groups. Memory is linked with both textual and political resistance for women; indeed Offred's entire narrative is marked by memory, and her fragile hold on subjectivity is under threat from what she calls ‘attacks of the past’ (HMT 62):

… a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.

(HMT 13)

This excerpt, from the opening paragraph of the novel, shows Offred's text starting from memory and is also suggestive of the textual identity of the women's narratives in the novels. The notion of palimpsest, a text whose original inscription has been replaced, making space for a second writing and another meaning, is crucial not only for Renata and Offred, but also for Atwood and Kociancich who are engaged in acts of genre subversion.¹⁰ The feminist dystopia, a ‘style upon style’, transforms the ‘bad place’ to a space for a feminine and transforming narrative, previously ‘unheard’, ‘forlorn’, an ‘undercurrent’. Like memory in the texts, such supplementary writing (Offred, Atwood, Renata, and Kociancich) occupies a tenuous textual position, remaining fragile, a ‘wail’, ‘powder’, ‘snow’, ‘tissue paper’. Yet within this fragility lies a power: through genre subversion, new textual identities emerge which allow women to move towards self-representation.

I want to look finally at the clash of the dominant discourse and the feminine idiolect, at the moments at which plaisir and jouissance come into conflict. Two moments in particular are of interest here: the first is when the feminine text disrupts the text of pleasure to such an extent that ‘a state of loss’ (P 14) is engendered; the second sees the restoration of the dominant discourse.

Bonday had imagined that writing this letter would be one of the few pleasant moments he would enjoy at this time, but now he was having real difficulty finishing it.

(LD 187)

Increasingly, in The Last Days of William Shakespeare, it is Renata's text which becomes central, moving from the shadows to assume control of the whole narrative. Plot, which had been found only in Bonday's text, relocates to hers, his sentences begin to fragment, breaking down into series of dots, which we might associate rather with Renata early in the novel. Bonday is also suffering from sexual impotence and thus in both senses his ‘small intellectual torch’, which first aligned him with the text of pleasure, has been replaced by that ‘dissolve’ which bliss brings. He has recurrent nightmares, linked to his impotence; the divide between unconscious and conscious is that which dissolves. When he looks at himself in the mirror he sees not only a grotesque image, but, importantly, sees himself as other:

The man in the mirror made him feel indignant, ashamed. ‘I drank a whole bottle, what an animal.’ Fixed by the frame of gilt garlands, he observed himself with horror and fascination. ‘A sick, slobbering wolf.’

(LD 101)

This perception of self-as-other is something we associate very much with Renata in the early part of the novel, and this contrasts sharply with Bonday's seamless performance as the prize-winning author. Crucial points in his breakdown include his first sighting and subsequent infatuation with Renata, and his conversations with a child who later dies, leaving Bonday in a ‘daytime nightmare’ (LD 173). Both are outside dominant discourse; both, from the margins or ‘edges’, prevent ‘The Master’ from writing and eventually push him into exile—literal and metaphoric—from discourse and from himself.

The ‘state of loss’ in The Handmaid's Tale emerges as Pieixoto realises he will not be able to complete the desired interpretative process on the feminine text:

… many gaps remain. Some of them could have been filled by our anonymous author, had she had a different turn of mind. She could have told us much about the workings of the Gileadean empire, had she had the instincts of a reporter or a spy. What would we not give, now, for even twenty pages or so of printout from Waterford's private computer!

(HMT 322)

His irritation is made clear by the ‘had she had …’ clauses, established earlier on by a sentence which begins, ‘She does not see fit …’ (318). It is also obvious that the historian would be happier with a text of pleasure, a masculine narrative, from a ‘spy’, ‘reporter’ or, better still, the Commander—all discourses of pleasure, which would fill those ‘gaps’. Offred's discourse itself is of no value, as it cannot, despite their reconstruction and arrangement, offer the editors detail or fact; it cannot be pinned down. The moment at which jouissance surfaces, however, comes when Pieixoto names her text as other, as beyond his interpretation:

Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of out own day.

(HMT 324, emphasis added)

The denotation of ‘matrix’ as linguistic register here, which is presumably what Pieixoto intends, is immediately replaced by the connotations of matrix as womb, as maternal space. This has already been set up in Offred's own narrative, at the ‘Birth Day’ ceremony: ‘Smell of matrix’ (HMT 133). He is unable to interpret the text of bliss, citing the matrix as that which prevents closure, that which disrupts and opens up the gaps. The maternal associations continue with ‘out of which they come’ and ‘imbued’, implying saturation, moistening, fluidity.

Plot and interpretation break down when faced with the non-linearity and ‘obscurity’ of the matrix. Pleasure is replaced by bliss and the masters of discourse are displaced by new voices, and yet, at the end of these novels, who is speaking? In both cases, the women have been silenced once more and it is the historian and the prize-winning author who have the final word. Bonday, rather interestingly, ends with, ‘Ah yes, for all their faults, one must recognize they've left their mark’ (LD 233), signalling that the feminine voice has been suppressed, but that it has ‘marked’ discourse. This restoration has come about through a second clash of bliss and pleasure (alternative and dominant, feminine and masculine), only this time pleasure has asserted itself though the violence alluded to earlier, in Barthes's trope of the spectator/voyeur at the striptease:

Without shouting, or struggling, without even any fear, I let him undress me and rape me. I keep my eyes wide open.

(LD 230)

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer …

(HMT 324)

Renata is finally silenced through specifically masculine violence: if a woman's voice cannot be silenced, plaisir brutally re-asserts itself. Renata's final journal entry retells the quest for dénouement from the other side, from the victim's rather than the voyeur's gaze. Pieixoto's allusion to Eurydice provides a paradigm for the textual violence, which is of particular concern here; Eurydice was killed by Orpheus looking back at her, just as the handmaid's tale has been edited, rearranged, named and interpreted by the historian looking back. The rape and murder of Renata in the ‘red office’ and the textual suffocation of ‘Offred’ show the same desperate masculine discourse, re-asserting dominance through the only means it has left. These are, then, the ‘last days’ of such discourse and the ‘problems of authentication’ will not simply go away.

For the moment, however, the dominant discourse is able to assimilate Renata and Offred's texts to silence the disruptive narrative, that ‘something without a shape or name’ (HMT 13). Barthes's distinction between pleasure and bliss seems to suggest that this might be the case, bliss as a transitory, ecstatic moment, pleasure as order which must reassert itself: ‘it is a veritable époché, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values’ (P 65). Yet these ‘recognized values’ are called into question within the space of the fictions, and Pieixoto and Bonday—the spokesmen for such discourses—can never quite escape the shadow of the supplementary narratives: Pieixoto admits defeat in his interpretative quest and Bonday retreats into exile. Although at the end of the dystopias we are left with their presence and speech, both of these have been destabilised; the power and authority associated with the words of the professor and the prize-winning author have been challenged and marked by other voices: ‘… speech, silence, absence and presence operate contrapuntally so that the traces of absence and silence are always latent in speech and presence’.¹¹ These ‘traces’ are foregrounded in each novel by a textual shock, a moment of horror within the reading of the text which makes clear the entrapment of the women's words: in The Last Days of William Shakespeare we realise that none of the letters Renata compulsively writes are ever sent (‘the letters never sent, intact, fresh, dead’, 221); in The Handmaid's Tale there is the shock of realising that Offred's narrative is a reconstruction, edited and arranged by Pieixoto. Thus Atwood and Kociancich do not show us a battle won; their texts include women's voices which remain only ‘adjacent and adjunct’, but the textual identity of the dystopia is irrevocably altered. The non-real fictional place is opened up to include other ‘cultural knowledges’ and the possibility of future feminine fictions. The woman's supplementary narrative occupies a crucial position: ‘[it] exists as a shifting, intermediary state, caught between its representations of its own appropriation and its enactment of an “otherness” it can only adumbrate, a “fiction” of what it might become’.¹² The feminist dystopia offers a supplementary place for the multiplying of textual identities, making space for an alternative feminine idiolect and subjectivity to be inscribed in the ‘opened’ text:

All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening.

(HMT 156)

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1945 edition, p. 39.

2. Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, London, Routledge 1990, p. 313. Chapter title ‘Dissemination: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’.

3. Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, London, Virago 1984, p. 271.

4. Joan Scott, ‘Women's history’, in Peter Burke (ed.) New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge, Polity Press 1991, pp. 49-50. Scott uses the ‘contradictory logic’ of the supplement to analyse the discourses of women's history.

5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato's pharmacy’, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.) A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991, p. 134.

6. Vlady Kociancich, The Last Days of William Shakespeare, London, Heinemann 1990, p. 2. All further page references will be cited parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviation LD.

7. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, London, Virago 1987, p. 311. All further page references will be cited parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviation HMT.

8. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1990, p. 14. All further page references will be cited parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviation P.

9. Julia Kristeva, ‘A question of subjectivity—an interview’, Women's Review 12, pp. 19-21. Reproduced in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds) Modern Literary Theory, A Reader, London, Edward Arnold 1989, p. 129.

10. Atwood is engaged in a very specific act of genre subversion. The Handmaid's Tale subverts the Orwellian dystopia in a number of explicit ways (for example, the use of an historical ‘Appendix’), but is also littered with clues to and signs of the re-writing: for example, the hotel bedroom at the brothel is Room 101 and Atwood's novel (whichever edition is consulted) begins on page thirteen, just as the clocks are striking thirteen as an ominous note at the very beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four. For a discussion of the genre subversion, see Amin Malak, ‘Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition’, Canadian Literature Spring 1987, pp. 9-16.

11. Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989, p. 74.

12. Bette London, The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster and Woolf, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1990, p. 133. London is describing the possibilities which French feminist theory offers for theorising the feminine voice.

Further Reading

There has been little critical consideration of women's experimentation with the dystopia, even within recent work on feminist genre fiction. However, each of the texts listed below includes some discussion of the feminist ‘bad place’.

Barkowski, Frances, Feminist Utopias, London, University of Nebraska Press 1991.

Barr, Marlene, Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Westport, Greenwood Press 1987.

Lefanu, Sarah, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, London, Women's Press 1988, chapter 7.

Mahoney, Elisabeth, ‘Writing so to speak: the feminist dystopia’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 1995.

Russell, Elizabeth, ‘The loss of the feminine principle in Charlotte Haldane's Man's World and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night’, in Lucie Armitt (ed.) Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction, London, Routledge 1991, pp. 15-28.

Wolmark, Jenny, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993.