Memória e identidade como forma de libertação em The handmaid's tale, de Margaret Atwood

Abstract

This work has the objective of analyzing the first-person fictional work by Margaret Atwood ―The Handmaid‘s Tale‖ which portrays the experience of a woman (the narrator) living in a dystopian society that exploits her physically, sexually, psychologically and transforms her life into a nightmare, where she is able to free herself through faith, memories, hope, much discipline and self-control. The work was first published in 1985 in her home country of Canada and won the Governor General‘s Award in the same year, and winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. The discourse covers many relevant themes for the current and future conjuncture regarding gender, identity and Memory. For such an analysis, we utilized theoretical studies related to memory, identity and feminism, which will help with the understanding how and why women write on relationship between the genders and why this relationship still present remnants of patriarchy in post-modernism. The theories of feminism will be from Simone de Beauvoir (2009), Patrícia Rocha (2009), Pierre Bourdieu (2010), Branca Alves and Jacqueline Pitanguy (1985), Virginia Woolf (2014), Lúcia Osana Zolin (2003), Andrea Nye (1995), Elaine Showalter (1994), Lúcia Castello Branco (1991), Michele Perrot (2012), Judith Butler (2003), Stuart Mill (2006) among others. In regards to Memory and Identity, we will utilize the studies of Le Goff (2003), Arthur Nestroyski and Márcio Seligmann (2000), Primo Levi (1988), Michael Pollak (1992), Stuart Hall (2014) Nathalie Heinrich (1998) among others. The study by these authors applied to the work of Atwood, leads us to possible conclusions about how literature is a rich and accessible source of expression for everyone and how it inspires real and fictional lives, influencing even the thought about life in the future.