Linguistic Manipulation of Political Myth in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

This paper investigates the linguistic manipulation of political myth in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. More specifically, this paper discusses the myth of the good-of-the nation, which is linguistically manipulated verbally and nonverbally throughout the novel. Atwood’s novel is one of the distinguished dystopian narratives in the twentieth century. This type of fiction has always been a reflection of the irrationalities committed against people by those in power. Drawing on two approaches of political discourse analysis (Chilton, 2004; Wodak, 2009), this paper tries to answer one research question: How are political discourse strategies employed linguistically to propagate the good-of-the-nation myth? By making a connection between the data extracted from the selected novel and the way present regimes use language, this paper aims to explore the extent to which the good-of-the-nation myth is linguistically manipulated to dominate the public. As such, this paper attempts to provide the public with some sort of linguistic knowledge so as for them to be aware of the manipulative use of language in shaping and/or misshaping public attitudes. Lexical choices, didactic indoctrination, religionisation and dehumanisation are among the strategies used in the analysis of the selected data. There are two main findings in this paper. First, different linguistic levels of analysis are incorporated to propagate the discourse of political myth in the selected novel: the lexical, the pragmatic, the grammatical and the morphological. Second, political myths are linguistically manipulated to normalise their initiators’ erroneous practices and legitimise their irrationalities.