“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood as a Postmodern Novel: Dystopian Genre Transgression in Postmodern Era

Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” seems to have been studied comprehensively and fundamentally. Aspects of the dystopian genre, its feminist and anti-religious orientation, and the novel’s connection with philosophical concepts of the 20th century have been studied in depth. In the poetics of the novel, researchers’ interest in the problems of intertextuality, the specifics of composition, etc., has never ceased. However, despite the variety of problems covered in these studies, in our opinion, a fundamental question about the significance of Margaret Atwood’s novel for the further development of the tradition of the dystopian genre has remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Meanwhile, “The Handmaid’s Tale” can be regarded as a programmatic work that clearly identifies and elaborates the key genre principles of the postmodern dystopian novel, which have not yet been substantiated. Modern studies of the features of postmodern dystopia based on the material of various works of the 1990-2000s, as well as in modern findings, capture exactly those genre strategies that were embedded in M. Atwood’s novel. At the same time, researchers focus on the transformation of the mainly predominant aspects of dystopia in the era of postmodernism. Meanwhile, the changes that dystopia underwent in the last third of the 20th century are associated with the formation of the aesthetics of the genre of the postmodern novel, as evidenced by the publication of the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”. In this regard, we consider it appropriate to study M. Atwood’s novel as a postmodern dystopian novel in the relationship between the content features of dystopia and the genre of the postmodern novel. The work aims to investigate the dystopian narrative presented in “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the context of the poetics of the postmodern novel genre. Achieving the stated goal involves the use of historicalliterary, philosophical-aesthetic, and hermeneutical research methods. In the context of the postmodern dystopian paradigm, the genre of dystopia is transformed significantly. Changes in the substantive aspects of the genre are associated with a reduction in the gap between dystopian and real time, the affirmation of a relatively optimistic tone, the lability of the dystopian world (which predetermines the conditionally metaphorical nature of the chronotope, the amorphousness of spatial and discrete time boundaries), and a shift in emphasis to the inner world of the character. The increased degree of anthropocentrism, which is characteristic of postmodern dystopia, determines the change in the nature of the protagonist’s rebellion against the totalitarian regime – the focus of social rebellion shifts to personal existential (the struggle to preserve one’s own identity), where it is not the result that is important, but its philosophical content. At the same time, dystopia also absorbs the features of the postmodern novel form and postmodern narrative strategy, mastering the techniques of intertextuality and rethinking the traditions of the past, irony and parody, playing with time and the author’s game with the reader. Moreover, the function of the author’s game strategy is not only to make the reader a co-author of the text but also to encourage him to make multiple interpretations. The multifaceted nature of the game draws the reader into the action and forces one to reflect on the windows of opportunity opening up in modern civilization, that is, to perceive the story of Gilead as more than just exciting storytelling. The game mode reveals the author’s ideological and content-based storytelling strategy – through intertext (as a combination of multi-level chronotopes and cultural texts), on the one hand, and through involvement in the experiences of Offred, on the other, to encourage/force the reader to experience the entire history of Christian civilization, presented in the dystopian heroine’s narrative.