Politics and Prophecy: Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale and True Stories

Abstract

At that moment when the nameless heroine of Surfacing walks out of the Canadian forest, brushes the leaves from her matted hair, puts on her clothes and proclaims to herself and the trees that she refuses ‘to be a victim’, Atwood’s subsequent fiction and poetry also begin to emphasise a quality of proclamation. Atwood’s principal concern in Surfacing and in earlier fiction and poetry has been to delineate the psychological factors of sexual politics, the behaviour of women in conflict with men. But only in the later novels and poems does Atwood expand her political view to encompass a world in which both men and women are caught up in the struggle to see ‘who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death’ (Handmaid’s Tale, 144). Oppression in all its manifestations, both physical and psychological, is Atwood’s subject in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale and in the poems entitled True Stories. Both novels and the poetry are profoundly political; all represent the confrontation with power and its universal forms: dictatorship, tyranny, torture and the reality of violence.