“This is an acknowledgement that we are acting, for what else can we do in such a setup?”: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in light of Goffman’s Dramaturgy

• Autor(a) principal: Medeiros, Daniela Sousa
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/91700
• topic: The Handmaid’s Tale; Resistance; Dramaturgy; Margaret Atwood; Erving Goffman; Dystopia; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

This dissertation analyzes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel set in a theocratic patriarchal society which employs an omnipresent and dissimulated surveillance of its citizens, through the Dramaturgical theory of social interaction formulated by the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, as presented in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. By exploring how the dystopian dictatorial regime of Gilead forces its citizens into submitting to a role imposed by those in power, it stands out that most individuals will perform their assigned role only as faithfully as the powerful audience they are in front of at that specific moment requires it to be. Most characters are cynical about their public performances and try to covertly go against what is expected of them by whatever means they can, avoiding being caught subverting those expectations and suffering the consequences their disobedience would bring. The most effective form of defiance proves to be enacted through “team-performances”, a term devised by Goffman which designates the cooperation between two or more people invested in keeping a performance common to all involved, particularly when that performance has some sort of secret that must be kept from general knowledge. It is by apparently adapting herself to what Gilead expects of her and rebelling silently that Offred, the protagonist, manages to survive and escape her oppressors, unlike other characters who openly revolt against the regime, proving how important it is to perform a role convincingly any society.