Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale . McClelland and Stewart, 1985. The Handmaids Tale
Miller, Laura. “The Handmaid’s Tale as Feminist Dystopia.” Modern Fiction Studies , vol. 63, no. 2, 2017, pp. 321–339. Foucault, Michel
The monthly “Ceremony” is the novel’s most explicit site of interpersonal surveillance. During the ritual, the Commander lies on top of Offred while his wife, Serena Joy, holds Offred’s hands. This bizarre triangle forces all parties to witness their own degradation. Atwood subverts the notion of privacy; reproduction becomes a theatrical performance for an absent audience—God, the state, and the self. Offred’s disassociation during the Ceremony (“I am a cloud… I am a mother’s body, passive and available” [Atwood 94]) demonstrates how surveillance fractures identity. She watches herself being watched, splitting into observer and observed, which is the ultimate goal of patriarchal control: to make the woman complicit in her own erasure. Atwood, Margaret