Ethics of Materiality and Commitment in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

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Title:	Ethics of Materiality and Commitment in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Authors:	黃逸民
Date:	2010-08
Issue Date:	2016-04-22 13:45:55 (UTC+8)
Publisher:	New Delhi : Sarup Book Publishers for OSLE-India
Abstract:	Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale addresses the current postmodern condition of a denatured culture, which privileges and sanctifies a fabricated and artificial culture severed from nature. Specifically, the novel questions the acceptance and reification of what Baudrillard has called “the reign of the ‘simulacra,’” in which “imitations” or “fakes” are accepted as adequate substitutes for or copies of the natural or real. While Atwood is opposed to an uncritical ecological naturalism, which treats nature and culture as more or less independent and distinct entities or conditions, her novel ecocritically warns us about the indifference towards nature that marks much of current Baudrillardian-inspired literary theory. The Handmaid’s Tale emphasizes the deleterious effects of such indifference. My paper elaborates on this claim by way of Mary Mellor’s concept “deep materialism,” which combines two seemingly incompatible philosophic positions, deep ecology and historical materialism, and Ariel Salleh and Erika Cudworth’s concept “embodied materialism.” My argument is The Handmaid’s Tale speaks for an ethics of materiality that recognizes the corporeal grounding of consciousness, commitment to kinship and communication with nature even as it refuses to see nature and culture as independent entities.
Relation:	Indian Journal of Ecocriticism 3, pp.88-93
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of English] Journal Article

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