The Hysteric as a Chronicler in Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale

Survival, a signature theme in Margaret Atwood’s works, is once again celebrated in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) wherein the narrator protagonist transforms herself into a chronicler and using her narrative sustains herself in a fictionalized dystopic world—Gilead. The present paper claims that the protagonist, Offred, in negotiating her agency as a chronicler in a totalitarian phallogocentric world, adopts the role of a ‘hysteric’. This argument is premised on Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic concept of the hysteric which claims that for a woman to produce her narrative in a phallogocentric world, she has to be a hysteric. Furthering this thesis, Offred’s past and present in the novel are compared to the Lacanian Imaginary and the Symbolic, thereby demonstrating that the narrator protagonist’s life is never free from the dictates of phallogocentric law. In order to survive such oppression, Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, becomes a hysteric chronicler whose narrative simultaneously becomes the symbol of her resistance and her means to survive.