Political Responses to Dominant Version of Reality: Cynical Behaviors of Subjects in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale

ABSTRACT: There is a widespread agreement among readers and critics that Margaret Atwood is not only a major poet but also very likely the best writer in Canada today. In her masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates the regime of Gilead and displays how characters are cooperated in their own oppression. The Handmaid’s Tale functions as an anatomy of ideology and description of ideological behaviors. The study of characters’ behavior with a methodology that covers both psychological and political elements all at once is essential. In this regard, this research refers to Slavoj ?i?ek’s dynamic and complex theories. This study chooses ?i?ek’s discussion on the notion of ideological cynicism from 1985 to the present day and aims to provide concrete examples of this concept within The Handmaid’s Tale. The discussion has been manifold and offers a lot of material for socio-political interpretation of the novel. Replacing Marx’s formula for ideology, they do not know it, but they are doing it, Sloterdijk proposes that we can modify this formula by a cynical variation in this way: they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.