Women and Women: Use of Women Types as Rhetorical Techniques in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country.

• Main Author: William Bowman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 2014-12-01
• Series: Fafnir
• Subjects: margaret atwood; sheri s. tepper; gender roles; women; science fiction; handmaid’s tale; gate to women’s country
• Online Access: http://journal.finfar.org/articles/women-and-women-use-of-women-types-as-rhetorical-techniques-in-atwoods-handmaids-tale-and-teppers-gate-to-womens-country/

In this article, I argue both Margaret Atwood in Handmaid’s Tale and Sheri S. Tepper in Gate to Women’s Country use the same three ‘women type’ characters to explore ideal female gender roles and their relationship to society. Further, I argue that both authors use these characters as part of their bigger rhetorical engagement with the American gender essentialist political movements of 1980s. In particular, I argue that Atwood’s types, despite her empathy with the feminist movement, distance her from both radical second-wave separatist feminism and the American religio-political conservative movement of the 80s, and, against Dopp, that Offred does in fact offer an effective ideal female to be emulated in that, by the end of the novel, she defines and externalizes her self. On the other hand, for Tepper I argue, against Pierson, that Gate is not intrinsically anti-sexual but rather anti-romanticism, sexuality—homosexual and otherwise–only the unfortunate collateral damage, and, further, that Tepper’s women types align her much closer to the essentialism of second- and third-wave feminism than Atwood.