Are There No Citizens in Gilead? - A Civic Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novel: 'The Handmaid's Tale'
In this paper, we develop a typology of citizenship hoping for fidelity to a wide range of political experiences. We develop it in dialogue with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. In that book, Atwood imagines extreme imbrications of fundamentalism, patriarchal ideology and an environmental disaster that radically reduce the available breeding pool among women. The dystopian result is the Republic of Gilead whose mission is to preserve a pool of handmaids who bear children for notable couples who cannot conceive.In the essay, we explore the question: Why develop a typology aimed at empirical investigation of civic life in dialogue with a dystopia? Our answer is that the standard approaches to civic description and analysis fail to address problems related to the roles of 1) imagination, 2) moral judgment, 3) place and 4) gender in civic studies and civic life. We contend that dialogue with Atwood’s novel allows for a more nuanced typology and critical analysis of civic life. Our typology identifies five types of citizen and civic functionary: 1) Purely Affirmative Citizens and Civic Functionaries; 2) Aspirational Citizens and Civic Functionaries; 3) Resisting Citizens and Civic Functionaries; 4) Resigned Citizens and Civic Functionaries; and 5) Revolutionary Citizens. These distinctions encourage us to resist the temptation to think of citizenship as simply a status assigned to privileged persons within a territory. Rather, citizenship is a field of possibilities governed by competing conceptions of good citizenship. In the concluding section of the paper, we apply the typology to many of the characters in the novel. We find rich combinations of citizens and civic functionaries caught in political struggles that would occur in a totalizing regime such as the Republic of Gilead. The analysis models the sort of thick description and typological analysis that could be used on a variety of imaginary and observable regimes.