“Myth is more instructive than history”: (Re)constructions of Biblical Myths in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

Abstract

The paper deals with The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter. Both writers show dystopian regimes which reconstruct Biblical myths since, as it is suggested in their fiction, totalitarian states abuse myths to represent women as passive victims and objects of desire and rescue. And because demythologizing involves remythologizing, Atwood and Carter attempt not only to refuse the representations of the past literary and mythological tradition but also to declare subjectivity for their heroines; women are represented in Nancy Roberts’ words “as rescuers rather than victims” . Margaret Atwood uses the genre of speculative fiction to depict the nightmarish Gilead, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime reconstructed from patriarchal narratives of the Bible and American Puritanism. The leaders of Gilead value women for their reproductive function as ‘two-legged wombs’. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, although she has no real power to rebel against patriarchal prescriptions, claims her body and her memory as her own territory. Through her narrative she undermines Gilead’s myth of the silent passivity of women. Offered not only survives the oppression, she also re-writes the story of ‘walking ovaries’ into her own story of identity, denying the role of nameless Handmaid. In Angela Carter’s speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve, the Biblical myth of the creation of Eve from Adam’s body is remythologized by Mother, the leader of a group of militant feminists. A British man, Evelyn, is kidnapped and transformed through surgery into “the new Eve” by Mother, who is a genius surgeon as well. I focus here on intertextuality, which offers Atwood and Carter a strategy for reconstructing the gaps inherent in Biblical myths related to reproduction, creation of woman and infertility.