A distopia teocrática por diferentes ângulos: o impacto da escolha das narradoras na representação de Gilead

Abstract

When birth rates dropped to near zero in the region known as the United States, a theocratic group took power, founded the Republic of Gilead and established drastic measures to promote wellbeing and ensure the future of society—that is the premise for dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Through the eyes of Offred, however, we watch a reality at odds with the promise of progress proclaimed by the regime. Over three decades later, Atwood released The Testaments (2019), a second book set in the same fictional place, but now with three other women as narrators, each unraveling to the reader how their life stories had been entangled with the events in Gilead. In this community where women have no voice, to know their point of view is to save the past by revealing traces, through a Benjaminian lens. Therefore, by exploring concepts that link memory, nationalism and religion, this work intends to collect the fragments left by those four narrators and understand how the memories they create build, all at once, different subjects and Histories of Gilead