"Storytelling Against Structure: Post-Structural Resistance and Civic Awakening in Margret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale"

Abstract

This paper examines The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood through a post-structuralist lens to explore how storytelling operates as resistance in a totalitarian regime. In Gilead, language is weaponized to erase identity and enforce ideological control. Yet Offred's fragmented, uncertain narration disrupts this authority by refusing fixed meaning and narrative closure. Drawing on Derrida's différance, Barthes' "Death of the Author," and Foucault's theory of discourse, this paper argues that Offred's act of storytelling destabilizes dominant ideologies and invites the reader into an interpretive, ethical role. Her narrative becomes a civic act — not by offering truth, but by resisting it. By embracing contradiction, multiplicity, and narrative disobedience, The Handmaid's Tale shows how literature can awaken public consciousness and challenge the linguistic foundations of oppression. In this reading, post-structuralism is not just a theory of language, but a method of resistance - and storytelling is its most powerful tool.