ECHOES OF THE UNDERWORLD. MYTH, VOICE, AND FEMINIST COUNTER-NARRATIVE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S “THE HANDMAID’S TALE”
ECHOES OF THE UNDERWORLD. MYTH, VOICE, AND FEMINIST COUNTER-NARRATIVE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S “THE HANDMAID’S TALE”

Summary/Abstract: This article examines “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) by Margaret Atwood through feminist myth criticism, focusing on its reconfiguration of the Persephone myth. Though never explicitly invoked, the myth’s structure underlies the novel’s construction of Gilead as a dystopian underworld defined by ritual violence, reproductive control, and spatial entrapment. Rather than retelling Persephone’s descent and return, Atwood dismantles its redemptive cycle, replacing silence with the fractured voice of Offred—a contemporary Persephone whose narrative remains suspended, her agency fragmented but enduring. The analysis draws on the works of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler to read Offred’s voice as a theoretical performance. Her disrupted narrative enacts “écriture feminine”, resisting coherence through memory, sensation, and affect. Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic reveals a bodily rhythm beneath Gilead’s symbolic order, while Butler’s theory of performativity exposes how Offred inhabits her assigned role subversively, destabilising power from within. The novel’s conclusion and its paratextual “Historical Notes” reflect the erasure of female voice by patriarchal knowledge systems, echoing mythic appropriations of Persephone. Atwood transforms the myth into a feminist countermyth—one of survival without transcendence—offering a narrative of voice, memory, and resistance from within the darkness rather than beyond it.

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