The Metonymy about Power in The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

As a speculative fiction, the book the Handmaid’s Tale written by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shows us a dystopian world where women are under the totalitarian rule by men, and not only women, men are also constrained by the totalitarianism in Gilead. Based on this, by applying the research method of textual analysis, the this paper mainly discusses the metonymies about power reflected in the Handmaid’s Tale, which are manifested in the dress color in Gilead, the stratification of the upper class and the naming of Handmaids in this book. Furthermore, this paper tries to unearth the underlying cause of the metonymies used in the Handmaid’s tale through specific analyses of the metonymies. And based on the result of the analyses, it indicates that to some extent, metonymy here can be a way to achieve power oppression.