Author: Sukriti Deswal

Abstract: This paper analyses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019) to explore how authoritarian regimes weaponise identity through linguistic control, ritualised violence, surveillance, and reproductive coercion. Drawing on feminist theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, trauma studies, and postcolonial critiques, it demonstrates how Gilead reduces women to vessels of demographic utility while erasing personal histories and autonomy. Atwood’s protagonists— Offred, Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy—expose the cracks within this apparatus, showing how memory, testimony, and storytelling function as forms of survival and resistance. The paper argues that identity under Gilead is not destroyed but reshaped through fracture, silence, and narrative reclamation, affirming the subversive power of language against systemic erasure.

Keywords: The Handmaid’s Tale; The Testaments; Identity; Feminist Theory; Biopolitics; Surveillance; Resistance

Article Info: Received: 08 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 05 Apr 2026; Accepted: 10 Apr 2026; Available online: 13 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.67