By Rodamanthi Sofikitou, @greek_studyholic
In this articleI am going to show how the Aunts in “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood relate to Foucault’s concept of discipline. In particular, this article explores the relationship between Aunts and Foucault’s notion of power about Panopticon, where people behave as if they are always under surveillance, even when they are not sure someone is watching.
One of the most controversial and influential novels in the last decades is “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which is written by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and adapted into Tv series, a film, an opera and a stage play. The novel explores a plethora of cultural issues, such as feminism, consumerism, environmental degradation, and religion.
The central theme of the book, which is set up in a dystopian society named Gilead, which means “hill of testimony” or “mount of witness”, is military dictatorship by a fundamentalist Christian group, as they take control by killing the entire government and conquer many cities in America. On the one hand, women are stripped of their rights and forced into reproductive servitude, as they divided hierarchically and became Commander’s wives, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts and “unwomen”, depending on their ability of giving birth, whereas on the other hand, men became Commanders, Eyes and Soldiers. In other words Margaret Atwood aims to shed light on men’s power, surveillance and domination in a totalitarian regime: handmaids only exist to produce children for commanders with the help of the Aunts, and being constantly watched by the Eyes, soldier-men who bare armors and discipline through violence and terror, both literally and metaphorically to women who bear children.
The protagonist Offred/June occupies the role of a Handmaid, an enslaved surrogate, who is valued only for her anatomy and her ability to have children. Her narrative is like a private journal, as the readers learn about her daily life. As the story progresses, subtle and transgressive shifts are happening in her life, which make her want to undermine the regime’s control, leading to a tension-filled collapse of her reality.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunts are one of the most important groups in the society of Gilead. Basically, they are women who help the government to control other women, especially the Handmaids. Even though Handmaids do not have rights in education, Aunts help them learn their new role, the laws and the responsibilities they have in the “Red Center”, before they work as Handmaids in Commander’s houses. According to Joshna Biju and Liss Marie Das (Biju and Das 53), they brutally exercise their power over other females, as they are responsible in training and inculcation of Handmaids. They remind them all the time how inadequate society was in the past and how sufficient it is now. Characters like the Aunts, the enforcers of patriarchal law, who even though they have limited power similar to men, provide domination through physical and psychological force and violence, whereas their power isn’t real, but fragile: they are in fact subordinate to male authorities.
The Aunts use many methods that align with Michel Foucault’s ideas about discipline and power. In his book “Discipline and Punish”, it states that power focuses directly on individual people and their bodies. Through small, everyday controls, the so-called “microphysics of power” shape people’s thoughts and acts. According to Foucault, “the major effect of the Panopticon [...] is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”. Foucault also believes that power exists everywhere, even though sometimes it is “omnipresent”, not because it controls everything, but because it comes from many different places at the same time. In other words, modern power does not only use physical violence. Instead, it works through constant supervision, rules, and the pressure to behave “correctly”. Even if they are not watched constantly, people feel as if they were, which can keep them docile.
This Foucauldian idea also applies in Handmaid’s Tale, because Handmaid’s are always being watched by the Aunts and the Eyes, so they discipline themselves. Adding to that, in the Republic of Gilead there are many buildings that are similar to the “Panopticon tower”, for example enormous armed towers, huge walls in the borders and heavily armed guards who guarded them. Oppressed women are constantly thinking that they are under male gaze, like Atwood’s Handmaids do, frightened by the Aunts and the Eyes, as Sandra Lee Bartky suggests: “A panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgement”.
This is exactly how Aunts control the Handmaids. They do not need to punish them all the time. Instead, they create an environment where the women feel they are always being observed. Because of this, the Handmaids begin to discipline themselves. They act carefully, follow the rules, and try not to draw attention, even when no Aunt is directly watching them.
Atwood presents a system in which less-oppressed women supervised more-oppressed women. In her book, she illustrates how oppression operates within the system, even affecting those who appear to have authority, such as the Aunts. This dynamic reflects Foucault’s theory of power, as it is analyzed in this essay, where surveillance and control are internalized, and even those who enforce the rules remain subject to the oppressive system that they have created. Surveillance in Gilead is not only physical, but also mental. In essence, it is exactly what Michel Foucault imagined, when he was referring to “Panopticon”.