The Primitive Accumulation of Women's Bodies and Their Unpaid Labor in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

This thesis analyses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, connecting the novel’s treatment of women’s labor and bodies to the ascendancy of capitalism. Building on the work of scholar Silvia Federici, I argue that, in Atwood’s novel, women’s bodies are enclosed, sectioned off, and restrained to be owned by the ruling class, similar to the primitive accumulation of capital, in order to claim complete ownership over the production of female labor. Previous scholars have written about the politics, separation of labor, and importance of the female body within this novel, but few have focused on its specific roots in the feminist interpretation of capitalism and understanding of unpaid female labor. This thesis includes critical analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale–notably, the control exerted over women’s bodies and the economics of ownership in the novel. It also examines the related literature and scholarship on primitive accumulation and capitalism from a feminist perspective, explaining how women were made to be kept in the home for the success of capitalism during its ascendancy. I build on this scholarship and research to come to a better understanding of how women are treated in the novel. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood provides a fictionalized demonstration of how the accumulation of capital occurs not only with natural resources, but also with what has come to be considered the natural resource of free female labor, leaving women to be continually dispossessed of their own labor, bodies, and, ultimately, personhood.