Resistance within the system: Offred’s agency in The Handmaid’s Tale and its adaptations

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the extent to which Offred, the narrator of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is portrayed as a passive victim or a subtle rebel across the novel and its 1990 film and 2017 television adaptations. The introduction provides a background on the novel, an overview of the existing scholarly debate, and the definitions of the central terms of agency, resistance, dystopia, and adaptation. The literature review surveys critical perspectives on Offred's agency, adapting the novel for screen, as well as resistance and language in the text. The empirical study examines four key moments in the novel that demonstrate Offred's subtle resistance, analyses how the two adaptations interpret her character differently, and investigates the role of language and storytelling as tools of feminist defiance. The conclusion summarises the findings of the thesis.