A question of names

2006-08-28T15:15:05+00:00

I am in the midst of writing a response/commentary to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia based on Fundamentalism’s grab for reproductive control of women. And I continuously run into one stylistic question: what do I call the protagonist?

So far, I am using, well, “the protagonist,” but it is cumbersome. The issue is that her ‘name’ in the novel, “Offred,” is not her name. It’s a possessive title indicating she is the property of Fred (and which applies to her only so long as she is assigned to him.) By using this name, I feel I would be somehow complicit, legitimizing the protagonist’s reproductive slavery. (Yes, I know she’s fictional, but I am an English major. Words have power and I have ethical qualms about my treatment of fictional characters.)

She has a name, this fictional woman, but it is never stated. A good guess is possible from a close reading, but it’s hardly clear communication to use the possible answer to a riddle as a fact. So, I struggle on with “the protagonist,” using “Offred” only in scare-quotes, and suspecting that this quandary was precisely Atwood’s intention.

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A question of names