The Power to Become Powerless: Corrective Institutions of Patriarchy in the Handmaid’s Tale (2017) and the God of Small Things.

One text is an acclaimed television series of speculative fiction, focusing upon a dystopic future of America and televised in 2017. Another text is a celebrated postmodernist novel, documenting the trials of mid-century India and published in 1987. European vs Indian, historical against futuristic, with twenty years between the two. However, both The Handmaid’s Tale (2017) and The God of Small Things share commonalities; in being written by a highly acclaimed female author with The Handmaid’s Tale first being written as a novel by Margaret Atwood, and The God of Small Things being written by Arundhati Roy; in their postmodernist usage of language to explore subjective realities; and in their searing criticism of institutions that create dynamics of unequal social relations and oppression in our culture. More particularly, the main subject of this essay, the Handmaid’s Tale and the God of Small Things explores how corrective institutions enforce restrictions upon female sexuality, motherhood, and female agency in the wider cultural and societal spectrum. More particularly, the subject of the essay will discuss how The Handmaid’s Tale and The God of Small Things depicts the intersection of being both victim and perpetrator for women in these corrective institutions.

Before we can understand the role of institutions in the reproduction and reinforcement of misogyny, a definition and discussion of institutions in the field of cultural studies is vital to the wider debate. In Tim O’Sullivan’s Key Terms for Communications and Cultural Studies, O’Sullivan outlines institutions as ‘regulatory and organizing structures of any society, which constrain and control individuals and individuality’ (O’Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 152). Berger expanded on the concept of institutions, documenting the construction of institutions as the result of human socialization and habitualization, noting that ‘society is a human product; society is an objective reality; man is a social product.’ (Berger and Luckman, 2008) Focused as a major source of social codes and rules, O’Sullivan goes on explain how multiple institutions intersect in regulating and responding to social issues at three principal levels: economic, political and cultural (O’Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 153). The most prominent examples of institutions that regulate the social realities within the two texts is the caste system of The God of Small Things and the social system of Gilead (one major component being the Handmaid’s model) of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017).

Where the caste system depicted in The God of Small Things is a historical and present reality and the social system of Gilead is fictional, both are examples in how these institutions create and regulate the roles and expected behaviours that particularly effect women. In the book The God of Small Things, Roy makes reference to the Love Laws, ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much’. More particularly, these Love Laws act as another term for the caste system of India; a system of classes (Brahmins, Kshatryas, Vaishyas, Shudras and Untouchables) starting in Hinduism and consistently present within the novel — the Ipe family belonging to the Brahmin caste while Velutha, an Untouchable, begins an inter-caste relationship with Ammu (a member of the Ipe family, mother to the two protagonists and recent divorcee). While in The Handmaid’s Tale , the text focuses on the system of Gilead, where individuals are placed into the model of Handmaids, Commanders, Wives, Aunts, Angels and Unwomen — June Osborne (also addressed as Offred) being positioned in the TV series and novel as the Handmaid to the Waterford household.

How these characters are positioned in these institutions, as mothers and as properties to men, shows in the very names the two main characters are addressed; June is addressed as Offed — of Fred , where the institution positions and addresses her directly as property to Frederick Waterford and addressing her role as a fertile woman (a Handmaid); Ammu (a Sanskrit form for ‘mother’) is never given any other name by other characters in the text, placing her indirectly in the text and in institutions as a mother going against the prescribed behaviours of motherhood and wifehood such as divorcing her husband and raising her children on her own, a substantial concept of dishonour that Ammu is aware of. More particularly, we can examine how individuals (and society by default) treat Chacko’s divorce (Ammu’s brother) and Ammu’s divorce; where Chacko (who his wife, Margaret, divorced due to Chacko’s lazy behaviour) is treated with sympathy, Ammu (who divorced her husband due to his alcoholism and abuse) The addressing of the characters and their positioning in the institutions is similar to Althusser’s theory of ‘hailing’ (known also as addressing or more formally as interpellation) subjects through language in relation to addressors i.e indirectly through institutions (O’Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 155), the book media and Society used the example a popular nursery rhyme to see how a song hails boys and girls to prescribed behaviours of what ‘real girls’ and ‘real boys’ are meant to act (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2012, p. 185).

The main conflict of the two texts is how the two main characters — Ammu from The God of Small Things and June from The Handmaid’s Tale — come into conflict with these institutions. June Osborne’s story in the TV series (and the Atwood novel), focuses on her ability to mentally survive the oppressive government of Gilead where women’s places in society are measured in their abilities to provide children and sex (Handmaid’s), emotional companionship (Wives) or servitude (Marthas) for men (Screenprism, 2018). Ammu’s story is the crux of the novel as told through the perspectives of her children, how her status as a divorcee and single mother brings chaos to the Ipe family and how Ammu rebels against patriarchal corrective institutions through being a good single mother and falling in love with a man below her caste, going against the caste system that ruled your career and worth and the people you could love and marry. But attention must also be paid to not only how individuals resist against institutions, but how institutions act as a paradox of agency and disempowerment. This requires an understanding to the power dynamics of hegemony and, more precisely, what power means within the field of cultural studies.

Hegemonies, as simply defined by Arthur Asa Berger in Media and Society: A Critical Perspective , are the processes to which mass consciousness is shaped by dominant classes, as first described in Marxism and Literature (Berger, 2012). First addressed by the Marxist politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, a cultural hegemony acts as a paradox of coercion and consent; hegemonies, as further analysed by Daldal, requires the consent of the subjugated to be ruled by the dominating, to ‘incorporate the will of each single individual into the collective will turning their necessary consent and collaboration from “coercion” to “freedom”’ (Daldal, 2014, p. 156). As succinctly written by O’Sullivan, ‘our active participation in understanding ourselves, our social relations and the world at large results in our complicity in our own subordination.’ (O’Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 152). This concept of hegemonies, where individuals are responsible for consenting to their oppression by corrective institutions of class and race and gender, in texts concerning resistance against corrective institutions may appear counterintuitive and even questionably victim-blaming; the Handmaids, regulated to ‘walking wombs’ to provide children for the ruling class of Gilead through government-mandated rape, are forced into the roles by Aunts through threat of legally sanctioned violence and death, with June resisting her role as Offred and trying to escape Gilead in Season 2; the caste system in The God of Small Things is legally and socially reinforced through the legal system, this conflict against the caste system indirectly results in the brutal and fatal attack of Veluthu, the indirect death of Sophie Mol, Ammu’s separation from her child Estha and Ammu’s disownment by Chacko (after Baby Kochamma discovers Ammu stopped the police from pressing charges of rape against Veluthu and tried to recover his body) and indirect death.

However, how to expand on the understanding of cultural hegemonies, it should be noted that the concept of hegemonies in its paradoxical usage of coercion and consent still the subject of debate within cultural studies; Maglaras writing with regards to Jackson’s statement of cultural hegemony, where ‘consent, for Gramsci, involves a complex mental state, a ‘contradictory consciousness’ mixing approbation and apathy, resistance and resignation’ (Maglaras, 2013. p. 5). With regards to the corrective institutions of patriarchy, this can place women into the intersectional positions of both resisting these institutions while also upholding it. These positions of contradictory consciousness, which have been detailed upon in intersectional feminist theory, are thoroughly criticised through the characters of Baby Kochamma from The God of Small Things and Serena-Joy Waterford from The Handmaid’s Tale alongside their relationships of subjugation with Ammu and June Osborne.

In a famous writing of feminist and writer Audre Lord, Lord written in 1997 a proto-intersectional feminist text expressing the intersections of race, sexual identity and gender. As famously quoted, ‘What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression, her own oppressed status, that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?’ (Lord, 1997, p. 284). This attitude is viscerally displayed through the characterisations of Baby Kochamma and Serena-Joy, who are placed into positions of powerlessness by patriarchal institutions and yet given power over other women — and even other men — through other corrective institutions (such as class and race). Baby Kochamma is Ammu’s paternal aunt who, after unsuccessfully trying to romantically pursue a priest and is relegated to the older unmarried woman, is the individual who outs Ammu and Veluthu’s relationship and the outfall that results. Serena-Joy Waterford is the Wife (married before the rise of Gilead) to Commander Waterford who openly allows for June’s sexual abuse, plans to separate the child who June becomes pregnant with and is eventually revealed to be the architect of Gilead (and therefore, responsible for the dismantling of women’s and LGBT rights in America).

Throughout both texts, it’s shown that even through the women are powerless — Baby Kochamma being considered unmarriageable after her attempts to marry a priest, Serena-Joy forced to concede as the meek and demure wife while her husband leads — they are shown to extort whatever power they have over women. More particularly, we see how these women consent to the hegemony in a different way from June and Ammu; where Ammu conducts her relationship in secret and June only complies with her place as a Handmaid out of fear of retaliation, Baby Kochamma and Serena-Joy consent to these institutions because of the standing they have over others. This a major aspect to the antithesis of intersectionality, known as white feminism; a term, as Desmond-Harris explains, where the the fight of women’s rights is based upon fighting only for middle-class, straight and white women while consenting to institutions that oppress others (such as queer people, people of colour and poor people) in order to still have worth over someone (Desmond-Harris, 2017). Even through these systems create powerlessness over Serena-Joy and Baby Kochamma, they are still willing to uphold the system as to get something positive from the system, a major aspect of hegemonies where ‘by forcing people against their conscious will or better judgement to concede power to the already-powerful, but that it describes a situation on whereby our consent is actively sought for those ways of making sense of the world which ‘happen’ to fit in with the interests of the hegemonic alliance of classes’ (O’Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 133).

One example of intersectionality is the God of Small Things, with how Chacko and Veluthu are treated differently in their ‘crimes’. Where Chacko is guilty for sexually assaulting lower-caste women who work in the pickle factory Chacko owns, Mammachi (and by extension, Hindu society) excuses Chacko’s actions as ‘men’s needs’ in Chapter 8. But where Veluthu is falsely accused is raping Ammu (Baby Kochamma filing it as rape to protect scandal from occurring), Veluthu is tracked down by the police and brutally murdered in what’s also described as ‘men’s needs’ in chapter 18. This is a prime example of ‘systems of oppression that work together and mutually reinforce one another’, which intersectional feminism is based around criticizing (Allen, 2016).

Coming to conclusion, we can understand ideologies as institutions made material (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2012, p. 182) and in doing so, we can understand as instututions that constantly create realities for our society and those that inhabit these societies. Where people such as June and Ammu resist against unfair hegemonies of power and control, institutions and hegemonies should also be understood in how even those made powerless in these institutions (such as Serena-Joy and Baby Kochamma) can play the roles as reinforcers and oppressors through different levels and lenses of class, race and sexual identity. Which leaves the more important question to what role, you, the reader plays: the one who resists or the one who obeys (and perhaps even both)?

References

Allen, A. (2016). Feminist Perspectives on Power. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy. San Francisco: Stanford University. Berger, A. (2012). Media and Society: A Critical Perspective (3rd ed., pp. 9–23). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (2008). Society as a Human Product. The Social Construction Of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology Of Knowledge . Retrieved from http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/berger_luckman.php

Desmond-Harris, J. (2017). To understand the Women’s March on Washington, you need to understand intersectional feminism. Vox . Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/1/17/14267766/womens-march-on-washington-ina uguration-trump-feminism-intersectionaltiy-race-class

Lord, A. (1997). The Uses of Anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly , 25 (1/2), 278–285. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005441?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Maglaras, V. (2013). Consent and Submission: Aspects of Gramsci’s Theory of the Political and Civil Society. SAGE Open, 3( 1), 1–8. doi: 10.1177/2158244012472347

O’Shaughnessy, M., & Stadler, J. (2012). Media and society (5th ed., pp. 180–191). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., & Fiske, J. (1994). Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies (2nd ed., pp. 139–155). London: Routledge.

ScreenPrism. (2018). The Handmaid’s Tale is About the Present [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R45eiu8SXko