Deauthorizing Anthropologies and “Authenticating” Landscapes in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Diamela Eltit’s El cuarto mundo

Abstract

Margaret Atwood and Diamela Eltit respond with defiance to the logic often present in the discourse of the discovery and conquest of the Americas as set forth by Anne McClintock. As such, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Eltit’s El cuarto mundo [The Fourth World] (1988) function to return the gaze of the discoverer/conquistador by narrating a new version of discovery/conquest from the point of view of female, indigenous and marginalized groups...Their female protagonists...narrate forgotten human experiences, thus composing a new “history of the future” for the New World at the same time that they project the consequences of “foundational fictions” in which bodies, especially female bodies, become metaphorical and actual sites, or historical landscapes, for the construction of national projects.