Consciousness of Identity and Existence in William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

In the novels Sophie's Choice and The Handmaid's Tale, William Styron and Margaret Atwood depict female protagonists as the victimized suffers of patriarchal subjugative ideology and their chronic sexual harrassment which problemitizes the identity and existence of females under the construction of phallocentric practice of patriarchy. Despite the female protagonists' continuous struggle for the emancipatory identity and existence along with the transgression in different localities because of their consciousness about their situation, Sophie's and Offred's traumatic experience in patriarchal autonomy with subversive pictorioration and sexual deterioration harsen the existence and identity of females.