This paper investigates the linguistic manipulation of political myth in Margaret
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. More specifically, this paper discusses the myth of
the good-of-the nation, which is linguistically manipulated verbally and nonverbally
throughout the novel. Atwood's novel is one of the distinguished dystopian narratives
in the twentieth century. This type of fiction has always been a reflection of the
irrationalities committed against people by those in power. Drawing on two
approaches of political discourse analysis (Chilton's 2004; Wodak's 2009), this paper
tries to answer one research question: How are political discourse strategies
employed linguistically to propagate the good-of-the-nation myth? By making a
connection between the data extracted from the selected novel and the way present
regimes use language, this paper aims to explore the extent to which the good-of-thenation
myth is linguistically manipulated to dominate the public. As such, this paper
attempts to provide the public with some sort of linguistic knowledge so as for them to
be aware of the manipulative use of language in shaping and/or misshaping public
attitudes. Lexical choices, didactic indoctrination, religionisation and dehumanisation
are among the strategies used in the analysis of the selected data. There are two main
findings in this paper. First, different linguistic levels of analysis are incorporated to
propagate the discourse of political myth in the selected novel: the lexical, the
pragmatic, the grammatical and the morphological. Second, political myths are
linguistically manipulated to normalise their initiators' erroneous practices and
legitimise their irrationalities.