Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, fashion, uniforms,

Fashion, often overlooked in literary analysis, can offer a powerful optic that deepensour understanding of characters and their words. While Chaucer’s The CanterburyTales reflects a time when fashion provided a channel for self-representation andself-construction, The Handmaid’s Tale shows how clothes can be used to erase identityand individual expression. This paper explores how fashion can be manipulated byrepressive regimes and can be employed to enforce conformity and control. The roleof fashion in literature is frequently neglected in traditional literary analysis. However,depictions of clothing, styled bodies, material culture, and changing fashions areintegral to the evolution of fiction. With the development of fashion studies, literarycritics have been able to “argue for the consideration of clothing and its implicationsas a generative critical lens, inviting new and exciting venues of investigation” (Kuhnand Carlson 2007, 2). And because style and fashion can apply equally to linguisticexpression and text, studying fashion, garments and accessories can enrich and deepenthe literary analysis of characters’ psychological state, gender identification, race andethnicity markers, social and political status, and occupation.

This paper explores the symbolic and political significance of clothing in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. It argues that while Chaucer presents fashion as a means of self-expression and social signalling, Atwood depicts clothing as a tool of repression within the theocratic regime of Gilead. Through close analysis of garments such as the Wife of Bath’s red stockings and the Handmaids’ red robes, the study demonstrates how dress functions either to construct individuality or to erase identity. Drawing on concepts such as intertextuality, palimpsest, and political aesthetics, the paper highlights how Atwood reworks medieval models of femininity, especially figures like Griselda, to critique contemporary patriarchal systems. Ultimately, the essay shows that clothing in both texts operates as a powerful narrative device that reveals structures of power, gender roles, and the potential for subtle resistance.