This paper demonstrates the main features of utopia through an analysis of the utopia literary genre and its further development into dystopia. It also touches upon the topic of gender and gender roles, relying heavily on the first piece of utopian writing highlighting these issues, Thomas More’s Utopia. Predominantly, the paper discusses The Handmaid’s Tale – a science-fiction novel, written by Margaret Atwood. Because of the work’s timeframe, Ketterer describes it as the first real dystopia, similarly to Kumar, who characterised Thomas More’s Utopia as the first real utopia.
The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of a woman who, with the fall of the USA, finds herself under the forcefully imposed regime of the theocratic republic of Gilead. In Gilead, she becomes a handmaid named Offred and takes on the social role of a concubine. Gilead establishes, enforces and maintains its power with oppressive means. The rigid patriarchal order leads to women of Gilead being oppressed and stripped of their rights. As a theocratic republic, Gilead strongly opposes different religions and builds its legitimacy on adaptions of paragraphs from the Bible.
To understand Gilead’s society, the paper identifies and analyses the mechanisms which Gilead uses to enforce its power. The works of authors like Althusser, Foucault, Butler and Wharton are used to establish a conceptual framework for the analysis and explanation of The Handmaid’s Tale and its key elements: religious and sexual oppression.
Furthermore, the paper shows that Atwood’s dystopia is written based on actual historic events and practices such as fertility decline, banning of female labour, slave names, the issue of homosexuality, ban on abortion and contraception, kidnaping of children and surrogacy. It illustrates the similarities between the past and the novel and explains why The Handmaid’s Tale is a reflection of society. Combining theoretical approaches, citations from the work and historical facts, the paper proves that The Handmaids Tale is a product of problems that society dealt with in the past, as well as the problems that society is facing now, making the novel a critique of the modern society.
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