The Perfect World Soon to Come

Dystopian fiction is that which suggests a utopia that does not work, and the underlying failure may be in economic and social terms and often includes a evaluate of gender roles in society in terms of both performance and power. A recent example is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

The novel is narrated by its protagonist, a young woman cognize as Offred who has been kidnapped by her government and separated from her husband and child. She is obligate into slavery as a Handmaid, or surrogate mother, for a powerful couple that cannot have children of their own. This story is set in a future where such arrangements have become commonplace. Offred encounters not only the enormity of the demand placed on her to be a surrogate mother but a chip of other indignities as her society imposes a code upon her, forcing her to mark and behave in a certain way in order not to be punished. Atwood develops here a imaging of the place of women in society and uses an extreme situation to acknowledge on the secondary position women occupy in horse opera society today. The feminist issues this raises have ben addressed by a number of writers and commentators in recent years, and some(prenominal) would not stripping the nightmare vision offered by Atwood to be that different from the frankness of today or that extreme as an extrapolation from the present into the future.

Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material Girls. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

The dystopia envisioned by Atwood is an example of the biological determinism referred to by Bem:

Atwood extends into the future concerns about the temper of the family, the danger of pollution, the fear of women that the gains they have mad will be taken away, and other concerns in a way that highlights these issues for our own condemnation. The time frame of the book is important in this regard, for the plurality of this novel are people who would remember our own age. Atwood shows that it exponent not take that much of a shift in thinking to tear away much of what we see as social progress and replace it with antiquated concepts still reckon by many.

We have seen in recent years a resurgence of a politics of false nostalgia, nostalgia for a time in the past that never strongly existed but that many have convinced themselves was real and better than what we face now. possibly the illusion they have, the world they have in their minds, is better, but the real world of the 1950s, or of the Victorian Age, was quite different from that illusion. In this novel, a future regime has created its own vision of what was outstrip in the past along with an added dose of authoritarianism. Atwood takes an ironic judgement of much of this--her fearsome overlords are not always that fearsome, as when one wants nothing more than to play a impale of Scrabble--and inherent in her novel is a satiric understand at what the "family values" of conservatives might really mean if obligate on the populace.

Late Victorian, the house is, a family house, built for a large rich family. . . A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneeling only (Atwood 11).

Atwood looks to the sort of postfeminist backlash in society that is exposit by Suzanna Danuta Walters:

Offred's description of the place where she lives evokes the sense of the past as something that has come back into the present that infuses thi
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