Margaret Atwood’s The handmaid's tale and The heart goes last. A comparative study on two dystopian cities
Abstract
The essay deals with two Margaret Atwood’s novels that depict two cities/societies with an apparent clockwork mechanism that makes them safe, clean, crimeless and disciplined. The novels, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Heart Goes Last (2015), are set in the fictional cities of Gilead and Consilience, situated in North America. Both societies share some similarities, and they apply the principles of the prison studied by Michel Foucault in his essay Discipline and Punish, especially the control over people’s life and bodies to make them “docile” and useful, the isolation from the outside world, and punishment (torture and even executions) to keep people subjugated. The apparent perfection of Gilead and Consilience hides a dystopia that, through this analysis, seems to be, according to the author, a possible future for our cities, and an extreme measure that raises doubts and thoughts on how such a management of society is worse than the current one.
Downloads
References
Atwood, Margaret. 2015. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage Books.
Atwood, Margaret. 2015. The Heart Goes Last. London:Bloomsbury.
Baccolini, Raffaella e Tom Moylan, eds. 2003. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the DystopianImagination. London: Routledge.
Bukatman, Scott. 1993. Terminal Identity, the Virtual Subject in Post Modern Science Fiction.Durham:Duke University Press.
Crispin, Jessa. 2017. “The Handmaid's Tale is just like Trump's America? Not So Fast”. TheGuardian, May 2, 2017.
Foucault, Michel. 1976. Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage Books.
Fyte, Nicholas. 2004. “Zero Tolerance, Maximum Surveillance? Deviance, Difference andCrime Control in the Late Modern City.” In The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possi-bilities, edited by Loretta Lees, 40-54. London: Sage.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or: The Culture Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: DukeUniversity Press.
Lyman, Tower Sargent. 1994. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5,no.1.: 1-37.
Lyman, Tower Sargent. 2003. “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Costs ofEutopia.” In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, edited by Raf-faella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, 225-232.London: Routledge.
Lyon, David. 2001. Surveillance Society, Monitoring Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Open Universi-ty Press.
Neary, Lynn. 2015. “Now Is Not the Time for Realistic Fiction, Says Margaret Atwood”. NPR,30 (September). http://www.npr.org/2015/09/30/444775853/now-is-not-the-time-for-re-alistic-fiction-says-margaret-atwood.
Prakash, Gyan. 2014. Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern City. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.
Segal, Howard P. 2005. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse Uni-versity Press.
Seltzer, Mark. 2014. Bodies and Machines. London: Routledge.Sennet, Richard. 1992. The Conscience of the Eye: the Design and Social Life of Cities. New York:W.W. Norton & Co.
Copyright (c) 2017 Barbara Miceli
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Licenza Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
