LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:12 December 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Dystopic Vision of Margaret Atwood in
The Handmaid’s Tale

C. Nandhini Devi, Ph.D. Scholar
Dr. Sumathy K. Swamy


Abstract

Atwood has written fiction about the future. Starting with The Handmaid’s Tale, she has written five novels which come under that category. They are, apart from the aforementioned novel, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Maddaddam and The Heart Goes Last. She, as most of the readers of Canadian literature know, is an ardent lover of nature, which maybe because she has come from a family which was living “in and out of the bushes”. (Cooke 22) Her father was a zoologist, mother a former dietician and nutritionist, and her brother is a neurophysiologist. Her fiction comes with harsh tone, instructing society to move onto safer sides in order to avoid devastating effects in the future. “Environmental awareness became an explicit theme in Atwood’s fiction during the late 1980s”. (Cooke 291) Starting from this period, she has produced a lot of works that are environment-conscious. These could be attributed to her visit to many places including Temagami in Toronto, where she came across acid-rain lakes and found out about the disappearance of black flies.

In the twentieth century, writers like George Orwell and Anthony Burgess were pushed by the social and political scenes of the time which made them bring out their fears and write about them. George Orwell’s 1984 is one such fiction where he satirizes such a muddled society. “Being deprived of free will and choice the individual has to obey and to live in this devastating environment. Dystopian literature refers mostly to the decadence of people reflected in acts of violence, sexual immorality and use of drugs. The protagonists indulge themselves in sin living only in the present”. (Dima- Laza 42) Many novels of Margaret Atwood including The Heart Goes Last, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and many other novels of various writers have a dystopian society as their settings. In this paper we shall see some of the attributes of the Dystopian vision of Margaret Atwood.

Keywords: Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, Dystopian literature, decadence, violence, futuristic society

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

C. Nandhini Devi, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of English
PSGR Krishnammal College for Women
Coimbatore - 641014
Tamilnadu
India
nandhinidevi.cp@gmail.com

Dr. Sumathy K. Swamy
Associate Professor
Department of English
PSGR Krishnammal College for Women
Coimbatore – 641014
Tamilnadu
India
sumathykswamy45@gmail.com
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