Feminist Utopian Fiction

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" and Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" conform to Sally Miller Gearheart's statements on feminist utopia in literature. Through an analysis of both texts, it looks at the ideas of the "woman's role" , motherhood and men as controllers of the "word" and the "world". It also compares and contrasts the future societies of Gilead and Mattapoiset and asks whether either live up to the idea of a feminist utopia.

From the Paper:

"It is significant too that present conditions in The Handmaid's Tale are most strongly criticized by male figures. The third of Miller-Gearhart's conditions for feminist utopian fiction is that it should "see men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills", but this does not see, to The Handmaid's Tale, where it is the ills of Gilead, the present of the novel, rather than our present, which are caused by men. The aunts try to convince the Handmaid's that things were much worse before, showing pornographic movies and telling stories of battered and murdered women, but these scenario's are not borne out by Offred's own memory of that time, and the stories appear to be more an instrument of propaganda rather than a reflection of the truth."

More papers on Feminist Utopian Fiction:

• Analytical Essay # 6037 : "Women on the Edge of Time"
• Comparison Essay # 48498 : "Charlotte Perkins Gilman"
• Analytical Essay # 144325 : "Control in Dystopic Fiction"

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