Context of dystopia

• • Patriarchal, totalitarian rule
  • An imagined near-future setting
  • Oppression, social control and loss of identity or individuality
  • Surveillance and mistrust
  • The use of censorship, propaganda and indoctrination
  • Desensitisation to violence
• Allegories - Comment on and criticise contemporary society or situations to serve as a warning about how things will develop if nothing changes
• 1984 - Orwell drew upon two other notable examples of dystopian fiction, which were written between the World Wars: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin & Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 1984 - Novel envisions a future in which society is oppressed and ruled absolutely by a totalitarian, patriarchal entity. It functions as a warning against the dangers of allowing totalitarian governments to seize control and go unchecked
• 1984 - The reduction and streamlining of language via Newspeak is a way of narrowing range of thought, further reducing the likelihood of original ideas, questions and potential rebellion
• Language is linked with self-expression and identity.
• 1984 - Living in fear - Fear of external enemies via the continuous state of supposed war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Fear of the Thought Police and of doing or thinking anything that might result in imprisonment, torture or vaporisation
• 1984 - The Party is an all-powerful force of oppression and control, destroying individual identity and ensuring the population live in poverty, exhaustion and misery
• Dystopian fiction often explores the effects of oppressive societies on the individual mind
• 1984 - Winston’s trouble retrieving and trusting his memories, and his struggles to determine reality from imagination, emphasise how the oppressive regime have influenced not only its people’s physical surroundings but also their mental states
• 1984 - Children in this society are indoctrinated from birth - links to Huxley’s Brave New World - childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined castes based on intelligence & labour.
• 1984 - The idea of betrayal is interwoven throughout the narrative, making it an intrinsic part of the world of Oceania
• 1984 - Orwell is suggesting that the power of totalitarianism cannot be overthrown once established, and that democracy is ultimately not bulletproof
• THT - set in a futuristic USA at the beginning of the 21st century. It functions as a warning based on Atwood’s concerns about the world around her at the time of writing (in the 1980s)
• THT - The meanings of words are changed to their opposites - Atwood uses the word “Aunts”, which has reassuring and comforting connotations, and subverts it, using the word to label people in her world who are key instruments of oppression
• THT - Those who founded Gilead did so through the idealistic but misguided expectation that their new regime would improve human life and the future of the humanity - it failed to factor in the expectations, principles and behaviours of real people
• THT - Atwood does not imagine futuristic and far-fetched technology. Instead she alludes to the possibility of extreme social control using technology current to the 1980s
• The perversion of technology and its uses is another typical feature of dystopian literature
• THT - In many ways, it is the lack of technology that is another way of the regime removing power from people, via the lack of access to information
• THT - Gileadean ideology seems to be more of a reaction against technological progress rather than an example of it
• THT - The narrative perspective of the novel is different from traditional dystopian literature, as the protagonist is relegated to the margins of society and confined to domestic spaces
• THT - Offred does not know what is happening beyond her immediate surroundings, and has to rely on snatched bits of information
• THT - Due to Offred’s ignorance, the reader only learns of Gilead’s political philosophy and its mechanisms via the male voice in the Historical Notes
• THT - could be considered a form of “feminine dystopia”, as the choice of a female narrator and the story being told through a narrow female lens subverts the traditional masculine dystopian genre