Which writer creates the most disturbing dystopian vision of the future- Orwell or Atwood?’
‘Which writer creates the most disturbing dystopian vision of the future- Orwell or Atwood?’
We perceive the idea of dystopia as a state or place in which there is oppression, dehumanisation and a totalitarian force: in 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale this is true. However, both writers create this sense of dystopia in different ways. Orwell creates the civilisation of Oceania which governed by the looming totalitarian figure of Big Brother: whose society is under constant surveillance and undergoing a constant war; which is used to terrify the citizens and even uses the force of fear to unite them in a Two Minutes Hate. Fundamentally creating conflict between the individual and the social system: in a world where thoughts, actions and feeling are restricted.
Orwell creates a more horrifying gloomy world, that strikes the reader with a sense of realism building on events such as Stalin’s Soviet Union that were happening at the time of his writing. Whereas Atwood builds upon Orwell’s 1984; Orwell being one of her heroes he had become a direct model for her writing. Atwood found the majority of dystopias taking the viewpoint of men (including Orwell’s 1984), Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale develops this and writes from a female viewpoint.
Both fictional societies are governed by totalitarian regimes which can be likened to real past dictators such as Pol Pot, who discarded the past society of Cambodia and put forward one which was occupied by mass murder, to ‘purify’ a previous capitalist society in favour of an extreme form of peasant communism. All history of a nation before Pot’s Year Zero was deemed largely irrelevant. In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, America’s history before the time of Gilead is also deemed irrelevant and very little exists from that era, for example Offred likens the red centre to a palimpsest, as the old world has been erased and replaced. Similarly this is also found in 1984 where every part of the past is destroyed, including literature and even
We perceive the idea of dystopia as a state or place in which there is oppression, dehumanisation and a totalitarian force: in 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale this is true. However, both writers create this sense of dystopia in different ways. Orwell creates the civilisation of Oceania which governed by the looming totalitarian figure of Big Brother: whose society is under constant surveillance and undergoing a constant war; which is used to terrify the citizens and even uses the force of fear to unite them in a Two Minutes Hate. Fundamentally creating conflict between the individual and the social system: in a world where thoughts, actions and feeling are restricted.
Orwell creates a more horrifying gloomy world, that strikes the reader with a sense of realism building on events such as Stalin’s Soviet Union that were happening at the time of his writing. Whereas Atwood builds upon Orwell’s 1984; Orwell being one of her heroes he had become a direct model for her writing. Atwood found the majority of dystopias taking the viewpoint of men (including Orwell’s 1984), Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale develops this and writes from a female viewpoint.
Both fictional societies are governed by totalitarian regimes which can be likened to real past dictators such as Pol Pot, who discarded the past society of Cambodia and put forward one which was occupied by mass murder, to ‘purify’ a previous capitalist society in favour of an extreme form of peasant communism. All history of a nation before Pot’s Year Zero was deemed largely irrelevant. In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, America’s history before the time of Gilead is also deemed irrelevant and very little exists from that era, for example Offred likens the red centre to a palimpsest, as the old world has been erased and replaced. Similarly this is also found in 1984 where every part of the past is destroyed, including literature and even