Bellamy and Atwood: comparative literary analysis

Science fiction is a term that includes a wide array of speculative fiction and not just, as some people believe, space ships and the like. Much science fiction entails social criticism as well, and two examples are Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. These novels were written more than a century apart and yet each take a similar approach by speculating about the society of the future in order to comment upon the failures of the respective author's contemporary society. Some of the futures seen by writers are intended to be utopias, examples of the perfect society, or of what the writer believes a perfect society to be. Other writers produce a vision of a dystopia, or a future no one really wants to see. Looking Backward is a utopian vision, while The Handmaid's Tale depicts a dystopian vision of the future.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was written in 1887 during the period of American industrialization, at a time when the cities were becoming more crowded, labor conditions were deteriorating, populations were shifting from rural to urban areas, crime was increasing, and other ills were being visited on society. The story tells of a man who, like Rip Van winkle, falls asleep and wakes years later to find himself in a new world, and he then looks back to his own era to see how forces in his time produced the world he finds himself in more than a century later -- indeed, in our own time, the year 20000. The central character is Julian West, a young man from Boston who sleeps for 113 years. The world he experiences can be considered Bellamy's utopian ideal.

The world Bellamy envisioned for us is very different from the world we have actually created, though some of the trends he saw did bear fruit, some for good and some for ill. The world of the future is described for the young man by Dr. Leete, his host. The society Dr. Leete describes is based on a central tenet -- the equitable distribution of wealth -- which clearly we have never achieved. Each worker gives his labor for 25 years in the Industrial Army, and for this he or she receives an equal share of the nation's production every year of his or her life. Each person gives his or her service to society, and this gives them a return in the form of full support for life. Based on this central tenet, Bellamy creates a vision of a society that has been totally transformed. Every citizen is entitled to participate in universal higher education; there is no need for a military; there is no need for laws given that private property has been eliminated; and so on.

At the end of the novel, West returns to the Boston of his own time and suddenly realizes just how terrible conditions and circumstances are in that time period. He finds that world beset by commercialism, militarism, and the tyranny of social classes. The industrial Revolution started in Great Britain and spread to continental Europe and North America and created a dynamic economic system. Accompanying this change in the West was a rise in global inequality, allowing the industrialized regions to increase their wealth and power as opposed to the non-industrialized regions which lost power. Rapid industrialization in America into the 1850s brought about a demand for workers, and European immigrants were attracted by the thousands to these jobs. Many immigrants were unskilled, and they caused serious disruptions of economic patterns wherever they appeared. In New England their arrival speeded the disintegration of the system of hiring young farm women. As new machinery was developed, machinery that ran faster, the number of skilled workers needed to run the machines was reduced. Immigrants replaced women as workers in large numbers. By 1860, more than half the workers in New England mills were Irish immigrants. This is the world from which Julian West emerges, a world in which the cities were becoming more crowded with low-paid workers forced to toil their whole lives and never able to share in the profits they generated to any significant degree.

The social structure Bellamy creates is much like the ideal Communist collective -- not the kind of society Communists actually created but the kind they offered as a theoretical ideal. These would also be societies that were collectives, with a lack of commercialism, with attempts to equalize pay, and with certain types of incentive for the workers. Of course, Bellamy had a religious basis for his society that Socialism and Communism do not, for Bellamy saw his future society as a reflection of God on Earth, while he saw his own time as one which had abandoned many of these principles. Aspects of Bellamy's ideal are to be envied, but the system as a whole seems to lack the kind of incentives built into a capitalist oriented society.

Margaret Atwood's story is set in a future where such arrangements have become routine. Atwood extends into the future concerns about the nature of the family, the danger of pollution, and other concerns in a way that highlights these issues for our own time. The time frame of the book is important in this regard, for the people of this novel are people who would remember our own age. The symbolism of the novel derives in part from biblical references and centers on the handmaids' colonies where the unwomen live, on the unified names of the handmaids, and on the ambiguous view taken of the future and the changes in position for women. As the protagonist states, "We yearned for the future" (Atwood 3), much as we may do today, though Atwood points out that we might not like it when we get there.

The unwomen symbolize the female before becoming a woman, meaning before being assigned to her "proper" social role. These women will be surrogate mothers, and they symbolize freedom from a certain tedious work even as they symbolize being chained to their biological role. The place of women in the society of Gilead is a reversal of the advances made for women in our own time and a revival of attitudes Atwood sees as remaining dear to a large segment of the population. In this vision, the revival of family values so touted by a conservative segment in American society today has come to pass in a way that highlights control, subordination, and the isolation of women and their biological functions into a ghetto that is society-wide and that is enforced most brutally. Also revived is the power of class conflict and a social hierarchy, and though Offred and her mistress may seem worlds apart, both are controlled in this male-dominated society in ways that determine every aspect of their lives, limit their choices, and return them to a time when women were expected to know their place and stay in it. The unified names -- Ofglen and Offred -- symbolize a certain freeing of women from the names and identities of the past but also symbolize a new kind of prison.

The unwomen symbolize the female before becoming a woman, meaning before being assigned to her "proper" social role. These women will be surrogate mothers, and they symbolize freedom from a certain tedious work even as they symbolize being chained to their biological role. The unified names -- Ofglen and Offred -- symbolize a certain freeing of women from the names and identities of the past but also symbolize a new kind of prison, linking the women to men through their names. For the traditional wife there is only a narrowing of interests and possibilities for development. Now the woman has an occupation and is allowed no emotional life at all.

Offred's description of the place where she lives evokes the sense of the past as something that has come back into the present that infuses this novel, extending beyond location and dress to underlying social attitudes:

Late Victorian, the house is, a family house, built for a large rich family... A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only (Atwood 11).

The image of the sitting room evokes class differences not unlike a distorted version of television's Upstairs, Downstairs, with slavery replacing normal servitude. Atwood's novel demonstrates that the role of women in society has long been an issue of social class as well as gender, and the advancement of women in our own time has a strong sense of overcoming class differences and achieving economic parity as well as greater freedom of choice in a number of areas, social, economic, political, and personal.

Atwood is clearly commenting on what she sees developing in our own time. As women in the women's movement entered the 1990s, they faced a number of problems, some because of a growing backlash against the feminist movement. Most of these problems have been around for some time, and women have challenged them and even alleviated them without solving them completely. They are encountered in the workplace, in the home, in every facet of life. Women have made advances toward the equality they seek only to encounter a backlash in the form of religious fundamentalism, claims of reverse discrimination by males, and hostility from a public that thinks the women's movement has won everything it wanted and should thus now be silent. Both the needs of women today and the backlash that has developed derive from the changes in social and sexual roles that have taken place in the period since World War II.

It would be a mistake to see changing gender roles in society as threatening only to the males who dominate that society. Such changes also threaten many women who have accepted a more traditional role and who see any change as a threat. This response is not new. When women first agitated for the vote at the beginning of this century, they were opposed by women's groups who wanted things to remain as they were. Many of these women were ladies of means and social position in society, and they argued that woman's suffrage placed an additional and unbearable burden on women, whose place was in the home. In Gilead, upper class women seem to have taken this idea even further and so have become more docile and subjugated themselves. Atwood is indicating the degree to which women in our society have been complicit in their own subjugation as they have often accepted a secondary role.

The book in particular takes a feminist point-of-view toward reproductive rights, something this future has distorted and taken away. This future claims that it has developed a society with a new way of treating women, but in fact, it is simply a society which has codified an attitude toward women that Atwood finds in the society of our time in a more covert way. This novel suggests that a twisted agreement has been reached between the religious right and the feminist anti-pornography activists of our time. Atwood expresses this in scenes of the indoctrination centers where Handmaids are trained, for there they are treated to lengthy lectures about the horrors of the old days which were supposedly filled with the filth of pornography, rape, and other ills. It is claimed that now everything is so much better because strict rules have been made against those things. What is apparent is that in making this bargain, women have freed themselves from certain fears while losing their freedom to have genuine self-directed lives. They have complained about the objectification of pornography, yet they have now made themselves into objects of a different sort, controlled from outside, with limited choices of their own. This is not a simple feminist tract about how women are abused, however, for Gilead is a society which treats both sexes -- and sex itself -- as an evil to be controlled.

Atwood's narrator, Offred, says of herself and others in her situation, "We yearned for the future" (Atwood 4). Her role is important in this novel because she remembers an earlier time when she had what we would consider a normal life with a husband and children, and now she serves a specific social role as breeder -- society has turned back to a classification of gender roles that is more rigid and divisive than exists today. Atwood warns that while we yearn for the future, we fail to see it could be a repeat of the past if we are not careful. She also notes that her story is happening as she tells it and not in some distant past: