Historical Reality Through Dystopian Lenses: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical perspective of dystopian literature. The thesis demonstrates that dystopian fiction extrapolates from history to build nightmarish societies, but also that certain historical experiences can be revitalized and actualized through a dystopian conceptualization. In fact, Atwood’s dystopian novel can be used as a “dystopian lens” to understand Jacobs’s testimony of women’s lives under chattel slavery as a “concrete dystopia”, that is a historical experience characterized by dystopian features. In order to do so, Atwood’s text is at first situated within existing scholarship and theory on dystopian literature and thoroughly analysed by highlighting how the text encourages reflection on women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation. Successively, I shift the focus to the context of American chattel...Show moreThis thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical perspective of dystopian literature. The thesis demonstrates that dystopian fiction extrapolates from history to build nightmarish societies, but also that certain historical experiences can be revitalized and actualized through a dystopian conceptualization. In fact, Atwood’s dystopian novel can be used as a “dystopian lens” to understand Jacobs’s testimony of women’s lives under chattel slavery as a “concrete dystopia”, that is a historical experience characterized by dystopian features. In order to do so, Atwood’s text is at first situated within existing scholarship and theory on dystopian literature and thoroughly analysed by highlighting how the text encourages reflection on women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation. Successively, I shift the focus to the context of American chattel slavery by reading Jacobs’s Incidents as dystopian in terms of setting and narrative devices and trajectories. By doing so, Jacobs’s testimony is liberated from its historical contingency and can be actualized. Atwood’s dystopian novel as analytical lens illuminates the ways in which coercive power, psycho-physical alienation, body commodification and systemic destruction of identity characterise women’s experience of slavery in Incidents. Moreover, it invites us to reflect on the ways sexual violence and appropriation of motherhood shape the slave woman’s construction of the subject as site of production and reproduction of oppression. However, the analytical comparison of the two texts sheds also light on the ways hope is performed by the narrative’s protagonists through storytelling. After being addressed by their testimonies, we, the witnessing readers, should be able to recognize the dystopian and utopian potential in our own reality as regards women’s sexual and reproductive self-determination and freedom, which seem to be continuously under threat.Show less

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Historical Reality Through Dystopian Lenses: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl