American dystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Parable of the Sower (1993) were not as concerned with world events and focused almost exclusively on the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. While Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published five years before the fall of the Soviet Union, the book’s subject matter is domestic, not international. The book does not concern itself with anything related to the Cold War, and as such, I have classified it in this section even though, chronologically, it is still within the realm of the Cold War. Parable of the Sower (1993) falls well outside the boundaries of the Cold War and similarly deals with domestic issues in the United States. The Post-Cold War Era could best be characterized as an era when conservatives, who had taken power in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, saw the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an indication that their side was correct. Even though Bill Clinton served as president for most of the 1990s, it was Republicans who had control of Congress for six of Clinton’s eight years.
With conservative politicians in power in the 1980s, radical conservative religious groups briefly came into the mainstream, as they now had a political “in.” The Handmaid’s Tale posits “a nightmare future in which such forces have established control of the government” (Booker 162). By the early 1990s, according to the book’s chronology, religious militants have assassinated the president and members of Congress and established a Protestant Christian theocracy, the Republic of Gilead. Laws are enforced according to the Bible. Religious difference is not tolerated in a United States where evangelical Protestants are in control (the very same people who became so prominent in the 1980s). Baptists, Quakers, atheists, and abortion doctors are all persecuted or killed (20, 32, 83).
What is most important to The Handmaid’s Tale is the treatment of women. A hierarchy exists in this society: Commanders (who are both military and spiritual commanders, as evidenced by their ambiguous title, “Commanders of the Faith”), their wives, Marthas (who operate the daily duties of households), and Handmaids. Just like Abraham’s handmaid, Handmaids serve as vehicles for procreation: once a week, a commander has sex with his Handmaid exclusively for the purpose of procreation. Women are forbidden to read and have no apparent rights. They must do as they are told.
The most curious aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale is the way Offred, the narrator, treats this denigration of women. On the one hand, of course, women have no rights. But on the other hand, they are sacred and revered. Offred muses about the time before the takeover of Gilead:
Don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a Laundromat, by yourself, at night. (24)
In the Republic of Gilead, “no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles” (24). These differing cultural norms present a problem: which one is better? On the one hand, Offred lived in fear of being killed or raped before the Gileadeans took control, but she had her freedom. In Gilead, she has no freedom, but she never has to worry about being killed or raped. The figure of Aunt Lydia, one of the women responsible for training Handmaids, appears as a symbol of the conservative Christian attitude toward women: “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it” (24).
Margaret Atwood, though obviously suggesting that the America of The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopic and undesirable, does not present that opinion by itself. While she encourages her readers to come to that conclusion, she engages them in some debate about the idea. There are definitely perks to being a woman in Gilead. Atwood asks us to wonder whether or not these perks are worth the price of freedom. Passing a movie theater, Offred remembers the films she saw there once:
Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. (25)
Prior to the establishment of Gilead, women were able to choose whether or not they wanted to be viewed sexually. This, of course, could prompt unwanted advances by men. In Gilead, the society has already made the choice for them: women have no sexuality, and they should not be viewed sexually. Being sexually open makes one the possible object of the male gaze renders one “visible” to men. In Gilead, “Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” (28).
As with A Clockwork Orange, the issue is choice. A free society gives Alex freedom to commit violent acts. A free society gives Offred the freedom to be a sexual being. In some instances, neither of these options is desirable. An authoritarian society protects everyone else by restricting Alex’s freedom of choice and protects Offred from being raped or killed by restricting her freedom of choice.
While the conservative Christian world of Gilead attempts to deny the existence of sexuality, it cannot fully repress sexual tendencies. This is where Offred introduces us to Jezebel’s, an exclusive, Commanders-only underground establishment where the Commanders go to obtain sex for pleasure, as opposed to what they do with the handmaids, which is sex for utility. Offred’s Commander explains to her that, even though sex for pleasure is strictly forbidden, “everyone’s human, after all” (237). The act of denying the existence of sexual instincts does not make those instincts go away. Jezebel’s offers a critique of the sincerity of the leaders of Gilead. As Booker notes (though it is quite an understatement), “There may be something bogus about the religious ideology that rules Gilead” (165). Atwood’s critique of the hypocrisy of Gilead parallels a similar critique of contemporary Christian evangelists like Robertson and Falwell. They may talk the Christian talk, but they may not necessarily walk the Christian walk, especially given the Jim Bakker scandal, in which Bakker, a televangelist, misappropriated money given to him by his devout followers. A society which purports to be ruled by Christian values will ultimately succumb to political turmoil as well as human weaknesses. On the surface (literally), women have protection from attack. At the underground world of Jezebel’s, Commanders are free to disregard this “freedom from” rhetoric and treat women as sex objects, anyway.
As with The Iron Heel, The Handmaid’s Tale is conscious of its existence as a work of art. Atwood ends the novel with a section called “Historical Notes” which indicates that the Republic of Gilead will someday fall, replaced by something that cannot be called utopic, but neither can it be called dystopic. It is more of a return to the world that the reader is familiar with, but also a return to a state of ignorance. “The most serious point raised about the present in terms of the future, not that of Gilead, but of the liberal post-Gilead culture, is how little has been learned,” says Murphy (34). The cycle of history has come around again to a period where women are just as marginalized as they are now. The academics at the historical conference are more concerned with picayune historical details of the Commander’s life. No attention is paid to the horrible status of women in Gilead. This pseudo-documentary is a little more ambiguous than The Iron Heel, for it suggests another dystopia may be around the corner:
To assume that Gilead will not occur because we are all too liberal for it is to ignore the overt parallels between the “it-can’t-happen-here” mentality of Atwood’s future academic speaker and the “we’ve-already-won-the-battles-over-racism-and-sexism” mentality of many present-day professionals (who, accordingly, oppose further affirmative action or deny the need to overthrow rather than reform patriarchy). (35)
The old cliché about history – that if we do not learn from it, we are doomed to repeat it – appears to be coming true in the “Historical Notes” appendix. Attitudes about women have come full circle, back to the way they were in the 1980s. The historians of the future treat Gilead as an historical abnormality, to be studied like a disease. They are concerned with describing the progression of this disease of ultra-conservatism, but they are not at all concerned with addressing its cause, since the cause has been allegedly eliminated. Academics can self-righteously pat themselves on the back, knowing that they live in a more civilized time where such things do not occur. Such arguments are forwarded today: women have jobs, women are more represented, the fight for equality is over. The problem is that once the fight for equality ends and the populace becomes complacent, the system of patriarchy (or racism, if we replace “women” with “racial minorities”) creeps back in, because while the state and institutions may recognize women as equal, underlying cultural attitudes about women remain the same. Pointing to more women in the workplace may be a start toward equality, but more women in the workplace does not mean that attitudes about female inferiority (or female sexuality) have changed.
The other thing that the 1980s did to society was allow the wealthy to become wealthier. Reagan tax cuts went primarily to the wealthy and allowed them to become richer and richer, while at the same time cutting funding for social programs. These wealthy-favorable policies are allowed to go to their logical conclusion, and in Parable of the Sower, they create a United States which is in the middle of a class war with itself.
Set in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Robledo in the years 2024-2027, Parable of the Sower follows a black teenaged girl, Lauren Olamina, on a trek to somewhere better than the place she lives. Los Angeles, like the rest of the country, is crime-ridden and drug-ridden:
Even in Robledo, most of the street poor – squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general – are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous. [. . .] They carry untreated diseases and festering wounds. They have no money to spend on water to wash with so even the unwounded have sores. They don’t get enough to eat so they’re malnourished – or they eat bad food and poison themselves. (9)
The government has given up on these poor parts of the country. The police are corrupt, and police and fire departments have become privatized and expensive. The government no longer provides water or sanitation services (except for high prices), and yet it finds a way to spend money on an unsuccessful space program to Mars that results in the death of one of its astronauts (15).[5] A new president, Christopher Donner, has been elected who “has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get the laws changed, suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws” (24). Sower is set up in a capitalist dystopia, where the needs of private corporations are infinitely more important than the needs of private citizens, and the federal government sets policy accordingly. The world is like The Iron Heel, except the capitalist takeover has already happened, and there is no middle-class intellectual to lead a revolt. Attitudes about the ability of individuals to overthrow an oppressive system have changed. In 1907, such a revolt was possible. In 1993, Butler suggests that the economic and social damage done to the middle class would be too great for them to lead a revolt. The people in Lauren’s neighborhood have enough trouble keeping robbers out, let alone overthrow the government.
For some people, there is hope – for a price, of course. A company called KSF creates a “company town” in Olivar, California, and advertises clean water and safety. The company, though, pays its workers poorly: “That’s an old company-town trick – get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery. That might work in Christopher Donner’s America. Labor laws, state and federal, are not what they used to be,” says Lauren (107). The novel is very much like The Grapes of Wrath in its views of the government helping capitalists to extort money out of workers. Later on in the book, when Lauren is making her way north out of California, she and her ragtag band of followers meet up with some others who bring horror stories of working for agribusiness conglomerates:
Workers were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for workers’ shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing – new or used – for everything they needed, and of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages – surprise! – were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws which might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers. (259)
Society in 2025 approaches near-feudal levels of class disparity as the middle class ceases to exist. “Mid-level jobs (professional, managerial, industrial, technical) and middle-class lifestyles disappear in a social vacuum in which the critical mass needed to mount an anti-corporate movement and build a different social system is no longer viable,” says Moylan (225). The middle class has always been a necessary factor in any significant societal change, and their dissolution has made change impossible. They must either succumb to the capitalists and attempt to become elite themselves, or face life in a Hobbesian state of nature in which families fear for their lives every day.
Having lost faith in social institutions, Lauren turns to change, the only thing which she sees as a constant in her life. Her new religion becomes one she invented herself, Earthseed. According to Earthseed, “God is change” (22). Lauren opts for a more deistic approach to the divine, perhaps the only way she can explain how an omniscient being could let the world fall into the horror it has. “My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is,” she says (22). Earthseed’s goal is to “take root among the stars” (75); that is, to leave Earth and to start a new society somewhere else without the pre-existing problems of Earth institutions. Such a goal will be tough with President Donner’s call to “dismantle the ‘wasteful, pointless, unnecessary’ moon and Mars programs. Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized – sold off” (23-24). An inward focus, a focus on Earth, would prevent new and better societies from forming somewhere beyond Earth and would take power away from de facto autocrats like President Donner and his friends at KSF.
[5] Butler’s sequel to Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents (1998), explains in further detail that stability in the United States came to an end around 2015 with an event called “the Pox,” which resulted in socioeconomic collapse (Moylan 224).
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