Is the current state of our societies an inspiration for future dystopian novels? : utopia and dystopia in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

摘要

The dystopian novels written by Sarah Hall The Carhullan Army and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, speculate with a pessimistic future world in which men, women, society as a whole and the environment, suffer major setbacks and disasters far worst and much more extreme than the current world in which we live. The aim of this paper is to show that there are big parallelisms between the imbalances and trends that existed in the societies of 1985 and 2007 (when the novels were written) and the issues that strongly inspired both authors and which are dealt with in both dystopian novels.