The Reality of Utopian and Dystopian Fiction: Thomas More's Utopia and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

摘要

The purpose of this research is to explore the different methods that Thomas More’s Utopia and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale utilize to create a compliant population, while also situating each in their appropriate historical context to draw on the authorial intentions. Different commonalities of the various definitions of utopia and dystopia are explored to form a framework to work within, and the two works are analyzed in relation to political theories set forth by Michel Foucault: the power over life and death in Utopia and the deployment of sexuality in The Handmaid’s Tale. Both are used to enforce subjugation, and an analysis of those methods will show that both of the governments in these two works have a strong basis in their respective authors’ time period.