Comparing Human Body In The Handmaid's Tale And Brave New World

The nature of how the human body is presented, most importantly its subversion, in Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is deeply nuanced and complex. In both novels the authors demonstrate the interconnectedness of power and the human body – Aunt Lydia the authoritative ‘Aunt’ in Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale says of sexual liberation: “Freedom to and freedom from.” She is referring to the supposed inherent promiscuity women of Gilead would show before the enforcement of the inhumane societal regime that normalises and essentially promotes rape culture. This draws an underlying parallel to the contrast between the strict monogamy of the Savage Reservation compared to more subtle confinement of the “every one belongs to every one else” mindset in the World State in Huxley’s Brave New World; however where in The Handmaid’s Tale the distinction is temporal, both of these anthropological practices exist simultaneously (separated geographically) in Huxley’s novel.

How can these dystopian worlds be so subverted that political and religious ownership of the body governs them? The identity of various characters in both novels is reduced to anatomy and all true expression or individuality is crushed entirely. Attwood summarises this concept succinctly with a quotation from the narrator, Offred the Handmaid, of her novel: “we are containers”. Despite the disparities between both of these fictional societies none of the citizens in either are actually ‘people’ and in an incomparable way both result in an important character sacrificing themselves to the