Hope in the Totalitarian Realm

Hope in the Totalitarian Realm

Religion and the manipulation of history are the most important steps in creating a totalitarian state. In the novels discussed the reader comes to understand true oppression results when hope and power are removed in their totality. Katherine Burdekin’s novel, Swastika Night, portrays women who are degraded and removed, stripped of identity, femininity, and important self-efficacy as societal role-players. However, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a more inclusive and historically aware society, though still defined by the separation of citizens into a strict, sexist, man-made hierarchy and ruled by religious authority. The participation allowed to women leaves opportunity for women to shape their own environment, through underground movements, and influencing the men around them. Though society and religion can affect the Handmaids, Aunts, and other levels of women as it crowds out and vilifies the memories of a longed for past, the wounds of disenfranchisement are too fresh for history to be truly erased. The distinctive and definitive difference between the two dystopian societies discussed is the active presence of women, and through women, hope.

“As a woman is above a worm, so is a man above a woman. As a woman is above a worm, so is a worm above a Christian” (Burdekin 7).This excerpt from the fictional book of Holy Hitler in Swastika Night is a prime example of the totalitarian religion in the fictional German empire and the hierarchy it produces. This religious tenet takes its form in the practices of modern day life for all the inhabitants of Germany and its conquered lands. Burdekin situates this dogma in the novel’s exposition as it explains succinctly the strictures of s...

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...ion of women by men.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986. Print.

Burdekin, Katharine. Swastika Night. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 19851937. Print.

Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Kingston, Paul. "The Joyless Republic of Gilead: Reflections of a Political Scientist on the Operatic Production of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale."University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (2006): 833-834. Online.

Neuman, S. C. (Shirley C.). "'Just A Backlash': Margaret Atwood, Feminism, And The Handmaid's Tale." University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (2006): 857-868. Online.

Petterson, Fredrik. “Discourse and Oppression in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.”

BA Thesis. Linnaeus University, Sweden: 2010. Online.