Biopower and Dystopian Novels: Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale
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This essay aims to create a method to investigate the history of twentieth-century dystopian novels. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) commonly base their dystopian imagination on the varying manifestations of biopower, the power that realizes itself through the advanced understanding and politicization of life. Brave New World and 1984 depict how the mind and the body could be thoroughly disciplined and engineered for social stability and conformity; however, the futuristic domination of life by technology in those two early twentieth-century novels disregards the historicity of life. Published in the late twentieth century, The Handmaid’s Tale does not focus on the unlimited, inexhaustible power of technology but uses as its setting an ecologically endangered environment and population. The biopower of Atwood’s dystopia operates based on ecological and historical contexts of its time, thereby having access to more intimate realms of life. A comparative study of this essay illustrates how the literary understanding of biopower evolves with the genre of the dystopian novel.
Abstract
This essay aims to create a method to investigate the history of twentieth-century dystopian novels. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) commonly base their dystopian imagination on the varying manifestations of biopower, the power that realizes itself through the advanced understanding and politicization of life. Brave New World and 1984 depict how the mind and the body could be thoroughly disciplined and engineered for social stability and conformity; however, the futuristic domination of life by technology in those two early twentieth-century novels disregards the historicity of life. Published in the late twentieth century, The Handmaid’s Tale does not focus on the unlimited, inexhaustible power of technology but uses as its setting an ecologically endangered environment and population. The biopower of Atwood’s dystopia operates based on ecological and historical contexts of its time, thereby having access to more intimate realms of life. A comparative study of this essay illustrates how the literary understanding of biopower evolves with the genre of the dystopian novel.
참고문헌 (24)
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