A full-marks (30/30) essay comparing and contrasting the presentation of female sexuality in ‘1984’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Tailored to the OCR A-level English Literature course. Strong focus on context (AO3).
What methods do both authors employ to explore the repression of female sexuality?
Although written almost forty years apart, uniting both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are
the brutal repressors placed upon female sexuality, and the collective aggression met by
women who fail to conform. Orwell, a ‘misfit, rebel, class renegade’ who identifies himself
with his characters, according to Patrick Reilly, maintains a political focus in presenting the
non-gender specific suppression of sexuality as a whole, reflective of his experiences living
whilst totalitarianism threatened European life. Atwood, however, writing in an era
characterised by tense struggles between feminist advances and anti-feminist backlash,
concerns her novel primarily with women’s oppression. Nonetheless, in the two works,
female sexuality is undoubtedly subdued on both the private and public spheres, as with
Melamed’s Gather the Daughters and O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, suggesting the trope to play
a crucial role in the making of dystopian literature.
Interestingly, the paradoxical notion of female contribution to female repression is
prevalent across both texts. In a horrific reimagining of 1984’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’, Aunt
Lydia leads the Handmaid’s in condemning Janine for her ‘gang rape at aged fourteen’,
chanting it to be ‘her fault, her fault, her fault’. The contrast between the two novels,
however, lies in the fact that the scapegoat of Winston’s book is the male Emmanuel
Goldstein, and thus, his novel draws less attention to gender discrimination. Atwood,
however, showcases Gilead’s subverted attitudes towards female sexuality, where even
women belittle each other, and she, therefore ‘refrains from convicting a gender in its
entirety as a perpetrator’ (Malak). This presentation has been the focus of much critical
reception: Jennifer O’ Connell draws a comparison between Atwood’s sadistic ‘Aunts’ and
the Sisters operating the Irish Magdalen Laundries from the eighteenth to the late-twentieth
centuries, stating ‘It was not just Gilead that women were stripped off their names.’ Others
have likened the complacency of women in Gilead as reminiscent of feminine support for
Iran’s ultraconservative theocracy imposed just six years before Atwood’s publishing.
Meanwhile, Serena Joy and her values ‘about the sanctity of the home, about how women
should stay at home’ are arguably a parody of Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the Equal
Rights Amendment and the ‘new thought’ of second-wave feminism. Therefore, as Attwood
stated herself, it remains apparent that ‘nothing happened in The Handmaid’s Tale that is
not happening already, or is not happening right now, somewhere in the world.’ Similarly,
the Anti-Sex League for which Julia voluntarily advocates, granted as a façade to avoid
suspicion, only serves to reinforce INGSOC’s misogynistic agenda that confines females to
celibacy – sex being a crime that diverts energy from ‘war fever and leader worship.’ In
suggesting women are partly responsible for their own static existence, the writers seek to
magnify their repression.
However, it would be naïve to argue that males are not almost wholly responsible for the
oppression of female sexuality across both texts. Whereas other dystopian works, including
McCarthy’s The Road, focus on the horrors of anarchy, Orwell and Atwood showcase the
terror accompanying a system of patriarchal order. Just as Big Brother is a ‘perfect
embodiment of hypertrophied masculinity’ (Patai), surveillance within Gilead is inherently
male, perhaps reflective of the theocratically centred conservative revival in the US, led by
men including Ronald Reagan, that called for a ‘return to traditional values.’
Correspondingly, the ‘institutional gaze’ felt by Offred is that of sexist examination – whilst
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