From Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid’s Tale" to "The Testaments": a story and its generic inflections

Abstract

In one of her many interviews, Margaret Attwood states that in writing "The Handmaid’s Tale", she was inspired by Orwell’s dystopia par excellence, "1984". It is not so easy, however, to insert the novel in a specific literary genre. First of all, Atwood distances herself from the term science fiction and replaces it with that of speculative fiction. Secondly, just as the protagonist of her novel, Offred, has an inclination to play with words, so Atwood coins a new term to better define the genre of "The Handmaid’s Tale": ustopia. She argues: “Every dystopia contains a little utopia, and every utopia contains a little dystopia”. The result is that in Atwood’s novel different genres are interwoven, the boundary between dystopia and utopia is blurred and, in addition, many critics insert the novel in another literary genre, namely, satire. This mix of genres is confirmed in the sequel "The Testaments". Here, characters and perspective change, and the result is a very different novel telling the same story. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the generic trajectory of the two novels along comparative lines.