Lois Feuer: Spreading the “Word” on
Dystopian Societies

Lois Feuer, professor of English and humanities, was one of three panelists on a recent segment of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) public radio program, “What’s the Word?” which features faculty members from American universities discussing issues in language and literature. The show will archived on the MLA Website, at http://www.mla.org/homepage.

Feuer’s panel discussed Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the context of “Science Fiction by Women,” although, as Feuer explains on the program, Atwood herself considers “speculative fiction” a more accurate label for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale.

“I think that when Atwood says she is writing speculative fiction, what she means is that there is nothing physically improbable in the books,” says Feuer. “There’s no space flight to another galaxy or anything like that. But it projects into the near future, with what the consequences of our present decisions are.”

Feuer was invited to speak on the program in part because of her 1997 paper published in Critique, “The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition.” She says that readers are drawn to stories about dystopias, which are societies that are under totalitarian governments operating in the name of the greater good, partly because they fear the results of the mass technology which makes this social control possible. She also notes, with some irony, that Atwood began writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984.”

“Up until the end of the 19th century, many such books were about utopias, rather than dystopias,” she says. “Once utopia became possible technologically, we looked at it and said, ‘Hmm, do we really want to live there? Is that really what we want?’ What Atwood describes is not so improbable. What these stories look at is the way we dehumanize our fellow human beings as things or as means to an end instead of looking at them as complete human beings for whom we should have respect and concern.”

Feuer, who teaches a graduate course titled “Gender, Sex and Love in Shakespeare,” underscores Atwood’s commentary on the condition of women in modern society through The Handmaid’s Tale’s story of the complete subjugation of women in the interests of a male-dominated government.

“I think that Atwood was noticing that both essentialist feminism and religious fundamentalism have something in common,” she says, “and that they both try to put women in this box and men in that box. I think she was also noticing that if we continue in the same path with fundamentalism, the result is going to be the kind of suppression of liberty that we see in The Handmaid’s Tale, not just women’s liberties, but men’s liberties, too.”

Feuer describes the changes in society and women’s rights in the 20 years since The Handmaid’s Tale, saying , “I think we are more aware because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the way that women in other parts of the world are struggling to have the most basic rights, like the right to an education. We in the United States are a little less insular, a little more aware of what’s going on in that regard. At the same time, ironically, our right to make decisions about our own lives has been increasingly threatened. I think it’s much worse now than it was then.”

The Shakespearean scholar has also completed an essay titled, “Hired for Mischief: The Masterless Man in Macbeth,” which will be published in Macbeth: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2006). She draws the parallels between this work and her commentaries on Atwood’s book.

“A ‘masterless man’ is someone who has no place in the society,” she explains. In a hierarchal society, everybody works for, or is under the protection of, someone higher up on the social chain. Both Shakespeare’s society and the one in The Handmaid’s Tale are very hierarchal, very structured. To fit into the society in The Handmaid’s Tale is to be controlled by those at the top of the hierarchy. To lack a place in those societies is to lack any identity at all.”

Feuer describes Shakespeare as a feminist before his time, by saying that “We can conclude that from plays showing people who break out of the boundaries of their gender identities.

“For example, in a play like ‘Twelfth Night,’ when a woman is disguised as a man, she can break out of the boundaries in which her sex confines her and explore being a full human being,” she continues. “He shows again and again that gender, like class, is socially constructed, and if you can socially construct someone as female, you can socially construct them as male or androgynous. He could be described as somebody who sees gender constraints, just as he sees class constraints, as artificial, and as needing expansion. Atwood, too, describes the ills of a society which sees people only in terms of their sex and divides humanity by genderizing us.”

-Joanie Harmon