DYSTOPIAN VISIONS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY: FEMINIST READINGS OF THE HANDMAID’S TALE AND BRAVE NEW WORLD

Abstract

Margaret Atwood is well known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), set in New England in the near future and positing a Christian fundamentalist theocratic rule in the former United States that developed in reaction to a fertility crisis. While Aldous Huxley is best known for his novels, he also wrote essays, short tales, travel writings, poetry, dramas, and screenplays. Although a satirical critic of conventional norms, Huxley was fundamentally a humanist who, by the end of his life, had completely accepted spiritualism. This study examines the dystopian portrayals of gender and sexuality in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World from a feminist standpoint. Both works depict cultures in which gender roles, sexual relationships, and reproductive rights are rigidly controlled, highlighting underlying political and societal concerns. This study uses a feminist interpretation to demonstrate that the control of gender and sexuality is a crucial tool of power in both narratives. While The Handmaid’s Tale criticizes women’s captivity under religious and patriarchal regimes, Brave New World depicts a future in which the state utilizes sexual freedom as a means of societal control. The study illustrates how each work, published in drastically different eras, criticizes the exploitation of women’s bodies and agency as methods for upholding dystopian systems.