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Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale

Both Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale represent unusual future visions, framed in experimental science fiction. Atwood's text is grounded in contemporary concerns, as it is partly an attempt at imagining what kind of values might evolve if environmental pollution had finally rendered most of the human race sterile. It has also sprung from the debates raging within the feminist movement of the past thirty years, a movement that Atwood has been very much a part of, although she has never spoken for any specific group- insisting on her individual perspectives. Dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale isolate certain social trends and exaggerate them, magnifying their most negative qualities. They are cautionary tales, meant less as predictions of a likely future and more as a commentary on the present. Atwood's text explores some of the traditional attitudes that are embedded in the thinking of the religious right, Orwell's studies the imposing extremes of the political right- and both authors are driven by the threats to their liberty that they perceive to be present in their respective contemporary societies.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exploration of the dystopian notion of power as it is held and enforced by the state. The significance of Orwell's discussions, both implicit and explicit, about the dystopian abuse of power becomes clear only through analysis. Then it becomes clear that Orwell's critique of society is inextricably linked to a critique of the power structures that surround communication. Orwell's writing is cautionary: it illustrates the point that communication is so integral to human instinct and desire that it can easily be turned into an extremely powerful tool for oppression.

As well as presenting power as a means of controlling language, and thus thought, the anti-utopian force of Nineteen Eighty-Four operates as a kind of twentieth-century contrast to the Humanist work of Sir Thomas More. Orwell's text expresses, "the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man" Nineteen Eighty-Four's cautionary agenda perceives man's bleak future to be one of dehumanization, induced by fascist dogmatism.

For Orwell, language is power. Since desire is the most powerful expression of individuality and is sated fully in the utopia, any dystopia must function through blocked desires. Orwell envision this suppression of desire taking place fundamentally within the context of language, "at least so far as thought is dependent on word" since it is only through words that man is capable of expressing his potentially dangerous wishes.

Atwood's is also concerned about the potential for exploitation in ambiguous vocabularies. Atwood has been equally interested and alarmed by the trend for some feminist anti-pornography groups to establish alliances with religious anti-porn zealots- right wing traditionalists who oppose the feminists on virtually every other issue. In this way, the language of "protection of women" could quickly slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, a kind of appalling neo-Victorianism. The nineteenth century repression of women was justified by a stretched claims that "good" women were being "protected" from sex; protection that extended to women being confined to the home, barred from participating in the arts, and of course voting. A rhetoric of protection is generally preventative. It controls, limits, and represses the women. The language may be is feminist, but it also entirely ostensible. The result, as seen in this novel, is the perpetuation of the patriarchal status quo.

In Orwell, words are commodified, becoming just another appropriated human liberty. Words acquire capitalist value- their weight depending upon their perceived worth to the state. Hence words are crudely reduced and objectified, existing in "an extreme form of pragmatism in which truth becomes subordinated to the Party" . Orwell records the Oceanian state's efforts to impart its dogma fundamentally, adjusting thoughts through altering language. Language control in Nineteen Eighty-Four is contrived deliberately to repress citizens' expression of reality, thus their psychological perception of it. As Orwell himself states, the dehumanising regime was "designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought" and,

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible."

As a result of controlling peoples' language, their ability to both express and discern the truth with words, the state acquires a genuine level of power over reality. When filtered by the omnipotent political dogmatists, "all reality is ideological"

Through subjugating the language of the people of Oceania, the state effectively converts ideology into truth, and the state's rhetoric functions as the vehicle for that truth: "Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else...whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. If this is so, then by controlling men's minds the Party controls truth" So the regime's rhetorical power over reality includes the power to determine arbitrary values of right and wrong, truth and lies, good and bad.

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