In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [59]
After his betrayal of Julia, Winston Smith becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him shows him sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor café, knowing he’s a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him too, while he listens to a popular refrain: “Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me.”
Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism—of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face forever. But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak—the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome—“bad” is no longer permitted but becomes “double-plus-ungood”—and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean—the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information—the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life—in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale. By that time I was forty-four, and I’d learned enough about real despotisms—through the reading of history, through travel, and through my membership in Amnesty International—that I didn’t need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias—Orwell’s included—have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who’ve defied the sex rules of the regime. They’ve acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves. Thus Julia, thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World, thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 seminal classic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view—the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist dystopia,” except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered “feminist” by those who think women ought not to have these things.
In other respects, the despotism I describe is the same as all real ones and most imagined ones. It has a small, powerful group at the top that controls—or tries to control—everyone else, and it gets the lion’s share of available goodies. The pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and the apples, the elite of The Handmaid’s Tale get the fertile women. The force that opposes the tyranny in my book is one in which Orwell himself—despite his belief in the need for political organization to combat oppression—always put great store: ordinary human decency, of the kind he praised in his essay on Charles Dickens. The biblical expression of this quality