Fiona Tolan

Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

UBLISHED in 1985, a year after the date made infamous by George Orwell’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale appeared during a period of heightened interest in utopian literature, particularly feminist utopias. With The Handmaid’s Tale , Atwood seemingly reworks the dystopian vision of Orwell’s classic tale to fit an American Puritan ethic and, indeed, she has described the novel as ‘a cognate of A Clockwork Orange , Brave New World , and Nineteen Eighty-Four ’ (Atwood 1986). Each of these novels tackles its own conception of potential dystopia, and I will argue that Atwood focuses on the history of second wave feminism, addressing the limiting and prescriptive nature of its utopian beginnings and, by creating an analogy to Christian fundamentalism, pointing to unacceptable losses of intellectual liberty. P

Everyone has left something here: The Storyteller-Historian in Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum

This essay reads Kate Atkinsons Behind the Scenes at the Museum as a text thoroughly of its time: a mid-1990s feminist interaction with postmodernist deconstructions of historiography. Atkinsons novel moves beyond early second-wave feminist interventions into fairy tale plots and draws its project of recovering female histories closer toward the postmodernism of historiographic metafiction, becoming a key example of the productive coalescence of these two significant late twentieth-century concerns.

Zadie Smith's Forsterian Ethics: White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty

Zadie Smiths 2005 novel, On Beauty, rereads and revises E. M. Forsters Howards End, and Smiths authorial affinities and dissimilarities to Forster were much discussed by the novels critics. This article extends this discussion by arguing that On Beauty actually represents the culmination of an extended engagement with Forsters work. Identifying the marks of a Forsterian ethics within both White Teeth and The Autograph Man, I suggest that a sustained ethical enquiry—prompted largely by Forster but also indebted to contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Elaine Scarry—underpins and illuminates Smiths fiction in a manner crucial to a fuller understanding of her work.

‘He Could See Her No Longer’: The Negation of Femininity Through Violence in Ian McEwan’s Fiction

Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel, Enduring Love, charts the growing obsessive ‘love’ experienced by psychologically disturbed Jed for the protagonist Joe. Largely in consequence of her refusal to countenance Jed’s mounting instability, Joe’s relationship with his partner Clarissa falters and fails. McEwan opposes science writer Joe’s rationalism with the sensibilities of Keats scholar, Clarissa. This classic, rather too neat, dualism constructs a potentially potent sexual tension in the text. But rather than negotiating the masculine — feminine opposition, McEwan dissipates this heterosocial aspect by redirecting Joe’s attentions and passions to the third, initially peripheral figure of Jed. Where Joe represents rationalism, and Clarissa emotion, Jed embodies obsession: sexual, religious, and psychological. Ultimately, frustrated obsession engenders violence, and the novel climaxes with Joe shooting his phallic pistol at Jed, and concludes with Jed institutionalized but resiliently enamoured of Joe. Compelled by his own obsessed pursuit of his stalker’s condition, Joe and Jed enter into a strange parody of a love affair, and Clarissa’s role in the text is increasingly negated.