Totalitarianism In The Handmaid's Tale

Totalitarianism as a form of government gets represented in a multitude of ways in literature. Two particularly important and popular representations of totalitarian states are found in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Both are written as first person, diary style accounts. The information on how the totalitarian systems function is limited due to the constraints on information available to the narrators and the limits of what they share. These are two unique forms of totalitarianism, written in very different social and political landscapes. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We around 1920-1921 only a few years after the Russian Revolution, just as the Communist totalitarian state was coming into being. We was initially …show more content…
Globally, conservatism had come to power after the more leftist decades of the 1960s and 70s and the Cold War was restrengthened. Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cambodia, and the lingering memories of Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy were all totalitarian states that Atwood could draw upon to form her own style of totalitarianism. The context of publication plays a large role in the development of these novels. We’s One State and The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead each have a government in the background that shape the space of the novel. I will look at the way government functions as a totalitarian system in each of these novels in order to better understand how the characters in the novels function in their daily …show more content…
Lilies of the Field [the store] is called. You can see the place, under the lily, where the lettering was painted out, when they decided that even the names of shops were too much temptation for us. Now places are known by their signs