English Honors Theses

Date of Creation

5-2023

Document Type

Departmental Honors Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Shawn Maurer

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis examines how dystopian fiction has responded to the sociopolitical issue of restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, a question that has become more timely since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in Summer 2022. Particularly, I aim to understand how readers can use dystopian novels to shape real-world dialogue and how authors can use narrative strategies to encourage readers to resist oppression. My first chapter takes a broad approach, tracing the development of dystopian fiction from a genre to a mode and using Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) as a case study of how an author can use the dystopian mode to model resistance. My second chapter analyzes how, with its plausible predictions and intimate first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative style, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has become a cultural intervention that many women still turn to as a symbol of protest almost four decades after its publication. Finally, my third chapter considers how Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) has become a feminist resistor’s narrative–especially for Black women like its protagonist, Lilith, who resists the aftereffects of slavery as well as patriarchal oppression–that shows readers how women can gain power, especially by using their voice in protest, exhibiting empathy, and never losing hope. My thesis is prefaced and concluded by a personal memoir, tracing my identity as a feminist in twenty-first century America.

Comments

Reader: Debra Gettelman

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