7 - Critique of naturalism

Summary

Few works have described so vividly the renewal of a naturalist paradigm in society as that by Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale. Published in 1985, this novel presents an anti-utopian vision of the future, unfolding some of the problematic implications of trends and ideologies in the present world. At one level, the story demonstrates the consequences of a politics of scriptural fundamentalism, which in this case takes certain passages of the Bible to be unquestionably authoritative and applicable directly to disconcerting contemporary situations. Thus, in the setting of 1980s New England, major concerns are developing around the breakdown of traditional family life, the campaigns of feminists for equal rights, the legal practice of abortions, the prevalence of same-sex relationships, unprecedented levels of environmental pollution, and the uncontrollable spread of sexually transmitted disease. All of these suggest a society which has lost its basic social units, through a combination of individual freedom of choice and successive short-term relationships, and which is now worried about the health and the future of humanity. The solution to these concerns appears to lie in a tightly controlled form of ascetic discipline throughout the public and private realms, which the political revolution violently imposes, supported by the straightforward use of biblical texts.