"Better is never better for all” : a study of feminist dystopia in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Lessing’s The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five ; as narrated by The Chroniclers of Zone Three

• Main Author: Eliza, Isa
• Other Authors: Mary Mazzilli
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52178
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

When you are a fiction writer, you’re confronted everyday with the question that confronted, among others, George Elliot and Dostoevsky: what kind of world shall you describe for your readers? The one you can see around you, or the better one you can imagine? If only the latter, you’ll be unrealistic; if only the former, despairing. But it is by the better world we can imagine that we can judge the world that we have. If we cease to judge this world, we may find ourselves, very quickly, in one which is infinitely worse (Atwood 6). I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don’t think it’s very much, really. I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen (Lessing).