Herramientas de configuración del análisis

What events, then, have constituted concrete dystopias for writers of dystopian fiction? There have been many historical events that have pro- vided inspiration but the most prominent of these has been the rise of fascism in Europe in the twentieth century.11 Classic dystopias such as Or-

well's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night pre- sent authoritarian worlds and their physical and psychological effects on men and women respectively.12 At the same time, these worlds are often

represented as quasi slave societies that provide not only the content but often a stylistic framework within which to develop the themes of oppres- sion, freedom, and liberation. In Swastika Night, for example, the women are illiterate, denigrated, and powerless in their position of reproductive slave labor. In Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, there is a micro slave society in which the female (though previously male) protagonist/narrator is captured by its tyrant, Zero, becomes a member of his harem, and is repeatedly raped and forbidden to speak. Slavery is also depicted more broadly, as in Butler's Parable of the Sower, to designate relations of eco- nomic dependence with the use of the term "debt slavery." On the level of content, then, the concerns of dystopian fiction often coincide with those of slave narratives in their discourse on freedom, inequality, and the nature of domination. On the formal level, dystopias such as Handmaid "borrow" from the classic slave narrative, and in Butler's critical dystopia Kindred slavery forms the main raison d'etre for the novel's narrative.13 Since slav-

ery is depicted as a form of "totalitarian" oppression in future worlds, these dystopian fictions problematize its status as a system of oppression and ex- ploitation located exclusively in the past.

Yet, defining slavery is not an altogether uncomplicated issue. For Pat- terson, to define slavery as a relation of domination—a relation defined by inequality, violence, and lack of freedom rather than a relation de-

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fined by property—makes a crucial difference. The former definition is for Patterson more fitting than the second because it can be accurately applied to the institution of slavery irrespective of its particular existence in time and place. Just as significant is the fact that it is one drawn from the point of view of the slaves themselves and the effects on their con- dition rather than an expression of their masters' point of view {Slavery 20-27, 334).l4 It is the relative power between the parties concerned that

differentiates the master-slave relationship from any other because the slave master's power over the slave's life is total. Furthermore, unlike people exploited in other types of labor relations "only slaves entered into the relationship as a substitute for death" (Patterson, Slavery 26). The constant threat of violence, then, and the ultimate powerlessness of the slave—barring the power to choose suicide—is a definition both nar- row and flexible enough to accommodate past and, I will argue, to pres- ent manifestations of slavery. Finally, this definition is supported by the evidence in the narratives of the slaves themselves. Slavery is shown to be primarily a relation of domination, while the issue of property, though important, is secondary.

In its classic form, the slave narrative achieves its effects on the reader as a form of autobiography with well-defined formal conventions as well as thematic ones. But as the essays in John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner's The Art of the Slave Narrative illustrate, it also utilizes conventions distinct from other autobiographical narratives that overlap with those of dystopian narratives.15 From a formal point of view, the most obvious similarity be-

tween the slave narrative and the dystopia is the focus on the subjective point of view of the narrator with whom the reader must identify and sympathize. As with all autobiographies, first-person narration is a nec- essary means of expressing the immediacy of experience as well as its authenticity. But in the case of the slave narrative the emphasis on first- person point of view serves an additional purpose, that of critique and ed- ucation. It is with these two functions that the slave narrative shares a common purpose with dystopian fiction.

But how do these functions manifest themselves in both slave narratives and dystopias vis-a-vis the institution of slavery? There are two important common points of reference here. Slave narratives were written "to per- suade the reader of [slavery's] evils" and were thus used as one of the vehi- cles the abolitionist movement enlisted to convince its audience of the need to end the institution of slavery (Taylor xvii).16 These narratives share

a commitment to social critique that the dystopian text, as with all Utopian fiction, practices implicitly if not explicitly. In Incidents, for example, Ja- cobs states from the beginning: "But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions

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of women of the south, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is" (6). Since social critique is not a requirement of historical/autobiographical novels as such, nor of sf in general, in this instance two completely different genres meet at the point of extra-textual function, that is, in the author's desire to educate the reader and warn of certain evils inherent in particu- lar institutions. And what does the dystopian novel contribute to a further understanding of slavery despite its conventional placement in a future time and place?

The answer lies in the second common function of the dystopia and the classic slave narrative in documenting the conditions of slavery, thus per- forming the education of perception that is also characteristic of Utopian fiction in general (Taylor xvii). Thematically, African American slave nar- ratives describe the violence inflicted on slaves and the ritual debasement they are subjected to throughout their lives, acts officially justified as a form of punishment ideologically supported by Christian rhetoric in favor of the institution of slavery. But slave narratives describe these events not merely to shock but also to reveal both the double standards and hypocrisy practiced by the slave masters as well as their cruelty.17 The violence of

slavery is crucially extended to the forced separation of families, with chil- dren sold away from their mothers, and to the surreptitious rape of slave women by their masters. The constant threat to slave women of being forced to bear children by their masters and the subsequent threat of being separated from their offspring through their sale is the dominant fear ex- pressed in Incidents. As Jacobs poignantly laments: "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden com- mon to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own" (119). The educational force of slave narratives by women thus extends beyond the documentation of injustices to expose the gendered nature of oppression produced by the institution of slavery.18

Likewise, in dystopian texts, public as well as privately enforced violence and its threat ensure the obedience of the lesser powerful. If slavery is pri- marily a relation of domination, then from the point of view of their pro- tagonists, these dystopias represent forms of domination at their most extreme: from the case of Swastika Night, in which women have no voice of their own, to the more open situation in which the context allows for a suc- cessful escape to freedom, as in Parable of the Sower. And as any reader of dystopias knows, to rebel against the status quo, to refuse one's slave status, results in certain death if escape or change is not accomplished. Atwood's descriptions of public hangings at "the wall" (chapters 6 and 44), "sal- vagings" or gender-segregated public executions (chapter 42), and "parti-

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cicutions" or group-organized murder of "criminals" (chapter 43) exist alongside the monthly enforced "mating" of the Handmaids with the Commanders. As sexual/reproductive slaves, the Handmaids immediately hand over their children to the commanders' families and are denied any rights over them. Additionally, any preexisting children are forcibly sepa- rated from their own mothers and "reassigned" to childless households of the elite, never to be seen again by their parents. Even though the Hand- maids' fear centers on the possibility of not being able to reproduce, they are already broken women on a psychic level because they are powerless to prevent the parting from their children or the "duties" required of them as Handmaids. Equally, as in slave narratives, religious rhetoric and its em- phasis on sacrifice is often utilized to indoctrinate as well as to justify the new state of affairs, especially for new "recruits" who have little choice in their "assignments" (230-31).

In Handmaid, the only "choice" the narrator retains is to become a sex- ual slave or die. Though Offred claims, "nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for," her options are extremely limited: she may provide children for the Commanders' families, become (unofficially) a prostitute, a "Jezebel," or work as an "unwoman" in a toxic waste site where death is in- evitable (105).

It is striking evidence of Atwood's use of slave narrative conventions that the one unacknowledged group of women whose "services" buttress the Republic of Gilead share the same biblical name as that attributed to female slaves of the American South. The "Jezebel" was a carnal image of women slaves, one that Deborah Gray White argues was useful as a counter-image of the asexual and religious mother figure, the mammy (46).19 The roles that women were assigned in slavery thus adhere to strict

sexual functions that benefited the masters without regard for the women's own desires. Within these limited parameters, each woman may or may not practice a kind of precarious "freedom" within which to negotiate for her desires, but without the threat of violence ever receding from view.

In their common purpose to "warn," these texts perform at the level of narrative the function of what J. C. Austin calls, in How to Do Things with Words, an illocutionary speech act, an utterance that achieves a "certain force" by virtue of its saying something (121). At the same time, Austin as- serts that "unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed" (116). For this to occur in the reading of dystopias, the reader will have to have understood the warning issued and, as a result, benefitted from the intended "education" of percep- tion. Such an understanding leaves no room for ambiguity in the message conveyed and, in the case of slavery, the target of its critique. As in dystopias that extrapolate from real events, the narrative must be clear, for

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the reader, about the institutions it critiques and the context it refers to. This analogy then is fruitful for a comparison of two genres as distinct as nineteenth-century autobiography and twentieth-century sf because it brings out the texts' common concerns to warn of sexual and reproductive slavery without eliding the different contexts from which they emerged. In their intention to warn, dystopias and slave narratives alike express a Utopian impulse that combines critique of the present with hope for a bet- ter future.

Although the value attached to each of these instances of forced repro- duction are radically different (in Jacobs's text the woman is disgraced and ashamed, and in Atwood's text she is "officially" honored and celebrated), taken from the point of view of the women their experiences are more sim- ilar than different. In both, women's powerlessness and fear are a constant reminder of their lack of sexual and reproductive freedom. It is this theme that links the function of "educating" to that of "warning" in both slave narratives and dystopias. Despite the differences in time, women's vulnera- bility toward sexual slavery expresses itself in both genres as a danger in- herent in the condition of womanhood in patriarchal institutions that must be fought and guarded against for themselves as well as for their daughters.

The forced separation of women from their children as well as other family members corresponds to what Patterson has termed "natal alien- ation"—"the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending genera- tions" (Slavery 7). This does not mean, however, that there were no social ties, but rather that they were neither legally nor morally binding. As Ja- cobs expresses: "Always I was in dread that by some accident, or some con- trivance, slavery would succeed in snatching my children from me" and "my mistress, like many others, seemed to think that slaves had no right to any family ties of their own" (227, 59). This regime placed slave women in the unique position of involuntary complicity since they were unlikely to attempt to escape without their children and any attempt to do so with them was more likely to fail. More often than not, as shown in these texts, women complied with their fate and tried to "make the best of it," without, however, this "ethic of compromise" completely eradicating the desire for freedom.20 As a result of this constant threat of separation, women chose, unsurprisingly, to avoid attempts at escape in return for the possibility of retaining familial relationships, however precarious they were.

It is not so much the degree or quality of this "freedom" which is signif- icant but the decision to reproduce at all that brings female-authored dystopias and slave narratives into a common framework. What links the discourse of freedom in both genres—and differentiates them from male- authored texts—is centered on the preoccupation with their reproductive

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rights, the freedom to choose motherhood, and their right to refuse it. Ac- cording to Sarah Lefanu, "[w] omen's dystopias foreground the . . . denial of women's sexual autonomy. They show women trapped by their sex, by their femaleness, and reduced from subjecthood to function" (71). In fact, as Nan Bowman Albinksi writes, the central concerns in women's Utopian writing from the 1920s to the 1990s are sexual freedom and, particularly for dystopias, reproductive freedom—the freedom to bear children or to avoid a compulsion to do so (79). In all the above novels, the narrators' fears of separation and the violence of punishment are ample deterrents from attempts at escape, and their acquiescence is manifest in their "choice" of slavery. But unlike them, not all characters share in their desire for free- dom. How is it, then, that in dystopias, as well as in slavery, forced repro- duction does not always take place against a woman's will but often willingly on her part?

To achieve such compliance, the forces of power enlist a range of practices that attempt to sublimate desire and eradicate hope via the violent practice of what Louis Althusser calls "Repressive State Apparatuses"—the army, the po- lice, the courts, and the prisons. But fear of violence is not always sufficient, as desire for freedom is impossible to eradicate. To this purpose, then, are put further "Ideological State Apparatuses"—religious, educational, legal, politi- cal, and cultural institutions (145). If women are made to believe that every- thing in their society is as it should be and unchangeable, then there will be no desire for change or revolt. In dystopias as much as in slave narratives, this "belief" that change is futile leads many to accept the given reality and their place within it—though unsurprisingly, in both it is the narrator who resists such complacency and refuses the displacement of desire and the loss of hope. By achieving the suppression of desire, dystopian worlds effect what is most characteristic of the genre's characters and/or narrator: that of both inter-subjective and intra-subjective alienation. Whereas eutopias utilize the technique of defamiliarization for a change of consciousness in the reader—a way of seeing the world as if for the first time and recognizing its forms—dystopias effect a double defamiliarization: between reader and narrator and within the narrator's psychic world. The first kind is positive and performs a transforming effect on the reader. The second is more ap- propriately called alienation. It is always accompanied by the narrator's cognition that the "official" language of the world he/she inhabits does not express experience; rather, it becomes an instrument of psychological ma- nipulation and further alienation. For women, this alienation takes place most evidently in relation to their bodies, their sexuality, and their repro- ductive freedom.

Luce Irigaray's theory of women's alienating labor is useful for revealing how women's bodies become a commodity with an exchange value in both

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slavery and the dystopian context. Following from Marx, Irigaray argues that women's alienation from the "product" of their labor (their children), from themselves, and from other women is inextricably tied up with the sacrifice of their sexual and reproductive freedom and as such serves to maintain the patriarchal social order (172,185). In Gilead as on slave plan- tations, women's bodies become the site of production of exploited rela- tions as well as their reproduction (of the means of exploitation). A woman's body in effect becomes a commodity with an exchange value as the woman is not the owner of this commodity but instead the laborer who must provide the goods to those who will benefit directly from her services. Accordingly, in Gilead the newborn are immediately handed over to the commander's wives and, after a period of breastfeeding, separated forever from their real mothers. Yet women still "desire" to provide their masters with children: "What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and ba- bies" (240). If the state's ideological apparatuses "promote class oppression and guarantee the conditions of exploitation and its reproduction," then the enforced motherhood of Gilead constitutes the Handmaids as the most exploited class and thus the most alienated (Althusser 184).

Equally, on the plantations of the slave narratives, children may be sold away from their mothers at any age and as far away as necessary. Yet be- cause of this over-emphasis on reproduction, female desire takes second place to maternity, since it is the latter that will determine a woman's "value" and the "quality" of her life: "Whatever slavery might do to me, it could not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were saved" (Jacobs 166). Because of this double exploitation (as slave and woman) in Jacob's story, the narrator chooses to become the mistress of another white