There is a comparison that almost no critical writing has performed, and that, when performed carefully, reveals one of the most important structural facts about the dystopian genre.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in 1924, is narrated by D-503, a male engineer in a totalitarian future society. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, is narrated by Offred, a woman who has been forced into reproductive servitude in a totalitarian society of the near future. Both novels are widely read. Both are part of the canonical dystopian conversation. Both are commonly cited as foundational entries in the genre.
The two novels are almost never read together. We is taught in courses on Russian literature, on science fiction history, on early twentieth-century modernism. The Handmaid’s Tale is taught in courses on feminism, on women’s writing, on contemporary North American fiction. The two books have been kept on separate shelves, and the reasons are roughly the same reasons the canon has used to keep many dystopian novels apart. Genre, geography, gender.
I want to perform the comparison here. The argument is not that the two novels are equally good, or that one is the source of the other, or that they should be read as variations on a single template. The argument is more specific. The two novels are telling fundamentally different stories about authoritarian regimes, and the difference is almost entirely a function of the gender of the protagonist. Read them together and you can see, with unusual clarity, what dystopian fiction can render through a male narrator that it cannot render through a female narrator, and what it can render through a female narrator that it cannot render through a male one.
This is one of the most important structural facts about the genre, and almost no general-reader criticism has named it.
The Two Regimes
The regimes in the two novels are, at the level of basic political structure, similar.
Zamyatin’s One State is a totalitarian society in which every aspect of life has been rationalised to mathematical perfection. The citizens, called Numbers, live in glass apartments. The day is divided into precisely scheduled hours. Sexual encounters are regulated by a pink ticket system. The leader, the Benefactor, is elected unanimously every year. The regime is built on a philosophical foundation, the idea that reason taken to its absolute will produce perfect happiness.
Atwood’s Gilead is a totalitarian society in which every aspect of women’s lives has been organised around their reproductive function. The women are divided into castes, marked by colour-coded clothing, named after the men who own them. The day is divided into precisely scheduled rituals. Sexual encounters are regulated by a state-sanctioned ceremony involving a Wife, a Handmaid, and a Commander. The leader is invisible to the women. The regime is built on a theological foundation, the idea that biblical authority justifies the reorganisation of women’s existence.
Held at this level of description, the two regimes look like variants of the same political form. Mathematical totality in one case, theological totality in the other. Engineered happiness in one case, engineered submission in the other. Both regimes claim absolute knowledge of the proper organisation of human life. Both regimes enforce that organisation through ritualised practices that the citizens have been trained to accept.
The differences begin to appear when you ask what the protagonist can see from inside the regime, and what the protagonist cannot see.
What D-503 Can See
D-503 is a man with social standing in the One State. He is an engineer. He is the chief builder of the Integral, the spaceship the regime is constructing to extend its mathematical happiness to other planets. He has access to the regime’s intellectual life. He thinks in equations. He writes the diary that becomes the novel.
His position permits him a particular range of observation. He can describe the architecture of the One State because he moves through its public spaces. He can describe its rituals because he participates in them as a full member. He can describe its philosophy because he has been educated in it. He can think about reason, about mathematics, about the nature of the soul, about whether his emerging feelings for I-330 constitute a rational error or a deeper truth.
The novel allows him to do this thinking. The form of the novel, in fact, depends on his ability to do it. We is structured as the record of an interior process, in which a man with full intellectual citizenship in his society begins to doubt that society’s foundations. The doubt is conducted in the language of his education. He has the tools. He has the time. He has the social position from which to deploy them.
What D-503 cannot see, on the other hand, is the texture of the One State’s operation on its less privileged members. The novel is set in a society with strict caste differentiation, but the lower castes are barely visible. The novel briefly mentions the existence of Numbers who perform unpleasant work, but it does not enter their experience. The factory workers, the cleaning staff, the people who maintain the food supply, the maintenance crews who keep the great machines running, all of these are present somewhere in the One State, but the novel does not render them.
This is not Zamyatin failing as a writer. This is the limitation of his chosen narrator. D-503 is a member of the intellectual elite. He cannot see what the elite does not see. The novel is constrained by his position.
A reader who wants to know what the One State looks like to a woman, a labourer, a person of low status, or a person who has not been educated in its philosophical foundations, will not find that information in We. The novel cannot supply it. The novel is the record of one specific kind of mind under one specific kind of pressure.
This is worth being explicit about, because the canonical reading of We treats it as a comprehensive analysis of totalitarianism. It is not. It is a comprehensive analysis of how a particular kind of educated male citizen experiences totalitarianism. The two are not the same thing.
What Offred Can See
Offred occupies a fundamentally different position in her society. She is a Handmaid, which is a high-status form of servitude. She has been allocated to a Commander’s household. She is fed, clothed, and housed. She is also, by the regime’s design, deprived of almost all the conditions that make D-503’s interior process possible.
She does not have access to the regime’s intellectual life. The regime has, in fact, taken active steps to prevent her from having such access. Women in Gilead are not permitted to read. They are not permitted to write. They are not permitted to engage with the philosophical or theological foundations of the regime that organises their lives. The regime has been built to keep them outside the conversation that produces the regime.
What Offred can see, from her position, is something D-503 cannot see at all. She can see the texture of the regime as it operates on the body. She knows what the cloth of her habit feels like in summer. She knows the schedule of the household with the precision of a person whose survival depends on never missing a beat. She knows what the wives say to each other and what they refuse to say. She knows which Marthas can be trusted with which information. She knows the small accommodations and the small refusals that the women in the house have worked out over time.
This is the form of knowledge that Gilead has been unable to suppress, because Gilead has organised itself around the assumption that women’s knowledge is not knowledge. The regime has therefore left this knowledge unmonitored. Offred has access to it because she is structurally beneath the regime’s intellectual attention.
The novel’s form depends on this access. The Handmaid’s Tale is, at the level of the sentence, a record of texture, of small observation, of the granular detail of life in a household run by people who consider the narrator subhuman. The novel works because Atwood has chosen a narrator who can see what the male narrators of canonical dystopian fiction cannot.
What Offred cannot see is the macro structure of the regime. She has no access to its political deliberations. She does not know how the Sons of Jacob came to power, except in fragmentary remembered news stories. She does not know what is happening in other parts of Gilead. She does not know what is happening outside Gilead. The novel often presents this lack of access as a deliberate cruelty of the regime, but it is also a structural fact of the narrator’s position. Offred cannot tell the reader things she does not know, and the regime has been built to keep her from knowing them.
A reader who wants to know what Gilead looks like to its architects, to the men who designed it, to the theologians who justified it, will not find that information in The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel cannot supply it. The novel is the record of one specific kind of mind under one specific kind of pressure.
This too is worth being explicit about, because the canonical reading of The Handmaid’s Tale often treats it as a comprehensive analysis of patriarchal authoritarianism. It is not. It is a comprehensive analysis of how a particular kind of intelligent but structurally subordinated woman experiences patriarchal authoritarianism. The two are not the same thing.
What Each Novel Cannot See, Read Together
The comparison reveals something the canonical separate readings of these books have obscured. Each novel sees one half of the regime it describes. Held together, the two halves combine into a more complete picture than either alone can offer.
D-503 sees the philosophical and structural face of authoritarianism. He can describe the system, because he has been educated in it. He can render the experience of being a privileged participant whose interior life is gradually subverted by the regime’s pressure. He can perform, on the page, the slow disintegration of a mind that has been trained to think within the regime’s categories.
What he cannot show is what the regime feels like to the people whose lives the regime is mostly organised around managing. The factory workers. The women. The lower castes. The people for whom the regime is not a philosophical structure but a daily set of physical impositions.
Offred sees the embodied and textural face of authoritarianism. She can describe what the regime feels like in the body, because her body is where the regime is most directly operating. She can render the experience of being a structurally subordinated participant whose interior life is conducted in the small spaces the regime has not bothered to monitor. She can perform, on the page, the patient accumulation of small observations that a person in her position must collect in order to survive.
What she cannot show is the macro structure of the regime. The deliberations of its architects. The theological arguments that produced it. The political manoeuvres that installed it. The form of consciousness of the men who run it.
A reader who has only one of these novels has only half of the analysis. A reader who has both is in a much better position to think about what authoritarianism actually does, because authoritarianism does both kinds of work simultaneously. It operates on the minds of its privileged members, slowly subverting their interior lives within the categories the regime has supplied. It also operates on the bodies of its subordinated members, organising their daily lives around physical impositions that the regime does not bother to justify to them.
The two operations are not separate. They are part of the same political system. They are visible from different positions within that system. Neither operation is fully visible from a single position. The genre, taken as a whole, has to do both kinds of work, and it can only do both kinds of work through narrators who occupy both kinds of positions.
What This Reveals About the Canon
The canonical dystopian shelf has been dominated, until recently, by novels with male narrators in positions of relative privilege within their regimes. Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party. D-503 is an engineer. Bernard Marx is an Alpha. Guy Montag is a fireman. The protagonist’s privilege gives the novel access to the philosophical and structural face of the regime, but it also limits what the novel can render.
The novels with female narrators that have entered the canonical conversation have done so relatively recently, and they have done so by offering the genre something it had been structurally unable to render before. The Handmaid’s Tale is the most prominent example. Its addition to the canon was not just the addition of one more dystopian novel. It was the addition of a kind of vision the canon had been missing.
This is one of the reasons Atwood’s novel was so immediately influential when it appeared in 1985. It was not because the political analysis was novel. Atwood herself has been clear that everything in Gilead is borrowed from documented historical regimes. The novelty was the position of the narrator. Atwood had supplied the genre with a vantage point it had not previously developed. The vantage point made certain features of authoritarianism visible that the older novels had not been able to render.
What is true of Atwood is true, in different forms, of other female-narrated dystopian novels that have entered the conversation more recently. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower gives the genre a young woman watching social collapse from a position of triple marginalisation, by race, gender, and age. Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death gives the genre a woman of mixed parentage living inside an ongoing genocide. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions gives the genre a girl whose interior is being colonised by the very education that is supposed to liberate her. Each of these novels supplies the genre with a vantage point the canonical male-narrated novels could not provide.
The canon has been slow to absorb this. The dystopian shelf is still, in most general-reader presentations, dominated by Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, and a small handful of others. The female-narrated novels that should have substantially reorganised the shelf have instead been treated as additions to it. The reorganisation has not happened. The canon has expanded, but it has not been restructured.
A restructured canon would treat the gender of the narrator as one of the genre’s central formal questions, on the same level as its temporal setting or its political structure. The narrator’s position determines what the novel can see. A genre that has been dominated by male narrators has, by structural necessity, been dominated by certain kinds of seeing. The novels that supply other kinds of seeing are not additions to the genre. They are corrections to it.
Reading Between the Lines
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. I am not arguing that male-narrated dystopias are worse than female-narrated ones. The two have different strengths. Zamyatin’s analysis of reason’s relationship to authoritarianism is brilliant and could not have been performed through a female narrator in the One State. Atwood’s analysis of patriarchal authoritarianism’s operation on the body is brilliant and could not have been performed through a male narrator in Gilead. Both novels are doing essential work. Both are limited by their narrators’ positions in ways that are productive of the analysis the novels are able to perform.
The argument is structural. The genre as a whole has been weighted toward the kind of analysis that male narrators can perform, and this weighting has produced a reading public that recognises authoritarianism more easily by its philosophical and structural features than by its textural and embodied ones. A reader trained primarily on male-narrated dystopian fiction will tend to look for the symbols of the regime, the slogans, the rituals, the visible apparatus. A reader who has also read female-narrated dystopian fiction will additionally look for what the regime does to the body, what it does to the household, what it does to the small social transactions that fill ordinary life.
Both kinds of looking are necessary. Real authoritarianisms operate on both registers. The reader who can do both has a more complete apparatus than the reader who can do only one.
The remedy is the same remedy this blog has been advocating in various forms. Read across the canon’s organisational divisions. Hold the books next to each other. Notice what each one can see and what each one cannot. Build, through this comparative work, an apparatus that the canon does not provide as a default.
In the case of We and The Handmaid’s Tale, the comparative work is unusually rewarding, because the two novels are doing such complementary work. D-503 cannot see what Offred sees. Offred cannot see what D-503 sees. Read together, the two novels supply each other’s missing material.
The two books are short. They can be read in a week. The reader who reads them next to each other will discover, by direct experience, most of what this post has been arguing. The discovery will be more lasting than the post. The post is scaffolding. The novels are the work.
Read them in either order. Hold them together. The canon has been keeping them apart. You do not have to.
