This paper focuses on the subversive potential of myths by exploring Margaret Atwood's feminist revision of creation, more specifically the myth of paradise. Atwood sketches gruesome personal histories for the female characters, but does not go into details of rape, or abuse, relying instead on the post-traumatic self to do the talking for her and to support understanding. The manifestations of traumatic experiences before the apocalypse are constructed in present tense narration, through the recollections of the female characters, and are more prominent in their prolonged aftereffects than the descriptions of the events themselves. Following in the steps of Cathy Caruth, I argue that, here, personal trauma is almost invisible, inasmuch as the traumatic event is hidden, and only noticeable in the fact that it affects everyday life. I would also like to trace how the traumatic wound becomes a multi-layered symbol, and how language, especially the language of trauma, re-constitutes ways of trauma narration depicted by the female characters.

I would like to examine this through uncovering the various layers of female experience in The Year of the Flood, and exploring the connection between the novel’s major trauma, the apocalypse, and the smaller, personal traumas of the female characters. The chief interest of this paper is to explore how women are presented in this dystopian world in terms of body, identity, status, and trauma, and, in turn, how this image reflects on current society. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy MaddAddam presents a world very much like our own – except for the fact that scientific developments made gene splicing, body modifications, and curios new species nothing out of the ordinary.

A survey of selected eco- and biotechnological dystopias or sf-ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Marge Piercy's The Body of Glass (1991) and Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002)-is followed by an in-depth model analysis of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). The paper then traces the productive interchange between science and literature and the emergence of an increasingly (bio)technology-centred utopian/dystopian discourse that explores as key motif the link between the imagined intersection or interface of the human self (identity) and the machine/(bio)technological other/alterity, celebrating the future advent of post-humans and cautioning against such an impending doom. The article provides an overview of how literary and scientific imagination have been entangled and how views of the imagination’s intermediation between the material (body) and the immaterial (mind) have changed over the course of the centuries.

Margaret atwood dystopian trilogy