Places and forms of Power: British humour

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CONCLUSION:

Thus, dystopia is useful so as to criticize aspects of society without naming it, it is also a way for the author to make the readers aware of a certain situation, to warn them and make them question their society. He denounces what he thinks must be, by exaggerating or predicting future, in the way he imagines it. As it is shown in Matched, now in the 21th century, we must be careful about progress of science that could evolve to a danger if we let it control our society.

Thus, the author tries to warn off his reader by showing the harmful consequences brought by an ideology or a practice, currently happening in his present-day

In this world, human nature is denied, women are infantilized: “we had flannelette sheets, like children’s” and they are treated like animals: “electric cattle prods”. All that is essentially human is forbidden: talking, communicating: “If only we could talk to them”, “we learned to whisper almost without sound”.

In Matched, the narrator’s father work is to “sift through the relics of a society that is not as far in the past as it seems” and he studies what is our present, which is in the novel, the past.“ Right now, for example, he is working on a particularly interesting Restoration project: an old library. He sorts out the things the Society has marked as valuable from the things that are not.” Here, Society is also using objects from the past, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, these one are used or not, according to the needs of Society. The notion of past is very important in dystopia, in these fictional societies it is like the opposite of what is currently applied by governments, like the narrator says: “It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures”

In the excerpt of The Handmaid’s Tale, the main characters are always observed by mysterious tutors: “Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled”. They are imprisoned in closed places, like livestock and they are watched by guards: the “Angels” who “weren’t allowed inside the building” while the prisoners “weren’t allowed out “. Paradoxically, Angels were “objects of fear” to the prisoners, they stood outside of the building “with their backs” to them. They also represent the desire of human contact: “If only they could look. If only we could talk to them.”

(Finally, dystopia is a way to denounce, by means of writing, the danger of science and progress nowadays. The novel Matched has been written in 2010, so only a few years ago, and the author is creating a dystopian future where all is tightly-controlled by genes and society, she is probably writing what she expects from the future. In the book Officials decide who you love, where you work and when you die, by means of science and analyses of your features. All is organized and people don’t have any choice, genetics are “choosing” for them, so as to create the most flawless society with no errors, it may be a way to eradicate war or adversity.)