Anti-Totalitarian Sexual Revolutions in
Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
English Abstract
Citizens of Dystopia are typically denied freedom of individual choice. They are unanimously victimized by an omnipotent totalitarian hierarchy that practice brainwashing by means of propaganda and constant manipulation of collective memory and language. Dystopian fiction also features a totalitarian regime manipulating human sexual desire by channeling it toward maintaining its dictatorial power. Under dystopian totalitarian rule, sexual pleasure for its sake is forbidden: citizens are denied the freedom of gratifying their desire in marital relations and their offspring is consecrated to the state. This paper aims at studying the course of two anti-totalitarian sexual revolutions—in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale‌—with the hypothesis of the variation of their endings between optimism and pessimism according to their authors' philosophical variant stances.

Key words
Dystopia; Totalitarianism; Sexual Revolution; Rebellion

Ahmed Mohamed Al-Kahky
Assoc. Professor
The Department of English Literature, Damietta University.