Literature - The Mirror of Society and Its Values?
When was the last time you read a book and saw yourself in the protagonist? Have you ever read a book and directly related to the plot or societal features in it? Literature is a tool often used to represent values that are seen in society today or in history. However, it is not the case that the events in your life or in society are constructed by literature. Rather, literature is a mirror image to what is happening in society which is why we can often relate to its thematic concerns.
"Literature constructs representations of the world, not the world itself.”
Literature is a tool used for expression, including the expression of current societal concerns or values, as can be seen very strongly when examining the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. For those of you who might not have read it yet (in which case I highly encourage you to do so), the book is about the life story of a Handmaid called Offred. In the dystopian novel the reader learns about her successful past life which had now been suppressed and reduced to solely to being the tool for childbirth for a richer couple, when America fell under a theocratic dictatorship.
At the time Atwood was writing the book, feminism was an incredibly crucial and controversial topic in society. With the second-wave of feminism slowly coming to its end in the 1980s, the rights of women and particularly the topic of sexual violence were debated and discussed frequently in the United States as well as in the rest of the Western countries.
Atwood used these events and discussions happening around her to lay the base for the plot of The Handmaid's Tale. Through taking the issues on hand, specifically that of the role of women, and taking them to extremes, she created Gilead, a dystopian state in which women are reduced to having only three jobs: bearing children, cooking and running the household. She took casually held attitudes about women and their role in society to their extremest logical conclusions.
Furthermore, not only are the basic principles around Gilead a representation of society but even some of the details Atwood weaved into the book create a mirror image of societal beliefs and traditions. When writing the book she made one rule: that she “would not put any events into the book that had not already happened”. In following this rule, Atwood created a book that included aspects inspired by events from the Bible, the Lebensborn programme in Nazi Germany, slave trade, and many more. Atwood thus created a slightly altered mirror image of society by only referencing events that are plausible to the extent where they have already happened before.
In conclusion, similar to how maps are a representation of geographical locations based on places and other data, literature is a representation of the world based on societal beliefs, ideas, as well as historic and current events. What do you think? Have you recently read a book that discussed current issues and ideas?
If you want to find out more about the Handmaid's Tale, Atwood’s inspiration as well as the true historic events that are underlying the plot, check out this article and this article.