The political awakening novels of Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, and Michelle Cliff: Narrative strategy, reader response, and utopian desire (Zimbabwe, Jamaica)

This study analyzes late twentieth-century women's novels of political awakening through examination of three writers who have written multiple texts in the genre: Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, and Michelle Cliff. Political awakening novels chronicle a protagonists evolving consciousness of her complicity with oppressive social structures and her responsibility to struggle against them. These novels are didactic; the political views of the authors are evident, and the texts are designed to raise the reader's political consciousness. The politics of gender affect the way women writers analyze political problems and conceive utopian possibilities; their narratives of awakening dramatize the interactions between gender relations and other arenas of struggle.; Drawing on feminist, Marxist, and reader-response theories, this study argues that while the oppositional force of political awakening novels may be contained by both post-industrial consumerism and the novels' own narrative strategies, women's political awakening novels nonetheless represent a politically significant expression of utopian longing among the relatively privileged women who are both the genre's practitioners and its audience.; The analysis of Margaret Atwood, titled “Is the Reader Exempt,” analyzes the manipulation of the relationship between protagonist and reader in the novels Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale. Both narratives struggle against strategies of containment that enable readers to experience themselves as exempt from complicity with systemic oppression.; “Political Awakening to Apocalyptic Disillusionment: Doris Lessing's Children of Violence,” shows that Lessing's five-volume opus is both political awakening narrative and anti-political awakening narrative. Mirroring much of Lessing's own political journey, the series argues finally against the efficacy of political activism.; “A Traitor to her Class: Michelle Cliff s Privileged Subversives” examines Cliff's presentation of the process by which protagonists who benefit from existing social arrangements commit themselves to oppositional struggle. Reading is an important component of the process, thus this chapter highlights the dissertation's sustained concern with the political effects novels have on their audiences. This study asks whether and how women's didactic fiction actually instructs.