Neomedievalist feminist dystopia

Abstract

This essay seeks to define the genre of twentieth-century British and North American neomedievalist feminist dystopia. I focus on two framed tales: Doris Lessing’s The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I observe how these two novels, written in the context of feminist responses to patriarchal and anti-feminist backlash discourses of the late 1970s and 1980s, construct stylized Middle Ages, to caution against recidivist and revanchist patriarchy and to also deconstruct the myth of romantic love.