| Popis: |
In "The Heart Goes Last," her 2015 dystopian novel set in the US in the near future, Margaret Atwood addresses the topic of the post-2008-financial-crisis Great Recession, imagining what a complete collapse of the capitalist economic system could look like somewhere in America. Most critics appear to regret that “this potentially insightful novel about unbridled capitalism” “deflates into a flaccid sex comedy” and really is “a silly mess.” In my paper, I demonstrate that this dismissal of the novel’s central issues of sex and gender as trivial and unrelated to economy is misguided. Turning her attention to marriage and sex Atwood never does abandon the important and timely subject of post-crisis (and always crisis-genic) capitalism. On the contrary, the “rich satire’s” sexual excesses of the rich serve as a hyperbole for the obscene consumption and perverse power of the real “1%.” Furthermore, Atwood highlights the importance of traditional gender roles in maintaining the system's security through a stable heteronormative family unit generating consumers predictable in their consumption from the cradle to the grave. Finally, by speaking about both capitalism and marriage as prison and by putting a suburban housewife side by side with neuroengineered sex slaves and sex robots, Atwood offers a critique of not only American late capitalism, but also the much larger and much older system that contains it: patriarchy. |
