SOURCE: Harris, Jocelyn. “The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984.” In Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Harris examines parallels between Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, asserting that Atwood's novel is a critique of George Orwell's treatment of women in his works.

By publishing The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Margaret Atwood openly invited comparison between her own dystopian novel and George Orwell's 1984. She herself draws the parallel when in an interview of 1986 she compares her epilogue to his:

In fact, Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for. He did the same thing. He has a text at the end of 1984. Most people think the book ends when Winston comes to love Big Brother. But...