2020 IB Extended Essays

To what extent do representations of politics, religion and sex contribute to the craft of storytelling as an agent of change within the literary works, God Dies by the Nile and The Handmaid’s Tale?

1.0 Introduction As a creative outlet part of a cultural body, a novel has the capacity to encourage personal understanding and foster social change. Literature has become a tool for the dissemination of progressive opinions. Recently, female oppression has become a repetitive leitmotif. Many authors use their fictional work to analyse underlying, historically disregarded social conditions and expose the institutionalised social behaviours that contribute to the oppression of females. This essay examines the use of storytelling as an agent of change through the representation of politics, religion and sex present in the novels The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El-Saadawi. The representation of these pillars of society and the voice of the characters navigating them, link the systematic oppression of women to the radical theocracies that have control over their respective societies. With the overarching purpose being to communicate the need for change within these pillars and draw reader attention to institutionalised social bigotry through the narrative. El-Saadawi’s novel paints a realistic description of life in Kafr-El-Teen, an impoverished village in Islamic Egypt. She combines the perspectives of multiple characters, using a heterodetic narrator, to follow the story of the Mayor’s wife, Zakeya, whose niece recently disappeared. Throughout the novel, each separate narration unravels the cycle of abuse that Zakeya and the women in the village endure. Comparably, The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopic told through the introspection of an ‘Handmaid’ within the Republic of Gilead. Offred is, like all fertile women in Gilead, stripped of her independence due to a sudden epidemic of infertility and the following Puritan revolution that engulfed the United States. Both novels demonstrate the entrenched extremes of a theocracy and validate how the subtle ostracism of women can become a harsh reality when religion is used to reinforce gender inequalities. There are major discrepancies, however, as the authors have starkly

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