Doomed by Hope: Environmental Disaster and the “Structured Ignorance” of Risk in Atwood’s Speculative Fiction | Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Margaret Atwood’s fiction has explored the politics of risk since at least the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. In that novel, environmental degradation (especially from chemical pollution and nuclear radiation) is identified as a contributing cause of the decline of birth rates in the ‘pre-Gileadic’ United States. But in her more recent speculative novels, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), the unchecked progress of climate change – evident in rising sea levels, shifts in weather patterns and seasons and ozone depletion – joins the unchecked progress of genetic engineering to become a double-stranded thread woven into her textual representations of a social/political (d)evolution. In paper, I connect current psychology studies of risk perception and willed ignorance to Atwood’s analysis of corporate responsibility and personal complicity in an imagined ecodisaster that threatens to bring an end to history itself. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor is Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at the University of Memphis. A member of the faculty since 1990, her research and publication interests include nineteenth-century British literature, as well as utopian literature. She has published articles on women’s literature in both of those research areas.