WILL THE HEART “GO LAST” IN THE FUTURE? ALIENATING SPACES IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S DYSTOPIAN FICTION

The aim of this paper is to analyse how the disturbing social forces affect individuals in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Heart Goes Last, by relying on Michel Foucault’s system of ideas on imprisonment in Discipline and Punish and Erich Fromm’s views on disintegration of love and faith in Western society in The Art of Loving. At the beginning of the book, it seems that the Positron Project, a futuristic prison, will offer an escape from post-apocalyptic misery to Stan and Charmaine, a young couple, hit by an economic collapse. However, the suburban paradise, at first glance, has gradually been exposed as a bleak and threatening place where people are kept in cramped conditions under constant monitoring and registration of data. As our analysis will reveal, the town of Consilience is the morbid urban realm where control is enforced through various mechanisms used to create “productive” and “subjected” bodies. In such a system, where the management has enticed the participants to take part in the project by offering material comforts, love has no (economic) value. The circumstances in the alienating location in the mentioned novel might be interpreted as a cautionary tale about relations of power in the current society and the world in the near future. In a metaphorical way, the author of The Heart Goes Last alerts to the problems by which mankind as a whole might be afflicted - the potential for abuses of power, treating people as commodities and the disintegration of real values.