“It is Better to Hope than to Mope”: the Representation of Rituals in Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

Details

Supervisors

Bragard, Véronique

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité didactique

Abstract

enOctavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993 and set in the year 2024, feels more relevant than ever. Sixteen years later, Margaret Atwood released The Year of the Flood (2009), the second novel of her MaddAddam trilogy. Though distinct in many ways, these two works of speculative fiction share a common concern: they warn against the alarming social and environmental trends the authors observed in their own time. Moreover, rituals are central to their plots and are responses to these concerns. This thesis explores how rituals are represented in the two texts. This will be done by applying the three main functions of rituals: social, transformative and psychological, to the texts. If rituals have positive effects on group solidarity and individual well-being, they can also be imposed. In both novels, characters reshape and question rituals. Trying to survive in the apocalypse, characters of both narratives escape their destroyed homes to find stability elsewhere. The novels also have a similar structure: each chapter begins with prayers, poems, or hymns that invite the readers to the rituals. In Parable of the Sower and The Year of the Flood, rituals are strategies used by characters to cope with the harsh reality of the broken world they live in. If Butler and Atwood depict gloomy worlds, they also remind us to hope for the best.