The Aesthetics of Social Reproduction: Silences in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

Abstract: This essay interprets novels by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler as the authors engage with social reproduction theory, a field concerned with the relationship between productive labor—"value"-producing work, such as that of the factory—and reproductive labor (or so-called women's work), including housework. Charting the impact of Tillie Olsen's essay "Silences in Literature," the essay argues that subsequent authors of the 1980s and 1990s adapted Olsen's concept of silences to their own purposes. What was originally a mode of interpreting the missing contributions of women to literary history became for later writers an invitation to think about lapses as an aesthetic strategy. In The Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Sower , Atwood and Butler reimagined Olsen's silences as developing a "trope of inarticulacy," a technique by which narrators insert gaps or occlusions in place of conveying events such as sex, pregnancy, or care work. The essay concludes that such a trope is the means by which these authors repeat the procedure that subordinates women's work to waged labor.