D L U O C G N I “ANYTH , E R E H W Y N HAPPEN A GIVEN THE .” S E C N A T S CIRCUM
– MARGARET ATWOOD
OPERA IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE FEMINIST DYSTOPIA BY LUCY CAPLAN
16 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA 2019 | THE HANDMAID'S TALE
I
t has been said that we are living in the golden age of the feminist dystopia. Head to the library and you will find shelves full of them: in Vox (2018), by Christina Dalcher, women in the United States are permitted to speak only 100 words per day. In Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), evolution starts to work backwards; pregnant women find themselves under siege by the panicked government. Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018) takes place in a Middle Eastern city where women die en masse, and those who survive are forced into polygamous marriages. Yet even as these fictional tales proliferate, it remains highly unusual to see a similar story on the operatic stage. Why are there so many feminist dystopias in fiction, and so few in opera? And can The Handmaid’s Tale, as both an opera and the foremother of these recent novels, bridge this gap?