Utopian and Dystopian Cities at Work: Challenging Imaginations of the City in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Pezzoli-Olgiati, Daria (2025): Utopian and Dystopian Cities at Work: Challenging Imaginations of the City in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In: Religion and Urbanity Online

Abstract

The entanglement of religion and urbanity is a core topic in the European literary and conceptual tradition of utopia. Utopia can be understood as a challenging imagination at the intersection of political and spatial reflection upon human coexistence. Utopia is an ambivalent form of thinking that merges positive and negative aspects of imagined societies in complex, often paradoxical formations. Informed by ancient traditions, amongst others apocalypticism, utopias depict (and sometimes criticise) the city as a spatial form of human coexistence par excellence. As a condensed imagination of an urban formation, the utopian city – although located beyond time and space – represents cultural ideas and shapes expectations, desires, and fears. Utopia is not only an abstract idea, however, as it is materialised in media as a specific discourse in literature, the arts, or film. This contribution focuses on the entanglement of utopia, religion, and urban formations in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale published in 1985, addressing selected topics such as the representation of urban places and their symbolic references, the role of media and intermediality, as well as the cultural skills of reading and writing, and the link to utopian traditions. To deepen the religious-historical roots of this novel, this analysis encompasses a close reading of and a comparison with Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, a late medieval treatise showing striking parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale in subject matter and style: both works explicitly unfold critical re-readings of literary and religious traditions. Moreover, the mise en abyme that characterises both texts involves the readers in a hermeneutical reflection which builds a bridge between utopian fiction and urban experience. The comparison between the two selected works emphasises striking lines of continuity, across a time lapse of almost 500 years, in dealing with the intertwining of religion and urban formation from a gender perspective.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Keywords: Religion; Urbanity; Gender; Utopia; Space; Politics; Media
• Fakultät: Evangelische Theologie > Abteilung für Altes Testament ; Evangelische Theologie > Abteilung für Religionswissenschaft und Religionsgeschichte ; Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft > Interfakultärer Studiengang Religionswissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 200 Religion > 200 Religion ; 200 Religion > 210 Religionsphilosophie, Religionstheorie ; 700 Künste und Unterhaltung > 700 Künste ; 800 Literatur > 810 Amerikanische Literatur in Englisch ; 800 Literatur > 840 Französische und verwandte Literaturen
• Sprache: Englisch