Author: Ali Madhlum Hussein

Abstract: As a dystopic satire, both Margret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Lutfiyya Al-Duliami's The Ladies of Zuhal (Saturn) portray the present evils in the hope of bringing about social and political change. The former's cautionary tale portrays the physical and psychological oppression of women for the sake of male genes in a state called Gilead. Gilead is a theocratic dictatorship based on Puritanical fundamentalism, rigidly orders every aspect of the daily life of all but those in the most privileged positions. The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s creation of an imagined society in which women under a futuristic totalitarian regime reduces its female subjects to mere voiceless, childbearing vessels. Recounted by a female narrator, Offred, the story focuses on the handmaids. These women are selected by the state for their potential ability to bear children at a time when infertility is high and live births have reached dangerously low levels. Though the woman’s biological function is privileged, she becomes marginalized as an individual – as the prime aim is to find healthy, fertile women who can produce children for those ruling class of men in position of power and influence. The latter is a female's epic portraying the sufferings of Hayyat Al-Babili who set down everything. The tale also depicts the other heroines' sufferings beginning with Hayyat's mother, Rawiyya, Fitnah, Manaar, Amaal, Zinah, Samia, Haalah, Shurouq, Luma, Helin, and ending with Briska Bernard,and other women who appear and disappear throughout this long heroic text such as Nahidah, Sahirah, and Siham. This novel clearly depicts the tragedies of the Iraqis in general, and women in particular. It is an epic revealing the roots of the ruin in man's life; meantime, it aims at collecting the splinter groups so as to to rebuild man with love and to retrieve the situation of the writer's dream as a real Iraqi woman. Sayidat Zuhal is the story of all, all the history of those who are killers and victims, lovers, dreamers, and visionaries. However, in The Ladies of Zuhal, the role of the men is not minor although the female race is dominating. Her miserable and catastrophic life is similar to her husband's, Hazim, who encountered castration from the Saddam's security guards.

Keywords: Woman's sufferings, Ladies of Zuhal, social satire.

DOI: 10.24001/ijels.2.4.11