Abstract
Throughout her long career, Margaret Atwood has written only two speculative novels, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. In both, Atwood traces ideas and practices already present in contemporary culture to their logical conclusions, and a comparison of the novels reveals the evolution of Atwood's perspective on a number of recurring topics, visual culture being chief among them. The context for Atwood's evolving concern about visual culture is the rise to dominance of the image in contemporary culture. In the nearly two decades that followed the publication of The Handmaid's Tale, the use of visual culture to aestheticize political and social life accelerated to the point that image and reality became nearly impossible to distinguish. Similarly, the stakes of visual representation are much higher in Oryx and Crake than in The Handmaid's Tale, and Atwood suggests that not only civil liberties but humanity itself is threatened by an increasingly degraded and dehumanizing visual culture. Nevertheless, despite changing conditions of visuality, Atwood continues to recommend literature as a viable space within which to develop a critical response to visual culture.