Abstract
Margaret Atwood reflects in her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood, as she does in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, not only on feminist but also on humanist and posthumanist concerns, as she questions the very survival of humankind in an era of environmental destruction, excessive consumption, unregulated biotechnological experiments and pandemic viruses. Offering a strident critique of the contemporary culture of unbridled consumption, Atwood, in Year, draws on and literalizes the trope of corporate cannibalism in describing her Americanized and corporation-controlled world. In a similar way, she draws on and extends a related idea she has long made use of in her fiction — that of the male commodification and consumption of women — as she tells the intertwined stories of Toby and Ren, two female pleebland survivors of the pandemic plague and former members of the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious cult and resistance group. Invoking the idea of degeneration as she expresses her long-held fears about environmental and social decline, Atwood looks to religion — specifically eco-religion — as she seeks evidence of our ethical capacity to find a remedy to humanity’s ills.