After the election of businessman Donald Trump as President of the United States, sales of several fiction books on the theme of mass surveillance or the control of women's bodies boomed.
An unexpected consequence. After Donald Trump's presidential victory, announced Wednesday, November 6, sales of several books, such as The Handmaid’s Tale et 1984experienced a sharp increase, placing them at the top of sales on the Amazon site, reports CNN. All take place in dystopian futures and evoke themes like mass surveillance or the control of women's bodies.
The Amazon platform announced Thursday morning that it had observed a very clear increase of 6,866% in online sales of The Handmaid’s Tale in the space of a single day. The novel rose from 209th place to 3rd in terms of best-selling works. It is even first in the fiction category.
The Handmaid’s Tale, or in French The Scarlet Handmaidis a novel by the American Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It was adapted into a series in 2017 and garnered numerous Emmy Award nominations.
This science fiction work takes place in a futuristic society where women are reduced to the role of reproducers.
Access to abortion, a central subject of the campaign
Access to abortion has been a central issue in the US presidential campaign, with Kamala Harris repeating on numerous occasions that she will protect it if she is elected president of the country.
Access to abortion is more broadly a major concern in the United States, since the repeal in 2022 of the Roe vs. Wade ruling which guaranteed this right at the federal level. Now, each state is free to prohibit it and several states have legislated to this effect.
During the campaign, a former adviser to Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, declared, when questioned by MSNBC about the issues of the election, that “women did not want to find themselves in The Handmaid’s Tale”, making a direct comparison between the situation of American women in the event of Donald Trump's return to power and the situation of the female characters in the book.
1984 and Fahrenheit 451 also on the rise
Margaret Atwood herself, during the campaign, shared on her social networks an illustration by press cartoonist Mike Luckovich, inspired by his book and referring to the presidential election.
It showed women dressed in a red dress and a white hat, like the characters in his book, entering a polling station and coming out dressed in a variety of ways, the red outfits thrown on the ground.
The book 1984 by George Orwell also saw its sales increase, but this time by 250%, same thing for Fahrenheit 451which enjoyed a 333% boom. Both are novels of anticipation evoking dehumanized societies where freedom of expression no longer exists.
