Institutional Power and Narrative Authority in the Political and Social Novel: A Comparative Reading from Dickens to Atwood

Abstract

Political and social novels frequently overlap because institutions govern both public decisions and apparently private experience. This article examines that overlap through a comparative reading of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The study combines historically situated close reading with scholarship on domestic fiction, narrative authority, discipline, and dystopia. It examines scenes of classification, the distribution of speaking positions, the treatment of memory and documentary evidence, and the limits of narrative resolution. The analysis argues that institutional power becomes legible through competing claims to define knowledge and interpret other people's lives. Dickens's classroom, Gaskell's industrial dialogue, Orwell's production of official records, Achebe's colonial historiography, and Atwood's reconstructed testimony expose different relationships between coercion and interpretative authority. Their formal differences also qualify any account of these works as a single progressive history of resistance. Narrative recognition can coexist with paternalism, restricted agency, or continuing control over testimony. The article proposes a comparative distinction between gaining representation and controlling the terms under which that representation becomes authoritative, while preserving the historical differences between the selected novels.