Free Will, Moral Blindness and Affective Resilience in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

Abstract

This chapter suggests that Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel The Heart Goes Last reflects on the possibilities and limitations of affect to elicit resilience and positive social change. I posit that resilience—understood broadly as either the capacity of beings and systems to withstand adversity and endure by absorbing shocks and adapting to conditions of crisis, or as “the process of harnessing biological, psychosocial, structural and cultural resources to sustain wellbeing” (Panter-Brick and Leckman 335; emphasis mine)—emerges in Atwood’s novel as a new affect linked to anxiety and emphasizing the tensions between agency, free will, and moral blindness. The article draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s and Hannah Arendt’s philosophical analyses of the contemporary moment, and tracks the novel’s critique of the cold sensitivity underpinning resilience strategies in times of the crises inherent to the period of late modernity.