Atwood’s novels deal with all three of these realms: The Handmaid’s Tale is primarily political; The Blind Assassin is heavily economic; and Life Before
Man is very social. But these novels—let alone others such as Surfacing or Oryx and Crake—do not stay neatly in a realm. They can, nonetheless, be analyzed in Boulding’s terms. Some will, however, require more complex analyses. For
The Edible Woman, for example, one need not say much about the political, but one must say a great deal about the economic and the social, for, arguably, the economic has too many threats and the social has too many exchanges.
Atwood’s fiction, however, offers more than a surface description of the power imbalances that characterize the world as she sees it. The