Xiaoli Huang

Xiaoli Huang

28 December 2023

Dystopia, Utopia, Space, Time, Native American.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich is set against the backdrop of the human evolution crisis in the future world, and tells the story of Cedar’s experience of escaping and giving birth to a child. The novel is generally regarded by critics as a typical dystopian novel. By sorting out the development and characteristics of dystopian novel and illustrate diverse spaces in this novel, this paper holds that this novel not only expresses the dissatisfaction with the social system through dystopian space, but also expounds the author’s utopian ideal about the future of the Native American through the metaphor of space. The alienation of daily spaces in the novel, such as communities, homes, hospitals and caves, alludes to social problems such as urban alienation and environmental degradation. Moreover, the writing of “non-places” in the novel triggers readers’ thinking about women’s rights and moral structure, then reveals the discourse system of dictatorship and despotism. Through the writing of the past and the future, Erdrich tactfully constructs a native utopia in dystopia.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license