Las Vegas (Symbol)
In The Heart Goes Last, the city of Las Vegas is a symbol of American decadence, tackiness, and perversion. While the book begins in the economically devastated Rust Belt region of the United States, the story eventually moves to Las Vegas, which has sustained its economy because tourists still flock to a city where every vice is turned into a profitable venture. Atwood highlights the schlocky nature of the entertainment and how the streets are full of celebrity impersonators who double as paid escorts. Atwood also emphasizes the city's perverseness by making it the location of the Ruby Slippers clinic, which has perfected the brain adjustment surgery that turns abducted women into sex slaves for paying customers. In this way, the fictionalized Las Vegas of the novel stands as a hyperbolic extension of the real city, a place people visit to transgress social taboos.
Blue Teddy Bears (Symbol)
The blue teddy bears that appear throughout the novel are a symbol of corrupted innocence. The blue bears first appear in the book when the narrator comments on how Charmaine and other women in her prison knitting circle knit the bears believing that they will be given to children. After being smuggled out of Positron, Stan wakes up in a shipping container full of the bears; he learns that they are being sold as an accessory for kiddybots—life-like child sex robots purchased by pedophiles. Atwood further emphasizes the blue bears' symbolic significance when Veronica accidentally imprints on one. While it lends the former sex worker a sense of innocence that she is hopelessly in love with a bear, Stan overhears Veronica having sex with the knitted toy, perverting the innocence of the situation.
Possibilibots (Symbol)
The Possibilibots (sex robots) featured throughout The Heart Goes Last are a symbol of capitalist exploitation of sexual violence. After Jocelyn fakes Stan's death, he assumes a new identity and begins working in Positron's Possibilibots division, where the workers perform quality control on increasingly life-like robots built for customers to have sex with. While some robots are made for women, the majority of customers are men who want to fulfill their most twisted sexual fantasies without having to worry about dealing with an actual human woman. The workers trade misogynistic jokes about the benefit of a robot's compliance and inability to refuse sex, and discuss how they're trying to make it so the robots react to violence and pain like a real woman would. The moral depravity of the project becomes even more clear when Stan learns that the company will gladly violate a person's privacy by creating any custom Possibilibot; Stan discovers that his own wife is being recreated in robot form. Stan is also disgusted to learn that one of the best-selling lines is kiddybots—child robots sold to pedophiles. While some of the workers argue that the robots might reduce the likelihood of a real child or woman being harmed, it is also suggested that the Possibilibots will only temporarily satisfy some men before they'll want to "try the real thing." In this way, the Possibilibots show how meeting the market demand for perverted sexual devices could irresponsibly encourage more sexual violence within society.
Consilience/Positron Project (Symbol)
The Consilience/Positron twin town project is a symbol of economic exploitation. Early in the novel, Atwood establishes that the project is based on the way prison labor helps sustain the American economy: by locking people up and forcing them to manufacture products while in prison, profiteers make much greater profit margins because their workers are essentially enslaved. The Positron Prison project ostensibly seeks to bring equality to this model, giving people a chance to live half their time as prison laborers and the other half in middle-class comfort. However, the desperate subjects of the experiment are really signing away their lives to the project, which effectively imprisons them even when they are living in the town of Consilience. Although they believe they are being given an opportunity to live a pleasant life built on honest work, the impoverished participants are economically exploited because their surplus labor is being absorbed by the profit-driven Positron and its investors. With no way of leaving the project and no way of accruing real money (they are paid in Posidollars), the workers are stuck toiling for their employers, who are really their owners.
Selling Babies' Blood (Symbol)
The notion of selling babies' blood is a symbol of moral depravity. The idea first arises when Stan donates his blood and the blood-bank worker tells him that at least a dozen desperate people have been offering to sell their babies' blood. There is a theoretical market for the blood because transfusing young blood can potentially stave off dementia and rejuvenate an old person. Later in the novel, Jocelyn explains that Ed, having gone mad with greed, has gotten into selling baby blood as an emerging market. In an economy where inequality is rampant, human lives are not considered equivalent, and the innocent suffer at the hands of the powerful. Atwood embodies this concept by depicting a society where the moral aversion to harming babies—the most innocent and defenseless humans—has disappeared, and their exploitation is fetishized.
