Swastika Night

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCfION by Daphne Patai For nearly fifty years, the identity of 'Murray Constantine', pseudonymous author of Swastika Night, has been concealed from public view. Only in the early 1980s, in response to persistent inquiries, did the novel's original publishers acknowledge that 'Murray Constantine' was in fact Katharine Burdekin. Born in Derbyshire in 1896, Burdekin died in 1963 having published ten novels between 1922 and 1940. Intensely interested in politics, history, psychology and religion, Burdekin experimented with a number of literary structures, yet her novels, whether published pseudonymously or under her own name, are clearly the work ofone hand, one creative intelligence in the process of development. Though Burdekin's feminist critique appears in her realistic fiction and even in her children's book, she excelled above all in the creation of utopian fiction, and the special vantage point afforded by the imaginative leap into other 'societies' resulted in her two most important books: Swastika Night (1937) and Proud Man (1934). When these novels first appeared, contemporary reviewers tended to miss Burdekin's important critique of what we today call gender ideology and sexual politics, though on occasion they noted her feminist sympathies, which, indeed, led some to guess that 'Murray Constantine' was a woman. With this reprint of Swastika Night, Burdekin's works may finally begin to find their audience. Like fictional utopias ('good places'), dystopias ('bad places') provide a framework for levelling criticisms at the writer's own 111 IV SWASTIKA NIGHT historical moment. But in imagining in Swastika Night a Europe after seven centuries of Nazi domination, Burdekin was doing something more than sounding a warning about the dangers of fascism. Burdekin's novel is important for us today because her analysis offascism is formulated in terms that go beyond Hitler and the specifics of his time. Arguing that fascism is not qualitatively but only quantitatively different from the everyday reality of male dominance, a reality that polarises males and females in terms of gender roles, Burdekin satirises 'masculine' and 'feminine' modes of behaviour. Nazi ideology, from this point ofview, is the culmination ofwhat Burdekin calls the 'cult of masculinity'. It is this connection, along with the strong argument against the cult of masculinity, that set Burdekin's novel apart from the many other anti-fascist dystopias produced in the 1930s and 40s.I Burdekin envisages Germany and England in the seventh century of the Hitlerian millennium. The world has been divided into two static spheres - the Nazi Empire (Europe and Africa) and the equally militaristic Japanese Empire (Asia, Australia, and the Americas). In the Nazi Empire Hitler is venerated as a god, exploded from the head of his father, God the Thunderer, and thereafter undefiled by any contaminating contact with women. A 'Reduction ofWomen' has occurred by which women have been driven to an animal-like state of ignorance and apathy, and are kept purely for their indispensable breeding function. All books, records and even monuments from the past have been destroyed in an effort to make the official Nazi 'reality' the only possible one. A kind of feudal society is in force throughout the Nazi Empire, with German knights as the local authorities, indoctrinators of a Teutonic mythology whose spurious nature has long since been forgotten. The women are kept in cages in segregated quarters, their Reduction complemented by the exaltation of men. This situation has led to homosexual attachments among males {Burdekin suggests that male homosexuality may involve embracing, not rejecting, the male gender role}, though procreation is a civic duty for German men. Christians, having wiped out all theJews at the beginning of the Nazi era, are now SWASTIKA NIGHT v themselves loathed, considered Untouchable. Seeing the relationship between gender hierarchy and class structure, Burdekin, in her earlier novel Proud Man, had written that English society (which that book's fully evolved narrator labels 'subhuman') is divided horizontally by a privilege ofclass and vertically by a privilege ofsex. In Swastika Night she further suggests that the sop of gender dominance ensures the co-operation of men who are themselves the victims of domination: no matter what their status, they are granted the assurance ofstill being superior to women.2 The German men, meanwhile, embrace the Hitlerian creed, which includes the words: 'And I believe in pride, in courage, in violence, in brutality, in bloodshed, in ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues.' If this is satire, it is also an...