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"Day of the Girls": Reading Gender, Power, and Violence in Naomi Alderman'S The Power
- College Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 47, Number 2, Spring 2020
- pp. 398-433
- 10.1353/lit.2020.0016
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Naomi Alderman's The Power is a speculative fiction that imagines a dystopia in which women, enabled by the ability to generate electrical power, come to rule a matriarchal world order. Yet the narrative highlights the danger of replicating old paradigms; indeed, critics were quick to highlight the problematic inversions of The Power, noting that whilst a female superpower might offer a reprieve from reality, it is neither optimistic nor feminist. However, the complications of Alderman's narrative are much more nuanced, as it uses representations of extreme violence as a strategy of resistance. It does so through a critical exposure of the means through which patriarchy controls women, and by literalizing those mythic archetypes associated with femininity, specifically the monstrous-feminine and its association with abject and highly sexualized imagery. By drawing upon conceptualizations of the monstrous-feminine and abjection via Barbara Creed and Julia Kristeva, and Linda Hutcheon's theorizations of postmodern parody, this essay argues that by reframing "female monstrosity as a source of physical power" (to quote Casey Ryan Kelly [2016]), The Power offers a scenario in which women are able to "combat a culture of gender violence."