Naomi Alderman’s The Power: A Speculative Feminist Dystopian Fiction Mirroring the Here and Now

Abstract

Speculative fiction, containing speculative elements based on supposition and imagination, changes the dynamics of what is real or possible as we perceive them in our current world and then surmises the likely consequences. Litterateurs have employed speculative fiction as a means of suggesting the latent possibilities and promises for our immediate reality which are not yet enacted or materialised. Accordingly, female writers of feminist speculative fiction, particularly from the 1970s onwards, have used this genre as an effective tool both to expose and to interrogate the oppressive status quo and the normative ethos of the conventional power relation between the sexes prevailing at present. In keeping with this, Naomi Alderman, in her Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017 winning novel The Power, strategically flips the current power structure between the sexes on its head by investing the women, primarily adolescent girls, with the unforeseen yet inherent power of electrocuting men which ultimately results in a Cataclysm initiating a new world order ruled and dominated by empowered women some time in the future. This paper aims at exploring how Alderman, a staunch feminist, purposefully demonstrates in The Power that her novel’s fictional dystopia, though macabre and gruesome, is, in essence, a fairly accurate representation as well as a critique of the hierarchical gender relationship as it is prevalent in our present reality.

Keywords

• power
• speculative fiction
• feminist dystopia
• speculative future
• present reality
• gender relationships