In recent years, we’ve been treated to a renaissance of feminist alternate universes in sci fi. While the greats to my mind remain Margaret Atwood, Sherri Tepper, Ursula LeGuin, and James Tiptree, Jr. (who was actually a woman), it’s been decades since we’ve really had some meaty feminist work to sink our teeth into.
Julia, which is 1984 from the character Julia’s perspective, and The Power are two recent contenders. Both are deeply flawed works, but both are provocative and worth reading. This review includes spoilers, so if you wish to read the books first before this review, by all means stop reading now and do so.
The Power, by Naomi Alderman, is the earlier work, being first published in 2019. Julia, by Sandra Newman, was published in 2023.
The premise of The Power has incredible potential. Though no one knows how or why, females begin to grow an electrically charged subcutaneous “skein” within their body that permits them to deliver an electric shock that can incapacitate or even kill. Males do not develop this, and so in a complete overhaul of society, men can be physically overpowered by women. In the past, if a man could but get his hands on a woman, he had the power to kill her in under five minutes using only his bare hands. Now, if a woman can get her hands (or any other part of her body) on a man, she can kill him almost immediately—far quicker than he could kill her. This renders men’s superior strength useless against women, for if he tries to touch her, she can kill him nearly instantaneously. Of course, women can still be killed by men with guns, but men can still be killed by women with guns. The real advantage of dominance in close physical contact has been upended.
The book then explores what changes in society and what changes in male-female relations, as well as describing what the author believes women would do with this power and how men would fight back. We know how the fight ends, because the book is written as if it were an ancient historical text pre-dating by thousands of years the matriarchy in which the historians discussing the text currently live. Indeed, one of the historians writes of “how much ‘what it means to be a woman’ is bound up with strength and not feeling fear or pain” (380), and another speculates, “I feel instinctively . . . that a world run by men would be more kind, more gentle, more loving and naturally nurturing. . . . Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women—with babies to protect from harm—have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places” (376).
The story the author weaves about the time period in which the power first manifested is both predictable and fascinating. That’s oxymoronic, of course, but nevertheless accurate. Anyone could have figured out what would have happened, but of course we never thought of it because we could never imagine it. What would a world be like if women suddenly could kill any man instantaneously just by touching him?
Would a man pick up a 16 year old girl hitchhiker? (Hear the gong in your head? That’s the incongruity between your world and theirs clashing in your brain.)
And so it goes. A whole bunch of husbands and boyfriends mysteriously die in their sleep, and their deaths are not investigated because such deaths are now so normal as to be unremarkable. There is no longer any sex trafficking or prostitution—would a man really put his life in a strange woman’s hands and visit a prostitute? Boys and girls are separated, and boys are told not to go out alone, not to use public transport alone, not to drive alone. Boys start to dress like girls in order to feel more safe and more powerful. Women form paramilitary gangs and topple governments—the Saudi government falls in twelve days. The character of heterosexual sex changes dramatically as men must fear their partner will get carried away and kill them, intentionally or unintentionally—and women can now physically coerce men into sex. Porn becomes the depiction of masochism on the part of men.
Women stop listening when men speak: “Nothing that either of these men say is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs. It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth” (78). Men no longer speak in commanding, dismissive tones to women.
God is now a “She.” Convents arise and become powerful institutions. “They have told you that man rules over woman as Jesus rules over the Church. But I say unto you that woman rules over man as Mary guided her infant son, with kindness and with love” (92). Men are taught to be “obedient and humble,” because that is God’s will for them.
New practices are introduced, such as “curbing,” a form of male genital mutilation: “[This image] depicts the “curbing” procedure in which key nerve endings in the penis are burned out as the boy approaches puberty. After the procedure. . . it is impossible for a man to achieve an erection without skein stimulation by a woman. Many men who have been subjected to curbing will never be able to ejaculate without pain” (278).
The men fight back, of course. Some try to blind the women; others try to shoot them. Others try to escape up towards the Arctic Circle to regroup. Some try to get their hands on chemical weapons. There are wars between male-led nations and female-led nations; these are brutal, and the story of rape in war with the roles reversed is absolutely blood-curdling until you realize it’s done to women even today, so you ask yourself why do you feel shocked? (316-318)
The women’s prophetess finally works out how women can end the conflict and remake the order. She sees that the problem is that the men who are currently alive remember the old order of patriarchy. Those memories must die. Using nuclear weapons, the women will bomb the planet back to the Stone Age. “And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear? . . . And then the women will win” (353).
The book ends with a glimpse of the society built after those 5000 years. We understand it to be a world of matriarchy, where men are very much in the position women are today in Western countries. We see the indulgence and the casual dismissal of men by women who are clearly in charge.
And that’s when you realize the book was a failure, even on its own terms. The real revolution would not have been that women take over and treat men like women have always been treated. While that’s the clickbait to the novel, there is no revolution in that whatsoever except to titillate our passion for “turnaround’s fair play.” The author dodged the real revolution entirely; it’s only hinted at once in one sentence midway through the book (113) and then never spoken of again. That real revolution would have been partnership between men and women. Not patriarchy, not matriarchy, but diarchy. But the author is set on there being no new thing under the sun. The new world looks just like the old world, only with roles reversed. What a shame--what a waste of an incredible premise.
The premise of Julia is similarly squandered by its author. Anyone who has read 1984 knows that Julia is a seriously underdeveloped character, probably because Orwell was a misogynist. She only has instrumental value as a plot device for Orwell, and he does not invest much thought on who Julia is or what motivates her. She is pretty much a cipher, even to Winston (who’s also a misogynist). Author Sandra Newman wants to correct that problem, rewriting 1984 from Julia’s standpoint.
Newman, however, is walking into a trap. Since Orwell has already written the plot, Newman is stuck with merely embroidering it, at least until the end when she is able to break Julia free from Winston and his story. We do get to hear more about Julia’s upbringing, and discover Julia’s parents knew Big Brother way back when he was just a young revolutionary from the same elite, educated class as they were. Her father eventually objected to the authoritarian direction the Party was taking, while her mother defended it. Her father was then hung in the streets, with Julia and her mother in “compulsory attendance” (50). Mother and daughter became political exiles in the countryside where life was unbearably harsh.
A key to Julia’s subsequent story lies in this past: Julie has become somewhat deranged because her mother encouraged her to turn her (the mother) in to the authorities in order that she (the daughter) be given more food to survive during a famine. This strange mix of guilt and gratitude produces a more reckless attitude in the young woman, as if she has already done the worst thing possible, so there is little point in trying to aspire to anything good. Her side hustle is black marketeering in the prole districts when she can slip away from work. She sees plenty of injustice, but keeps her mouth shut about it. She has many affairs, and prefers to consummate them out in the fields with the open sky above, and far away from the telescreens. Julia is completely indifferent to politics.
She succeeds in seducing Winston Smith, or “Old Misery” as she calls him. While Winston heartily enjoys their secret trysts, he is too wrapped up in his rebellious thoughts to understand her, or even seek to understand her. She’s just a prop, and his morbid self-absorption is distasteful to her. While he intones to her that, “So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing,” she pushes back with, “Oh, rubbish! Which would you rather sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive!” (125). She does not love him, but she wishes he was more.
Fatefully, O’Brien—the ogre of Orwell’s tale—insists Julia come to his house to repair his telescreen. The houses of Inner Party members are opulent, with servants and guards and electricity all day and night. Here, telescreens can be turned off, not just down. O’Brien of course knows all about her, even the secret about her mother’s betrayal. He uses this knowledge to assure her that she works for him now, and in return, she can aspire to be inducted into the Inner Party and live as they do. Her job? She will have sex with many men so that they can be caught in their own words and sentenced to torture and death.
O’Brien then descants on the need to catch these men: those she seduces will view themselves as “truth-seekers.” But, as O’Brien explains, “But soon truth demands the blood of others . . .They will commit acts of sabotage that cause the deaths of hundreds of innocents . . . They will commit every low crime, too—cheat, forge documents, blackmail, corrupt the minds of children, distribute habit-forming drugs, encourage prostitution, spread venereal diseases—anything to harm those people they see as obstacles to truth. If it might somehow serve the cause of truth to throw acid into the face of a child, the truth-lover will happily do it. They hate doublethink—so they say. But they will readily lie for truth” (146-7).
Julia doesn’t want this job of whore/betrayer, but she’s stuck: “No, she must go forward and see what came of it. There was always the chance that something would change” (151). Julia is ever the survivor—that is what her whole life has trained her to be. The experience of whoring for Big Brother leads her to a profound dissociation, where she often falls asleep while Winston is speaking because she knows he will soon be tortured in the Ministry of Love for what he has just spoken.
Through her many liaisons she discovers that there are places outside of Party control where one could escape, that in fact a war is raging and territory is being taken by the Brotherhood, which is the enemy of the Party. In addition, she has been chosen to be artificially inseminated with Big Brother’s sperm and becomes pregnant.
When O’Brien has his first meeting with Winston, Julia is in the know; she is one of the deceivers, not the deceived. The fateful conversation ensues, in which Winston proclaims at O’Brien’s behest that he is willing to murder, commit acts of sabotage which could cause innocents to die, to forge, cheat, lie, distribute drugs, corrupt the minds of children, throw sulfuric acid into the face of a child if need be to weaken the Party and strengthen the Brotherhood . . . . Julia is horrified. O’Brien proclaims them members of the anti-Party Brotherhood. She realizes, dimly, that O’Brien has merely played her, just as she saw him play Winston. He will betray her just as he will betray Smith. And so after a time they are arrested.
Despite her Big Brother pregnancy, she is sent to be tortured just as Smith and her other lovers are. Her fate is the terrible Room 101, but she is told a secret by another prisoner—101 is scheduled in 15-minute blocks. If she can just run out the clock, she stands a chance. As in Orwell’s 1984, Smith turns on her, insisting the “rodent to the face” torture is perpetrated on Julia, not on him.
But Julia, the survivor, manages to kill the rat with her bare teeth, running out the clock and stupefying her torturers--and she is released until her baby is born, after which she will be executed. Here the author is finally able to break free from Orwell’s narrative structure, which had ignored Julia’s fate to conclude the original book with Smith’s release.
For Julia does not wind up defeated as Winston does. She does not decide, as he did, that she loves Big Brother—she decides that she hates Big Brother. She decides to escape, heading towards the outskirts of the city, only to discover there is a mass evacuation because the Brotherhood of Free Men is closing in. During the evacuation, she manages to escape and be captured by the Brotherhood, who see her torture scars and accept her.
The Brotherhood has overtaken the great Crystal Palace where Big Brother lives. Big Brother, aka Humphrey Pease, is now just a querulous, demented, shrunken old man. The Brotherhood opens his wine cellars and help themselves to his luxuries.
Julia feels free, she meets old friends, all seems well. But then the Brotherhood process her paperwork so she can have ID papers and be counted among their members. And they put to her the questions . . . Are you willing to commit murder if it is necessary to the Brotherhood? Are you willing to commit acts of sabotage that would cause the deaths of hundreds of innocents? Are you willing to cheat, forge, distribute habit-forming drugs, encourage prostitution, disseminate venereal disease to weaken the Party? Are you willing to throw sulfuric acid in a child’s face? Julia recognizes the questions at once.
The Party and the Brotherhood are, in essence, both the same. Left and Right. Totalitarian or “free.” Both prepared to torture and kill her if she does not accept and parrot their lies, and submit to their horrifying ideas of what fealty means. There is no escape from these men and their male systems, for they rule across the political spectrum. Julia can only be a survivor within them; that is the best to which she can aspire under the Brotherhood, just as it was the best to which she could aspire under Big Brother and the Party. These are both brutal fraternities, and she will always be an outsider.
Julia balks at some of these horrific but familiar questions, but then realizing she has no choice, says, “Yes. Yes, I will. Yes” (385). It is as great a defeat as Smith’s was in Orwell’s original.
While the book finally takes its meaning once the author is free to take Julia beyond the end of 1984, we are given only a bleak end for all that, as bleak an ending for women as portrayed in The Power. There is no escape from destructive male systems of thought and power—even, as in The Power, when women are in charge. Indeed, in The Power, the women destroy the world, including all its innocents, with nuclear weapons in order to “save” it, which sounds very much like the oath Julia is forced to take. In the end, these two interesting but ultimately unimaginative books try to persuade us that things will always and ever be the same. In a sense, both books cannot imagine a future outside of the dominance systems created by men. Both flawed, both provocative, then.
What would have taken real imagination would be to tell us how the world could truly change, or how dominance systems could be replaced by something better. What is completely missing in both books is any possibility that a man and a woman could form a loving, equal partnership. No such relationship ever makes an appearance in either book. And the opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy; it’s diarchy. If these authors could have admitted such possibilities, a whole new world would have risen right before their eyes which they might have chronicled and explored through their fiction, as did Sheri Tepper in The Gate to Women’s Country.
In one sense, that failure is appropriate. If you cannot even conceive of that possibility, that possibility is surely closed to you. You cannot help but write books in which everything is always bleak and destructive, everything is under a system of dominance, and these conditions ever will be. There truly is no escape.
To the contrary, I know there is hope. And what I wish to see in my lifetime is an author that sees that possibility and runs with it . . . Perhaps that author I conjure in my own imagination will be a Latter-day Saint. If so, may they be moved to start writing!
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2024) "Book Reviews: Julia and The Power, Both Flawed but Intriguing," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 2 (Summer 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerJuliaPower.html, accessed <give access date>.
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