What if women had the power to dominate the world? This question is expressed in Naomi Alderman’s empowering novel, The Power. For the longest time, men have dominated the world and have had a very strong amount of power over women. This power that they hold allows them to treat women as if they were objects or props that they can use to their advantage. However, in this novel, the dominance that men is switched over to women, giving them the power to humiliate and torture men just like men have done to women over the limitless and boundless majority of history. This makes women gain a very large amount of confidence and forcefulness and this electrical power that they hold causes a major change in the world with an exchange of the power systems and the perceptions regarding gender. However, the major change the occurs starts off as a positive change, but ends off as a negative one, clearly showing the destructiveness that power can cause when in the hands of both genders.
The novel is narrated through four various perspectives. The first one is a girl called Roxy, who saw her mother get murdered and who has father that is a gangster. The second one is Margo, who is known as a US politician, and she is forced to hide her secret, which is that she is capable of producing electrical power through her body, also known as “the power”. The third one is Allie, who at first is living with her foster father and is constantly sexually abused by him, but she manages to get away and recreate herself as a spiritual commander of the Earth’s female population, known as Mother Eve. Finally, the fourth one is Tunde, who is a boy from Nigeria. He becomes a reporter who reports the escalation of female dominance all over the world.
The theme of Power plays both a positive and negative a role in the novel. In the beginning of the novel, it plays a positive role by strongly showing what power can do to women themselves when in the hands of one. The women in the novel receive that power by discovering that they have the capability to produce electrical current through their bodies. They utilize this to their own advantage by using their bodies to harm men. This violence that men are affected by are all atrocities that occur in the present day, except with the genders switched. The modern society in the novel becomes matriarchal instead of patriarchal. So, when the power is placed in the hands of a woman, men experience the negative things that they have done towards women, allowing them to receive a taste of their own medicine. When reading this novel, a man will visualize a dreadful dystopia. However, a woman will visualize a reasonably precise condition of the world and the societies within it as it is in the current day. This may seem like a negative thing. However, it is positive because it allowed women to gain an unbelievable amount of confidence, which is something they lacked when men were in power. Additionally, before the women in the novel had discovered their power, they were all going through some sort of struggle involving inequality and sexism. Some examples are that women were prohibited to drive in Saudi Arabia, and men kept female sex slaves captive in Moldova. This relates back to the movie, Hidden Figures, which takes place in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and shows how sexism is a major downfall that has negatively impacted many Black women in the past, and is still an ongoing issue to this day. In the film, the three main characters are women and not men, which allowed others to undervalue the women’s abilities at work. In one part of the film, one of the women states an idea during a meeting and her boss proceeds to make a joke about it. He uses humour as a coping mechanism, and by doing so, it shows how he does not take her seriously and underestimates her ability. The theme of power is definitely a significant theme in the novel and it exhibits the downfalls as well as the escalation and rise of the female population, which many find inspiring. The author does a very good job of luring and attracting the reader by showing how independent and vulnerable female characters grow to become strong and powerful leaders. The girls start off in very sexually, physically, and emotionally abused positions, but then they come to find out that they at last have the power to defend themselves and rule the world, which ultimately makes the novel very strong and empowering, especially for young female readers like myself.
On the other hand, power also plays a negative role in the novel. When women become stronger and more powerful than men because of the gender role switch, men are viewed more in a way that reflects exactly how women are viewed in this present day and how they are situated in the world from a social point of view. This is shown by one of the characters in the novel known as Tatiana, and she says, “…just like a man does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say…” (p. 229) These phrases are cases that express the idea that men and women are unequal and have distinct and differing determinist traits. The sentence that Tatiana stated also exhibits the idea that women who are powerful can be just as ferocious and brutal as men who are powerful. As the novel continues, the positive side of power, which is the side that reveals empowering women, changes into something negative because of the deep-rooted unlawful essence of power. The novel starts off with the idea that the world could be a much better place if women were in charge, and the women in the novel who received parliamentary power might have originally wanted it so that they could apply some changes and make the world a better place, but instead they turned into the oppressive and autocratic leaders that they were attempting to get rid of. An example of this is revealed when Margot says to herself that ‘she wants power because she wants to knock him down.’ (p. 254) All in all, the women’s purposes for wanting power turns out to be negative instead of positive, and the power alters them the same way it would have to men if they had that power.
Another theme that shaped the novel is the theme of Technology and Social Media. In the novel, religion becomes “female-centered”, which affects who people looked up to. For example, Jewish people started looking to Miriam instead of Moses, Muslim people looked to Fatima instead of Muhammad, and so on and so forth. This type of religion was quickly spread and talked about on large social networks, such as Youtube, making it a very popular topic. Additionally, many riots were filmed and posted on Youtube by a male journalist, which allowed him to get recognized by very known TV networks, such as CNN and BBC. Furthermore, many online organizations stated how they were completely against women, which encouraged them to start a movement involving “men’s rights”. This exhibits the power of technology in the novel and the important role it plays regarding how fast information is passed on and how easy and accessible it is in terms of being able to share your own individual opinion regarding topics such as gender rights.
In conclusion, I believe that both men and women are not capable of containing a massive amount of power and dominance in their hands and should both be placed in an equal position. This novel is a pure example of the idea that if power is placed in the wrong hands, it can be completely destructive. Men with power can be violent, abusive, and self-serving by using women to their advantage and treating them as if they were tools. However, women can be just as cruel and dictatorial as men too, which further proves the idea that power cannot and should not be trusted in the hands of men or women.