Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Susan Watkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781137486493
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137486509
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depicts the end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to this trend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporary women's work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for the past, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much male authored apocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readers the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning for society, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploring science, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time, narrativeand history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the book covers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. WatkinsContemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic FictionPalgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48650-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Rewriting and Transforming Traditions

Susan Watkins¹

(1)

School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

Susan Watkins

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Since the millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that imagines the end of the world as we know it and the limping survival of a remnant of humanity afterwards. Contemporary women writers are no exception to this apocalyptic trend, but how is their writing of the apocalypse distinctive? I argue in this book that conventional apocalyptic fiction (usually male-authored ) tends towards conservatism. In such narratives, traditional patriarchal and imperialist definitions of what civilisation is are central and the momentum after the imagined disaster is either towards the restoration of what has been lost during the apocalypse, or focuses on nostalgic mourning for the past. In popular cultural treatments of apocalypse, there are also few viable alternatives to this masculinist narrative.¹ Why do so many texts that are set in a post-apocalyptic future focus on men who are trying to survive, trying to protect women and trying to rebuild things the way they were before? Why is there so much emphasis on men’s nostalgia for the world before things changed? It is urgent that we engage with the work of those contemporary women writers who do present alternatives to this way of imagining a post-apocalyptic environment. This is because they focus on analysing the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration after such a disaster, they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse.

The aim of this book is thus to establish the distinctive ways in which contemporary women writers imagine the apocalypse. I argue that there are particular trends in the body of contemporary women’s apocalyptic writing that are unique. Studying this work as a body of work that imagines the end of the world as we know it in particular ways can provide new insights into and for the present. My argument is not that women are bound to write end-of-world fiction in a particular way because they are intrinsically different from men: in other words, this is not an essentialist proposition. Rather, I claim that women writers’ fictional engagement with apocalyptic ideas and forms is inevitably related to their specific subject positions in the contemporary moment.

The book is concerned primarily with women’s literary fiction since 2000 from the UK and North America. However, this inevitably involves a discussion of traditions of women’s and men’s science fiction and dystopian writing from around 1900 onwards in order to contextualise this work, since I argue that contemporary women writers transform and rewrite the traditions of the apocalyptic genre in order to refocus our attention on its intrinsically gendered aspects and make apocalypticism resonate for the contemporary moment. Issues of nationality , race and ethnicity are addressed at points where they intersect with those of gender and sexuality and the book includes discussion of a number of novels by North American writers of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. It is also the case that a number of interesting post-apocalyptic and dystopian fictions have recently been published in Australasia and the Indian subcontinent as well as in North America by writers of East Asian heritage. Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), for example, both draw on her own history as an indigenous Australian. The Swan Book is set in a future world adversely affected by climate change , where Aboriginal Australians living in the Northern Territory are still affected by the policies of the Intervention.² In the collection Stonefish (2004), Keri Hulme, a writer of mixed Maori, Scottish and English ancestry, includes a number of short stories and poems that include post-apocalyptic scenarios and examines how these might play out differently for ‘fourth world’ peoples.³ Before She Sleeps: A Novel by Pakistani writer Bina Shah , published in 2018, was praised by Margaret Atwood for its dystopian scenario: set in a repressive southwest Asian country, a nuclear war has caused a genetic mutation that causes a deadly type of cervical cancer to kill millions of women.⁴ Chinese Canadian Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2008) takes place partly in a future version of the Pacific Northwest, using the devices of science fiction to explore queer sexuality and the posthuman .⁵ The specific and diverse postcolonial histories which are drawn from so imaginatively in these very different texts, amongst others, deserve the focused attention that is beginning to emerge in other research work in this area.⁶

Proceeding thematically, the book begins with an examination of the ways in which novelists Jane Rogers, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Hall reconsider the relationship between science , nature and matter . My argument in Chapter 2 is that in The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), The Year of the Flood (2009) and The Carhullan Army (2007), these writers make gender and sexuality central to ideas and discourses about the natural world, the environment and female embodiment. I argue that new materialist theories, such as those of Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo , can be connected to that project. In this fiction, writing is a complex site of intra-action between agency, matter and discourse. Chapter 3 analyses the treatment of the posthuman body in a number of works by writers including Tama Janowitz, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Nnedi Okorafor. I examine how They Is Us (2008), The Stone Gods (2007), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Shadow Speaker (2007) redefine humanity in relation to technological, animal and plant life forms to foreground the presence of matter in all these. This chapter puts Donna Haraway’s theorisation of the cyborg and the animal as companion species of humanity in conversation, or intra-action, with the novels in question. The idea of the cyborg as an apocalyptic figure, rather than one that is opposed to the apocalypse, is important here.

The maternal imaginary is at the centre of Chapter 4: it is striking that a number of the fictions I study in this book focus on the mother-daughter relation and women’s interactions with each other in a post-apocalyptic environment. Using the work of Luce Irigaray , this chapter includes a consideration of the relevance of ideas of traumatic repetition and haunting and their place within the maternal imaginary and the post-apocalyptic genre. Here I examine novels including Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), Julie Myerson’s Then (2011), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017). Chapter 5 examines the relationship between gender, time , narrative and history, drawing on Elizabeth Grosz’s idea of the rupture or ‘nick’ and Haraway’s conception of the Chthulucene . I consider here Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and its use of Great Time , as well as the device of the sequel as it functions in texts as different as Doris Lessing’s Ifrik novels, Mara and Dann (1999) and General Dann (2005), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009). The sequel functions, I argue, to generate a state of suspension, proliferation or process that questions conventional conceptualisations of time, narrative and history .

In the final chapter, I focus on the prominent images in contemporary women’s post-apocalyptic fiction of words , texts or narratives that have survived the end of the world. Such texts could be part of a nostalgic attempt at preservation of the archive , but in fact function as palimpsests that sustain, revise and transform meaning after the end. This chapter pits Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now ’ (1984) and its ideas of remainderless destruction of the juridico-literary archive against Adrienne Rich’s conception of writing as ‘re-vision’ and Luce Irigaray’s ideas about the exchange of women in ‘Women on the Market ’ (1985). The novels studied in this chapter include Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family 2029–2047 (2016), Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010), Doris Lessing’s General Dann and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), concluding with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013). In different ways, all these texts show positive futures for literature , writing and the word after the imagined apocalypse. The conclusion considers the place of writing and its relationship to post-secularism and new forms of spirituality in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY (2017). The book uses a mixture of close critical analysis of literary texts and dialogue, conversation, or intra-action between relevant ideas from philosophers, theorists and critics and the fiction in question. Often, I have spent time noting the presence and puzzling out the implications of the apocalyptic imagery in the non-fiction writing considered here. Some novels appear more than once and are examined in different contexts.⁷

Contexts

What is happening now that explains the popularity of the apocalyptic and dystopian mode? In The Sense of an Ending , first published in 1967, Frank Kermode argues that ‘[a]pocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Rewriting and Transforming Traditions
• 2. Science, Nature and Matter
• 3. The Posthuman Body
• 4. The Maternal Imaginary
• 5. Time, Narrative and History
• 6. Literature and the Word
• 7. Conclusion: The Post-secular
• Back Matter