The Power

Women’s ascent into power first stirs within the confines of a remote convent along the coast of South Carolina. Most obviously, using the setting of a convent to chart the emergence of women reflects Alderman’s acknowledged debt to her mentor, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, and specifically to Atwood’s landmark work, The Handmaid’s Tale.

The convent here becomes less a refuge for women as it does for Atwood and more a launching site for their newfound status, as women around the world discover the power of the skein. Allie, on the run from killing her foster father, is directed to the Sisters of Mercy Convent by the voice in her head. After enduring abuse from multiple foster parents, Allie receives from the nuns a generous and compassionate welcome.

The nuns, Allie finds, “are kind and the company of women is pleasing. [...] She’s not found the company of men has had much to recommend it” (45). Women, Armon suggests, are different—and thus the convent is used by Armon to create a spiritual significance around the emergence of women, which is otherwise a simple product of a complex biological aberration. It is the convent and its grounding in the wisdom, literature, symbols, rituals, vocabulary, and logic of Catholicism that teaches Allie how to respond to the new powers of women. It also shows her how the skein provides a generation of women the opportunity to revise the millennia-old message of Christianity. “So I teach a new thing,” (89), she says.

Under the influence of the convent, which acts as a testing ground for Allie’s emerging theology, Allie reconstructs Christianity into a woman-centered gospel, recasts God as a loving Mother, and displaces Christ from the center of the Christian drama of salvation and replaces him with the Virgin Mary. Thus, it is Allie, after she assumes the persona of Mother Eve, whose theological writings and Internet broadcasts provide the new women’s movement its spiritual vigor. By co-opting the vision of Christianity, Mother Eve inevitably embraces the concept of apocalyptic cleansing. Christ’s message, after all, was that only by destroying the old order can a new order be realized. Thus, the spiritual implications of the skein draw from the symbol of the convent itself, which provides a transcendent dimension to the women’s emergence into power. 

Because the ascendance of women is related to a biological anomaly—specifically the sudden development of a tight braid of muscle along the collarbone—the novel uses the skein as a symbolic device for exploring the relationship between gender and biology, and more specifically the relationship between power and biology. After all, as Margot Cleary ponders, for five millennia now, men’s power is little more than an accident of biology: Men have a penis, an Adam’s apple, and no breasts. That arbitrary biological makeup has empowered men to assert an oppressive dominance over women for centuries. Biology not only defines power but creates destiny and in turn shapes history.

Initially, men scramble to account for the skein. Perhaps it is as harmless as an appendix, they argue, a vestigial muscle cluster able to produce mild static electrical shocks, like dragging feet across a carpet. But as the women begin to discipline the skein, men see the implications. The skein then is regarded as the nefarious result of a highly controversial government program designed to protect people from nerve gas poison; or maybe, men posit, it’s some kind of virus that, like influenza, will pass. When it is clear, however, that the skein is a genetic mutation, the implications are clear. Women are in charge, literally. Frustrated, men scheme for ways to destroy the skein—they experiment with skein removal procedures, the equivalent of castration; desperate, they tinker with the idea of transplanting the skein into men only to find that men cannot control the energy.

The skein then raises the question whether simple anatomy, not gender, defines power. Women do not ask for the skein, nor do they not evolve into power through the patient advance within hierarchies already in place. Instead, they use their biological advantage to grab power and to smash the patriarchal structures of civilization. Anatomy creates advantage. It is a page ripped from the patriarchal playbook. The skein then represents how biology could have easily been tipped to favor women, how having this twist of muscle, like having a penis, would be sufficient to advance one gender into real power over another.

Glitter, the street name of the potent drug that the Monke cartel sells to women, symbolizes how quickly women, when gifted with the power of the skein, want, need, even crave more power. It is not enough to be able to shock men. With Glitter the skein can incapacitate them or even kill them in a single shot. Women are giddy under the influence of the drug, and they become addicted to the rush. Along the backstreets of central London, business is brisk as the Internet broadcasts messages about the drug’s potent interaction with the skein.

The white crystalline powder with the purplish sheen is cocaine-based with uppers crushed in. It is described as “[a] purple crystal, as big as rock salt, fiddled about with by chemists and derived originally from the bark of the dhoni tree, which is native to Brazil but grows pretty well in [England] too” (178). The drug hits the streets of London less than three years after the Day of the Girls first introduces women to the skein. Unlike many other illegal recreational pharmaceuticals or even liquor, Glitter does not mellow out the user. Rather, Glitter is “calibrated. It is designed to enhance the experience” (173).

As Roxy discovers, under the potent influence of Glitter, the drug juices up the voltage of the shock and exponentially increases the pleasure felt from delivering the jolts. The money pours into the Monke syndicate. It becomes an essential element of the training regimen in the NorthStar camps. In time, the Monke syndicate, now under Roxy’s management, opens a sprawling processing facility in Bessapara to help enhance the women troops preparing for the apocalyptic showdown with the Saudi-backed male armies. While the drug enhances the experience of the skein for its users, Glitter swells the coffers of the Monke crime family.

Glitter also blurs the judgment of its users and makes the skein more of a problem than a solution. Roxy, at the height of her power as the new drug lord of the Monke family, is betrayed by her own brother, her skein ripped from her body. Now denied not only the skein but the enhanced power from Glitter, Roxy discovers a power far greater than either provides: love.