The Link between Ideology and Power in Naomi Alderman's The Power

Abstract

The Power is a feminist dystopian book that deals with how society might change if women were to hold more power than men. The book has an investigatory nature to it. It examines how the psyche of women might change and how a new ideology is bound to be born out of the new change. The author introduces a sudden ability in women to generate electrical shocks that can inflict severe injuries. The fact that men are physically stronger than women crumbles down suddenly and women start all over the world to re-examine their roles in society making sure that they emerge now as the dominant sex. The book deals with how power influences behaviour and how it dictates a new ideology. Also, the book serves to clarify how feminist dystopian fiction is function-based in the sense that it serves a purpose. This is done through relying on the technique of defamiliarization that helps the author to bring back to the forefront the injustice with which women have been treated since the dawn of time by patriarchal societies that such practices have become unfortunately normalized.