Marguerite Harkness

The imminent end of the millennium, predictably, prompts apocalyptic tales of the end of the world as we know it. What seems to differentiate this literature from earlier apocalyptic tales is the increasing complicity of women in a gendered apocalypse. Apocalypse becomes almost feminized. While earlier tales distanced the source of a final disruption onto an "other," and dramatized the source of destruction in traditionally male domains (for instance war or science), increasingly the source of destruction lies within us and within female domains.

Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale details the complicity of women in the upheaval that generates Gilead; Nadine Gordimer centers July's People on the social and sexual roles of Maureen Smales; P.D. James focuses upon universal sterility in her novel The World of Men; Tom De Haven moves from a male narrative point of view in Sunburn Lake to female narrators as the world spirals out of control and into apocalypse. Perhaps epitomizing this gendered and internal source of apocalypse most succinctly, Doris Lessing ultimately moves the source of destruction into the womb with Harriet's conception of the fifth child.

Implicitly, these shifts may suggest that feminist and poststructuralist interrogations, aimed at dissolving male boundaries and certainties, simultaneously prompt feminized versions of apocalypse.