Engendering the Apocalypse 

In 1919, W. B. Yeats wrote his famous apocalyptic poem, "The Second Coming." Envisioning a failing civilization, where "the ceremony of innocence" is drowned and "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity," Yeats imagines the return of an old deity, one whose "twenty centuries of stoney sleep" had been "vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle." He ends his poem, however, not with certainty or vision, but with a question: "What rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Against the backdrop of what may be a failing civilization, contemporary writers imagine their own "rough beast/Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem." Intensified by the approach of the new millennium, apocalyptic visions undergird works as diverse as P.D. James' Children of Men, Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains, Nadine Gordimer's July's People, Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nor have male writers eschewed the phenomenon: as one instance, the increasingly fragmented and poststructuralist style of Tom De Haven's Sunburn Lake mimics and reveals the novel's growing sense of apocalypse. Readers can bring their own examples of the genre.

But what strikes me most forcefully in the fiction in this last half of the twentieth century is the gendered nature of apocalypse. Atwood's Handmaid's Tale centers its apocalyptic story on the treatment of women, forced into a perversely purified sexual slavery in order to allow the culture any hope of sexual reproduction; P.D. James, more ordinarily known as a detective writer, envisions the day no more children are conceived in her futuristic tale; Doris Lessing's prelude to apocalypse is the conceiving of a child, Ben Lovatt, who is a monster, a throw back threatening the collapse of "civilization," having destroyed "the House of David," his father's fortress while Lessing's overtly apocalyptic novel, Memoirs of a Survivor, constructs roving gangs of small children without remorse or any tribal morality, visions of failed mothering, and women who must break through to the other side of the collapsing little world. And Nadine Gordimer, overtly contemplating violent revolution and dissolution in South Africa, centers on Maureen Smales's sexually charged relationship to her African servant July and her sexually figured escape from the paralysis that her position creates. The helicopters bringing either "saviours or murderers" are oddly female, directly sexual beings:

These sexualized visions of apocalypse differ from the versions our culture inherited from the book of Daniel or the Revelations of St. John; most differ first in ways they share with earlier versions in this century: 1) they cannot and do not conceive or construct the new kingdom, the new heaven which will follow the collapse of this failing world and 2) enemies (or causes of apocalypse) are increasingly among us, not among some demonic other. But they differ as well in gendered ways; they differ from the military and male constructions of nuclear apocalypse from the fifties; they differ from exclusively male versions of either Conrad's Heart of Darkness or its copycat, Apocalypse Now!, of the seventies. Apocalypse now is entangled with gender, sex, and reproduction. It is, perhaps, feminized. Tom De Haven's Sunburn Lake shifts to a specifically female center and point of view as he moves from the thirties--with its final vision of fragile family--through the more obviously destructive eighties and the disastrous twenty-first century; Graham Swift's Waterland places at the center of the personal destruction (which runs parallel to public destruction), the abortion of a child, the theft of another child, and the ambiguous fathering of Dick.

That is not to say that the proximate causes of the collapse are all gendered. There are, obviously, pragmatic and "realistic" exigencies in these novels: pollution, atomic warfare, violence in our cities, centuries of oppression grooming the freedom fighters of South Africa, shortages of food and water, etc. But many of these texts do connect gender and sexual issues to causation: drops in the fertility rate of women, the conception of a true enemy within, the destructiveness of sexual relationships entangled with power, failures of adult sexual relationships, even indeed the independence of women and its concomitant effect on "traditional" family values. Ignoring the difficulties attendant upon the social revolution of the sixties does not make those difficulties disappear. And these texts, in at least one way of reading them, at the very least interrogate the feminist and poststructualist revolutions of our time, sounding occasionally like Daniel Quale, as well as proposing that women bear the brunt of collapsing societies. If the enemy is within, the most extreme image of that "within" in contemporary fiction is Harriet's womb rather than spies and cowards and madmen with bombs.

These tales do not excuse women from the general complicity even when they bear the greater burden of the catastrophe. In Atwood, women cannot escape complicity in the disaster that permits Gilead to exist. In Lessing's The Fifth Child, Harriet's selfishness, her desire to withdraw and retreat to an idealized Victorian family and home has as its corollary the birth of her monster child, the most obvious vision of what our future holds for us. Gordimer's July's People clearly implicates Maureen Smales in the imperialist, racist, and immoral regime of apartheid--despite her liberalism--that leads first to the wars and rumours of war and ultimately to her departure from family and July.

Let me take a passage from Atwood's Handmaid's Tale as one example of how feminist and poststructuralist ideas are implicitly interrogated by these texts. I choose this novel to look at first because many of you have read it and second because on first blush that might be the most difficult text in which to blame women at all. Simultaneously, however, parts of the text indict the current cultural condition AND notions of liberation, an indictment that echoes in many current apocalyptic texts. Offred muses about her generation: "It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives" (294). In that musing, of course, Offred describes a basic position of a postmodern society, of a society that--in seeking to open closed boundaries--ends up creating a world without even the boundaries that might protect children from being snatched, women from being raped. The novel balances between Aunt Lydia's "freedom from" and the earlier generation's "freedom to," both most clearly focused on women. That is, Gilead removes women's freedom to be independent, "to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives": the first "sign" being a removal of women's financial independence, later signs the removal of any freedom to control their own sexuality and reproduction. Gilead proposes to substitute a freedom from rape, violence and denigration (largely of course by ritualizing those phenomena). I am not suggesting that Atwood approves of Gilead; I am suggesting that her art does not deny the dangers of human experience without boundaries where freedom and license become indistinguishable and women's part in creating that world. Poststructuralist analysis has proposed the demolition of sanctified boundaries as imprisoning and inaccurate; feminist theory has proposed that those boundaries are patriarchal and stifling. Both have insisted on the shifting, uncertain nature of language. And yet, the absence of boundaries has its costs as well, as the pre-Gilead world suggests.

Clearly in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the oppressive Gileadan society and its authorities place the blame for moral disintegration squarely on the shoulders of the unwomen of the feminist revolution. Dismissing that idea, readers must however acknowledge that Gilead doesn't exist without causes that implicate women. The narrator recognizes and accepts the authorities' view of the cultural conditions when she records the shutting of the "Pornomarts," the absence of "any Feels on Wheels vans" all of which had been "a nuisance" (225-26). Those are part of freedoms to: freedoms to enjoy pornography (a freedom of the press), freedom to have prostitutes traveling around in vans, etc. Atwood's women accommodated the "stories. . . read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found--often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst--in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or note; at any rate, killed. There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, . . . .These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hope they would save you" (293). Those threats, however, were somewhere away from "your man," and your life. You remained safe and silent.

Atwood's Commander, a character who elicits only the smallest part of sympathy from the readers, points out "The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore. . . . I mean there was nothing for them to do with women" (272); the porn shops and prostitution, the freedom to, was not enough: "the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. . . . You know what they were complaining about the most. Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage" (273). Men, without the old boundaries, are as anchorless, the Commander seems to believe, as the Unwomen; further, sexuality itself was becoming a victim of the society without limits, feelings without constraint.

P.D James's Omegas--the last children in the world--suffer from much the same malady and end up as violent and superior as Atwood's men. By the time the novel opens, wandering bands of indifferent, at least slightly and often more hostile young persons view the old with contempt, "seem incapable of human sympathy." These are children, now men and women, who are a race apart," because they have been "indulged, propitiated, feared, regarded with a half superstitious awe" (14). That is, they have lived without perimeters, boundaries, limits.

P.D. James's The Children of Men differs from Atwood's construction of the coming apocalypse, partly because James divides her text into two parts, "Omega"--the end and "Alpha"--the new beginning, fulfilling in a more traditional way the broad outlines of apocalyptic literature. She differs, too, in her focus on men, both in her title and in the narration of the novel, divided as it is into a diary of a middleaged male professor and a more knowing third person narrator. Like Atwood, she focuses her apocalypse on sexuality. Theo, our diary writer, tells us almost immediately that he is part of the problem, having discovered at an early age how to avoid "without guilt, the commitments of love" (34). Theo tells us that his "obsessive self-sufficiency" is HIS problem, but readers cannot fail to see the connection between that self-sufficiency and the increasing masturbatory nature of sexuality, porno shops, etc.

James's text shares with Atwood and Lessing its valorization of love and commitment and its condemnation and blaming of a society that had rejected love, family, commitment. James almost echoes Atwood: Harriet attacks our hero:

It is against this backdrop of cultural decay imaged as the removal or change of boundaries and limits surrounding sexuality that the Alpha asserts itself, significantly enough at the conclusion of a Evensong Church service, attended without faith by our diary writer, and in the person of a "defective" woman who has escaped testing for fertility because she is not physically perfect. Later the miraculous birth occurs, the product of adultery between the imperfect woman and the priest with epilepsy and outside the bonds of marriage. (It also occurs in what resembles a stable; Theo acting as an odd Joseph taking care of an odd Mary, her hour come at last, with the threatening Xan acting an equally odd Herod.) The woman, Julian, knows she didn't love the priest, who dies to prevent her death: "'I didn't hove him, but I liked having him in love with me. I envied him because he could love so much, could feel so much. . . .'" (275).

Nadine Gordimer's July's People is both more fixed in the mundane and contingent world and, in many ways, a richer and more complex work than James; even richer than Atwood's. I reveal, perhaps, my own prejudices in that statement. But Gordimer does not erase issues of race and other-ness in the ways that James and Atwood do (Atwood disposes of African-Americans in one terse references, quite odd if one assumes she is analyzing US culture); nor does Gordimer ignore issue of class in her novel. What she shares with them, the issues of gender and sexuality that I have been outlining, occur within and as a part of the cultural condition of South Africa. Further, while the issues of language and its power and elasticity are central to Atwood's tale (and not to James'), Gordimer's tale extends that reach by considering the varieties of language operative in South Africa, from English to Afrikaans, to the variety of languages the Africans represent and the despised pigeon African used by white officials in their dealings with Africans. Nor does she, ultimately, place her faith so oddly in the single word "love" with which Offred responds to the Commander when he asks what Gilead has forgotten in its reforms of civilization, nor the "love" that undergirds the closure of James' The Children of Men. Nor does she envision the mystical transportation that closes Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor. Indeed, Gordimer leaves us without a particular hope within the dissolving world, the boundary-less world in which Maureen finds herself. By her own epigraph, Gordimer describes the middle space, the interregnum between orders with their boundaries and limits.

The disruption of those old boundaries is absolutely essential--I am not arguing that the old is good. I am arguing that the women here share in those negative boundaries and that the text specifically centers on Maureen's misunderstanding of how she participates in those boundaries--in quite gendered terms. Late in the novel, there is a remarkable scene between Maureen and July:

The text drives home the point when it describes the scene: "The incredible tenderness of the evening surrounded them as if mistaking them for lovers." (152-3) Maureen makes herself into "the death's harpy image" which "meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls" (153). This scene is, indeed, the end of the relationship--the climax of destruction of the old boundaries, the old ways. And it centers not on the male whites running the system, but on the relationships between a male black South African and a female white South African. The vision is, thus gendered, entangled with sexuality and the roles assigned to men and women.

When Tom De Haven divides his Sunburn Lake into three sections, with three different narrative voices, moving from the pseudo-tough guy of the thirties to the now aging "perfect girl" from the girl groups of the sixties living on into the greedy eighties (and making her money doing real estate) to a futuristic sunburn lake where Tragedy meets, and merges, with Joy, he moves from a male perspective to two female perspectives. The first of the women engages in conversations--we hear only one side--that propose very little connection to others (including men) either verbally (they do not narrate) or literally (they do not marry successfully); one friend makes her pin money by engaging in phone sex from a 900 number. Our "perfect girl" of the second section of the novel is frozen emotionally in that adolescence of perfection, still believing that her true hero, Bobby Spangler, will some day come, while he colors carefully within the lines of a children's coloring book, while all about her the gentrification of a neighborhood conflicts starkly with the disintegration of society, of race relations, of relations between men and women (which are marked by abuse and by distance--those 900 number sex calls).

The second of the women records, much as Offred had, her story for others whose only connection appears to be through tape recordings, played on tape recorders whose batteries are in short supply (becoming shorter). That is, the very narrative of the novel moves away from print media into verbal/telephone media, and finally into the lone voice recording for others who may or may not ever hear that voice. Increasingly isolated physically and linguistically, Joy finally becomes one with Tragedy, a now mute singer, who "speaks" only through Joy. And that is the end: the union of Joy with Tragedy, indicative of intimacy, may be the last act of the human race: the white noise and black line of the text subsumes all. How women constellate in this apocalyptic vision is complex: on the one hand, we can remark that the only "fulfilled" intimacy is the lesbian relationship between Joy and Tragedy, the sister arts. And it is easy enough to see that men are increasingly useless, clinging to the old rules and boundaries that are, increasingly, trivialized by the text. The central male of the second section of the novel, for instance, practices his rule fixations by coloring in kids' coloring books, carefully, always between all the lines. In the third section, Dick Idea attempts in the midst of total destruction to organize a neighborhood watch which he will control. The apocalypse--the dissolving of all boundaries of self and other, body and mind--creates the one positive relationship between Joy and Tragedy. But that relationship also spells death for Joy as she embraces her dying friend, alter ego, lover, Tragedy.

There are dangers in these investigations for me, of course. Implicating women and reproduction in these visions of apocalypse risks reiterating the old tale of "Eve's temptation"--fixing potential blame in women. And, certainly, the writers who concern me here are not known as blamers of women for the evils of the world. If a film like Dr. Strangelove erases women (except for the sexualized bombs of fantasy), to insist on the presence of women in the coming destruction of the world is to risk echoing the Whore of Babylon of Revelations. But to ignore the specifically female experience of apocalypse poses perhaps greater dangers. And to ignore what Gordimer calls the morbid symptoms of the interregnum, that space between ordered societies, seems equally dangerous. By extension, to valorize the poststructural, a world without limits or boundaries with a language that may not permit meaningful communication, can destroy as well as, and as easily as, it can liberate.