{"id":1470,"date":"2018-06-26T16:25:07","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T14:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1470"},"modified":"2018-06-26T16:25:07","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T14:25:07","slug":"katharine-burdekins-swastika-night-in-the-times-of-the-handmaids-tale-a-warning-about-patriarchal-enslavement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2018\/06\/26\/katharine-burdekins-swastika-night-in-the-times-of-the-handmaids-tale-a-warning-about-patriarchal-enslavement\/","title":{"rendered":"KATHARINE BURDEKIN\u2019S SWASTIKA NIGHT<\/em> IN THE TIMES OF THE HANDMAID\u2019S TALE<\/em>: A WARNING ABOUT PATRIARCHAL ENSLAVEMENT<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> (1985) many years ago before seeing the unfairly neglected film adaptation with the late Natasha Richardson as Offred, directed in 1990 by Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff and written by none other than Nobel Prize award-winner Harold Pinter. I have not seen, thank you very much, the ongoing HBO series, now in its second season and the object of a hot debate about whether watching misogynistic torture porn is every feminist\u2019s duty or yet another insidious patriarchal contamination of a text about women\u2019s suffering. On principle, I dislike feminist dystopia because in the end it tends to depress women and favour patriarchy by multiplying sexist images of women in deep distress. I believe, however, that this is a good time to recall another key feminist dystopia, which may even have inspired George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>. I refer to Katherine Burdekin\u2019s Swastika Night<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I hesitate whether to call this book a novel because, as it is often the case with utopia and dystopia, its plot is flimsy and what truly matters is the description of the happy or unhappy state of a given civilization. Burdekin (1896-1963) published Swastika Night<\/em> in 1937, using the male penname Murray Constantine, as a specific warning about a future in which Adolf Hitler had not only won WWII but also become the object of a divine cult, enduring at the time the novel begins already for 700 years. Please, recall that Burdekin\u2019s dystopia appeared two years before WWII began and one year after the Berlin Olympics, when the world didn\u2019t yet suspect that the catastrophe that started in 1939 was on the horizon. The Jewish Holocaust that overlapped with this period and that lasted until 1945, however, may not have been so unexpected since Burdekin includes it in her novel, as one of the many shows of power of the Nazi regime. Her book didn\u2019t do very well at the time of its release but was re-issued in 1940 within a left-wing collection, to be soon forgotten again. Decades later, feminist scholar Daphne Patai finally realized that Burdekin was Constantine and Swastika Night<\/em> was re-released in 1985\u2013the same year when Atwood published The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In Burdekin\u2019s novel the world consists of two militaristic blocks constantly at war: the Nazi Empire, which comprises Europe and Africa, and the Japanese Empire (all of America, Asia, and Australia). Hitler\u2019s miraculous birth from God the Thunderer without a mother is the foundation for the most horrendous misogyny ever imagined. Women have been reduced to the most basic animal function as breeding machines. They\u2019re not sexually interesting to the men, who bond with each other through homosexual sex and a complex pseudo-feudal network of allegiances. Even more thoroughly than in 1984<\/em>, all records of the past have been destroyed so that the Nazi Empire appears to be the only possible way of life. The plot narrates how a book assembled by a disaffected Nazi Knight falls into the hands of an Englishman, Alfred, though whom we discover how this sinister masculinist society works.<\/p>\n

Men\u2019s compliance with the Nazi patriarchal system is business as usual: patriarchy tells men that they are superior to women (sounds familiar, right?) and, so, they feel entitled to abusing them in any way they want. In Swastika Night<\/em> rape is not a crime\u2013it is a man\u2019s right to which women must submit (unless they are officially \u2018owned\u2019 by a specific man). This is a demonstration of power, with no pleasure involved, since women are considered disgusting; beautiful young boys are preferred as objects of sexual desire. Mothers are routinely separated from their male offspring at eighteen-months but allowed to keep their daughters as they need to be educated into submission. This is all the education they receive. The boys are also educated in patriarchal submission but at least this affords them the protection of their fathers who, of course, try to do as well as they can by them.<\/p>\n

Hitler was a defender of the Victorian \u2018separation of the spheres\u2019, a patriarchal doctrine by which women were told that they should accept being wives and mothers as their main role in life. In public he would claim that this should be a cherished role by no means inferior to those played by men; in private, he made no bones of abhorring women (and never had children), though he could be a gentleman if he chose to. It seems that the Nazi pro-natalist policies were not, however, particularly successful and that the aim of returning to pre-1914 birth rates was never achieved. Historian Jill Stephenson explains that the Nazi project of expanding the \u2018Aryan race\u2019 was undermined by the regime itself, which sent the \u2018Aryan\u2019 men to conquer Europe and, thus, left the \u2018Aryan\u2019 women with no adequate mates\u2013instead, they were surrounded by foreign war prisoners, which in the end only resulted in many illegitimate children of the unwanted kind (in the Nazi\u2019s view, of course). I won\u2019t even mention what was done to Jewish mothers, and children.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfundamental immutable laws of Hitler Society\u201d dictate that \u201cAs a woman is above a worm, So is a man above a woman. As a woman is above a worm, So is a worm above a Christian\u201d\u2013yes, religion is banned, except for the Hitlerian cult. What is then \u201cthe meanest, filthiest thing that crawls on the face of the earth\u201d? A Christian woman. A classic mistake often made about patriarchy is that it privileges all men: this is not correct, for whereas men are persuaded that they are above all women, the pecking order in patriarchy is inexorable. \u201cAs a man is above a woman, So is a Nazi above any foreign Hitlerian. As a Nazi is above a foreign Hitlerian, So is a Knight above a Nazi. As a Knight is above a Nazi, So is Der Fuehrer (whom may Hitler bless) above all Knights, even above the Inner Ring of Ten\u201d. God lies at the top of the pyramid. The word \u2018mother\u2019 is obscene. \u2018Marriage\u2019 no longer exists in the vocabulary of the English language.<\/p>\n

Women were once as desirable as boys but the new women of the Nazi Empire are pitiful creatures, with their \u201cnaked shaven scalps,\u201d the \u201chorrible meek bowed way they had of walking and standing\u201d; they have \u201cno grace, no beauty, no uprightness, all those were male qualities. If a woman dared to stand like a man she would be beaten\u201d. When they age past menopause women stop being socially useful beings and are only tolerated because they help to raise the younger generation of female slaves. Men like Alfred, though \u2018good\u2019 in comparison to his Nazi oppressors, never care \u201cabout the ordinary day-to-day sufferings of women\u201d. <\/p>\n

This starts changing somehow when the secretly rebellious Knight Hermann (of the Inner Ring of Ten) corroborates to Alfred that Hitler was indeed born of a woman and that, as the rumour goes, the creatures were different in the past. Why, Alfred wonders, \u201chave they let themselves go down so?\u201d Here is a passage that will hurt any woman reader (though please recall that this is a Nazi speaking, no matter how disloyal to the Hitlerian cause): \u201cThey acquiesced in the Reduction of Women, which was a deliberate thing deliberately planned by German men. Women will always be exactly what men want them to be. They have no will, no character, and no souls; they are only a reflection of men. So nothing that they are or can become is ever their fault or their virtue\u201d. We might agree that women\u2019s standards of beauty change to please men but when Hermann claims that \u201cIf men want them to have an appearance of perfect freedom, even an appearance of masculine power, [women] will develop a simulacrum of those things\u201d, we may think that Burdekin is going too far. The conclusion that men can never \u201cstop this blind submission and cause the women to ignore them and disobey them. It\u2019s the tragedy of the human race\u201d is infuriating, perhaps because it surpasses the limits of the novel to become something that rings true. Sorry.<\/p>\n

The conversation continues, with Alfred defending the idea that, then, \u201cIt must be right for women to submit to men. Anything else would be unnatural\u201d. The Knight disagrees: \u201cIt would be all right (\u2026) if men were infallible\u201d but it is women\u2019s misfortune to have followed inadequate leaders. This is what I call \u2018the faulty patriarchy argument\u2019. Once a friend taunted me by declaring that feminism is the product of bad patriarchy, that is to say, if patriarchy had really fulfilled its own ideals (the chivalric code) then women would have seen no need to rebel. If every man were Darcy, we would all be happy Liz Bennets. Unfortunately, as the Knight Hermann observes, men of the patriarchal persuasion are not infallible\u2013and, so, they abuse their authority using violence to confirm their power. Hence the constant conflicts with each other and over\/with the women and children supposed to obey patriarchal family heads.<\/p>\n

In Swastika Night<\/em> the \u2018Reduction of Women\u2019, as the process is called, does not begin from above, as it happens in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>. It begins from below with the devaluation of rape. Like the men who have distorted the label \u2018incel\u2019 (involuntarily celibate), created to define recently separated individuals, into a misogynistic badge of dishonour, the Nazis believe that \u201cthe rejection-right of women was an insult to Manhood (\u2026)\u201d. Their main theorist, one von Wied, claims (like the incels) that women\u2019s beauty is another \u201cinsult to Manhood\u201d for it gives females \u201can enormous and disgusting sexual power over men\u201d. Following this man\u2019s revolting directives, women are deprived of everything that might make them attractive: hair, flattering clothes, even basic cleanliness. When they reach the age of sixteen, they must be \u201ccompletely submissive\u201d to any man. <\/p>\n

You might think that women put up a fight rather than meekly accept the delirious Nazi mandate. On the contrary, Hermann explains, \u201cthey threw themselves into the new pattern with a conscious enthusiasm that knew no bounds\u201d. They believed, he adds, \u201cthose poor little typically feminine idiots, that if they did all that men told them to do cheerfully and willingly, that men would somehow, in the face of all logic, love them still more\u201d. There is more: the women contributed to their own degradation with their love and admiration of men, which instead of gratitude generated a reinforcement of men\u2019s feeling of superiority. Alfred begins to see that these animals are \u201cnot women at all, and never have been\u201d because they have always seen themselves as slaves with no self-esteem. The remedy, he clarifies, is \u201csimple\u201d: \u201cThe highest possible masculine pattern of living should be imposed on women (\u2026)\u201d, beginning with basic literacy, and in this way they would see that men loathe their easy submission. By the end of the novel, Alfred feels something new when he holds his newly-born daughter in his arms, though this is not really the main point of the novel.<\/p>\n

I am aware that Burdekin\u2019s controversial discourse on women\u2019s submission has elicited many answers from feminist scholars. I will insist that this is placed in the mouths of men living in an extreme form of patriarchy, though I very much suspect that the author is expressing through them her own feminist despair. The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> also complicates the issue very much with the presence of the Aunts, the women fully complicit with the system that help patriarchy to dominate the Handmaids. In Burdekin\u2019s Swastika Night <\/em>the whole situation is far worse: of course, violence was used to overpower the rebels, but most women accepted the restrictions of the (fictional) Nazi regime. Their way of life would be a nightmare even for Offred, for she recalls what life as a free woman was like whereas Burdekin\u2019s women have lost all memories of the past. Arguably, the conversations between Alfred and Hermann are designed to elicit our disagreement and to be jolted out of any possible passivity in the face of our own patriarchal domination.<\/p>\n

HBO, Amazon, Netflix: No, don\u2019t do Swastika Night<\/em>\u2013time to move on and abandon dystopia for constructive utopia.<\/p>\n

I publish a new post every Tuesday (for updates follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. My web: http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (1985) many years ago before seeing the unfairly neglected film adaptation with the late Natasha Richardson as Offred, directed in 1990 by Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff and written by none other than Nobel Prize award-winner Harold Pinter. I have not seen, thank you very much, the ongoing HBO series, now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-1470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}