Patai, Daphne 1984. Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. Women's Studies International Forum 7(2): 85-95. DOI: 10.1016/0277-5395(84)90062-1 [ScienceDirect]
In June 1937, twelve years before the publication of 1984, a novel appeared in London with the timely title Swastika Night which strikingly foreshadows Orwell's most famous work. Swastika Night was published under the male pseudonym 'Murray Constantine', but in fact its author was Katharine Burdekin, a feminist novelist who had produced eight previous books, mostly of fantasy and science fiction - six under her own name in the years between 1922 and 1930, and two in 1934 as 'Murray Constantine'. (Patai 1984: 85)
- Constantine, Murray [Burdekin, Katharine] 2016[1937]. Swastika Night. London: Gollancz. [Internet Archive]
Swastika Night was reissued in July 1940 as a Left Book Club selection and became one of the very few works of fiction the Club ever distributed to its members. Victor Gollancz, founder of the Club and of the publishing house that to this day bears his name, was also the first publisher of George Orwell, and Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier was itself a Left Book Club selection for March 1937. There is no direct evidence that Orwell was acquainted with Burdekin's novel; only the internal similarities between 1984 and Swastika Night suggest a connection. (Patai 1984: 85)
Sounds like a whole interesting world that I know nothing about, yet.
Burdekin envisions Germany and England in the seventh century of the Hitlerian millennium. The world has been divided into the Nazi Empire (Europe and Africa) and the Japanese Empire (Asia and the Americas). In the Nazi Empire Hitler is venerated as a god and a 'Reduction of Women' has occurred by which women have been driven to an animal-like state of ignorance and are kept purely for breeding purposes. All books, records, and even [|] monuments from the past have been destroyed in an effort to make the official Nazi 'reality' the only one. The Reduction of Women and the exaltation of men has led to homosexual attachments among men, though for German men procreation is a civic duty. A type of feudal society is in force, with German Knights as the local authorities. Christians, having wiped out all the Jews at the beginning of the Nazi era, are now themselves the lowest of the low and are considered untouchable. (Patai 1984: 85-86)
Found a title on the very first page. The summary comes across as an apt extrapolation from Nazi aspirations.
The plot centers on a skeptical English engineer, Alfred, on a pilgrimage to Germany. Through his young German friend Hermann, Alfred comes into contact with a Knight named von Hess. Von Hess's family has for generations guarded a secret manuscript - probably the only non-technical book in the German Empire other than the Hitler Bible - which is an attempted reconstruction of the true history of the world before Naziism. Von Hess also possesses a photograph depicting the real Hitler - not the blond giant of a god into which he has been transformed - in the presence of a proud and strong-looking German girl. The photograph at one stroke undoes the two central tenets of Hitlerism: that Hitler was never in the defiling presence of a woman, and that women have always been the loathsome creatures that they are in this seventh century of Hitlerism. (Patai 1984: 86)
Perhaps this manuscript ordeal is what Orwell's Winston is looking for when he questions an old man in the pub. Perhaps Goldsmith's book is an echo or vestige of Burdekin's manuscript. And of course Hitler would have become a blond and blue-eyed Nordic giant in seven centuries.
Extrapolating from his own society, Orwelli in 1984 arrives at an urban society that is as shabby as post-war London, and onto this he grafts Nazi and Stalinist elements. Burdekin, however, extrapolates from the Romantic and medieval longing of such Nazi ideologues as Alfred Rosenberg and hence imagines a totalitarian society in which a spurious Germanic mythology with its cult of masculinity governs life, and sheer ignorance is combined with brutality to form the main instruments of control. (Patai 1984: 86)
Damn, "a spurious Germanic mythology" is even better (a title) but I've already committed. What I imagine is if the Proud Boys governed an empire on two continents. It would be extremely dumb.
Swastika Night and 1984 are both about the interactions of men. Burdekin addresses this issue in her exposé of the cult of masculinity, but Orwell, taking the worst male type as the model for the human species, seems to believe that the pursuit of power is an innate characteristic of human beings. Thus Orwell's despair and Burdekin's hope are linked to the degree of awareness that each has of gender roles and sexual polarization. (Patai 1984: 87)
(1) love, (2) power, and (3) curiosity.
Although Orwell gives names (such as Newspeak and doublethink) to phenomena that also appear in Swastika Night, he cannot and does not provide a name for the key concept that explains the Party's preoccupation with domination, power, and violence: these are all part of what Burdekin calls the cult of masculinity. Because she is able to name this ideology, Burdekin's depiction of a totalitarian regime has a dimension totally lacking in Orwell's novel. (Patai 1984: 87)
Ooh, now I'm really really interested.
Although in his earlier writings he occasionally argued against mistaking power hunger for a biological fact, in the world of 1984 he disassociates this hunger from the context that alone can hope to explain it. While his novel makes it clear that life for women in Oceania is in many respects similar to their life in Orwell's own society, this is not part of his critique. (Patai 1984: 88)
Nietzsche comes to mind.
Swastika Night begins with a religious ceremony in the Holy Hitler chaptel of a swastika-shaped church. The creed is sung: Hitler is venerated as a son of God the Thunderer, exploded from the head of his father, an interesting adaptation of the myth of Zeus and Athena, itself an example of male usurpation of female procreative powers. Thus Hitler is 'untainted', that is, not begotten or born of woman. By contrast, mortal men are all 'defiled at birth'. (Patai 1984: 88)
Hot damn. This is a vaguely familiar trope but I cannot put my finger on where I've met it before. Maybe this: "A Greek Orthodox monk on Mount Athos, the center of Orthodox monasticism, died at the age of 82 without ever seeing a woman."
According to this Nazi ideology, women have no souls and are not human, but German men must have intercourse with German woman in order to perpetuate the race - something many of the men find impossible to do. The Knight, as he preaches to the women about their duties, knows, however, that fewer and female female babies are being born and that in this way the entire society is, ironically, endangered. He also knows - because he possesses the secret manuscript - that women were once loved. Now, however, they have been turned into ugly creatures with minds hardly more intelligent than that of a dog. (Patai 1984: 89)
Well, strictly speaking, no-one does. The soul is a metaphysical construct. It doesn't actually exist.
In the figure of Alfred, Burdekin creates a hero destined, like his historical namesake, to contribute to his country's freedom - but Alfred is emphatically not a warrior. Burdekin had published a pacifist novel, Quiet Ways, in 1930, in which she attacks the very idea of manliness as dependent upon violence and prowess. In Swastika Night she continues this attack through Alfred, who realizes that the Hitlerian notions of violence, brutality, and physical courage can never make a 'man', but only ageless boys. To be a man, in his view, requires a soul; liberation from Hitlerism, in Swastika Night, cannot come through violence and brutality, the 'soldierly virtues'. (In her 1934 novel Proud Man, Burdekin had defined a soldier as 'a killing male'.) Swastika Night reveals the gradual extension of Alfred's understanding; from the rejection of Nazi views of what it means to be a man, he eventually comes to reject also the Nazi views of women. (Patai 1984: 89)
This appears to be a rare book, possibly not reissued. Yup: "Rare - only this edition ever appeared and is in only five libraries."
- Burdekin, Katharine 1930. Quiet Ways. London: T. Butterworth. [AbeBooks — US$ 363.02]
Although women had a high place, in theory, in the old Christian theology, von Hess explains, the Christian men acquiesced in the Reduction of Women 'probably because there always had been in the heart of the religion a hatred of the beauty of women and a horror of the sexual power beautiful women with the right of choice and rejection have over men. And when the women were reduced to the condition of speaking animals, they probably found it impossible to go on believing they had souls.' (Patai 1984: 90)
Apt.
Thus Burdekin has each of her character grasp bits of the puzzle and contribute to the reader's understanding, which is a composite of these elements, rather than creating one fully knowledgeable 'informant' who would speak didactically to the reader. (Patai 1984: 91)
Somewhat familiar: "The novel is the story of Paul's revenge for the death of his father as well as an ecological puzzle in which the reader gradually pieces together the reality of Dune." (Fitting 1979: 67)
Proud Man, published in 1934 under the Murray Constantine pseudonym, is a novel that utilizes a science fiction framework to make a profound criticism of the sex-gender system. Like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, published in 1931, Burdekin utilizes a superior narrator who looks back on an earlier time. Stapledon, however, situates this narrator in the remote future and has his gaze fall schematically on a two-billion year long process of evolution that includes eighteen species of men. Burdekin, by contrast, has her narrator dream of a two-year stay in a twentieth-century England still perfectly recognizable to us nearly fifty years later. (Patai 1984: 91)
The only reason I came across this interesting paper. A mere mention of Stapledon is a mark of quality in my eyes.
Burdekin locates the root cause of patriarchy in the male need to redress the natural balance that gives women greater biological importance than men. Like Karen Horney, whose essays on feminine psychology were available in English in the 1920s, Burdekin sees the male imposition on women of an inferiorized social identity as the result of a fundamental fear and jealousy of women's procreative powers. It is this that explains men's insistence on women's inferior artistic (and other) abilities, as Burdekin's narrator explains to a discouraged women writer in Proud Man. (Patai 1984: 92)
"[Karen Horney] disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women, and she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology." - Smart lady.
In Proud Man Burdekin concludes that men and women must be transformed: 'They must stop being masculine and feminine, and become male and female. Masculinity and femininity are the artificial differences between men and women. Maleness and femaleness are the real differences...'. (Patai 1984: 93)
Sex vs gender. Good paper, this.
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