segunda-feira, 18 de junho de 2012

Where No Man Has Gone Before: The loss of the feminine principle in Charlotte Haldane's Man's World and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night by Elizabeth Russell

The title of this anthology, Where No Man Has Gone Before, in no way describes the dystopian societies depicted by Charlotte Haldane and Katherine Burdekin, for their fictional worlds are men's worlds, ruled by men for men. The women in these worlds have been reduced to their biological function and it is this alone that gives them a social identity. In both novels the women are minor characters and comply with the dominant ideology. They are depicted by silence rather than sound and only exist in so far as they internalise male desire and imagine themselves as men imagine them to be. The women of Haldane's world have been elevated to a pure and intensely 'feminine' level; those of Burdekin's world have been devalued into 'unwomen'. At opposite poles, neither the former nor the latter have the possibility of asserting themselves, of becoming fully developed human beings. In this essay, I shall attempt to decipher their silence in order to make clear the political message that both Haldane and Burdekin - by adopting the voice of Cassandra - try to put over.

Charlotte Haldane's Man's World, first published in 1926, depicts a futuristic scientific socialist state which covers North America, Australasia and Europe. Her husband, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, had written an essay, Daedalus: or Science and the Future, only three years before, in which he suggests that the responsibilities of the future should be left in the hands of a scientific elite. Haldane's essay was answered with scepticism in 1924 by Bertrand Russell's Icarus or the Future of Science. Both essays constitute different views of the possibility of science to promote human happiness. For Russell, Daedalus represents the rational scientist whose prime aim is to aid humanity, which he does by taking a middle road, whereas his son, Icarus, represents the irresponsible scientist who does not heed the warnings of others and refuses to be guided. Rash and imprudent, Icarus becomes over-confident of his own abilities and allows his pas¬sions to take precedence over his reason. The middle road, the road indicated by Daedalus, represents the perfect balance between head and heart, or - as Nietzsche put it - between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

In the early twentieth century there appeared a great number of scientific Utopias which pointed out that the perfect society of the future would be one inhabited by rational thinkers who, like Daedalus, would take the middle road and be aware of the consequences of each act. Daedalus and science was the road civilisation had to follow if it was to avoid self-destruction. The scientific dystopia, on the other hand, was the civilisation of Icarus, the irresponsible scientist who does not take into account the consequences which his scientific experiments may have upon humanity. The conflict between head and heart, reason and emotion, have long been the focus of many a philosophical discussion. Christa Wolf, in her essay Conditions of a Narrative, refers to the warning issued by Leonardo da Vinci which runs: 'Knowledge which has not passed through the senses can produce none but destructive truth' and follows his line of thought by adding:

There could truly be a new renaissance of consciousness if this insight were to bear fruit again, after the long dangerous experiment with abstract rationality, which resulted in chinking that everything is a means to an end. What speaks against this possibility? The fact that the senses of many people - through no 'fault' of their own - have dried up, and that they are justifiably afraid to reactivate them. (1)

Charlotte Haldane's Man's World is a discussion of the conflict of head/heart, of rational and abstract thinking/emotion and feeling. It is also the conflict between science and religion. In this, Man's World offers little that is original from the other scientific Utopias or dystopias of its time (2) but, read from a feminist perspective, it is clear that Man's World is essentially an analysis of gender distinctions and a warning of what the effect on society would be 'if the human race could determine in advance the sex of its children'. (3) As the title of her novel suggests, the future for women in a man's world is grim. Women have little or no say in matters of state. Science has solved almost all the problems afflicting humanity but it has not yet been able to control or manipulate instinct. The female population of the scientific state is kept down to a minimum. All girls entering adolescence choose to become either 'vocational mothers' or - if they show no mothering instinct - they are sterilised by the state and doomed to be neuters. Living in a male supremacist society, the women in Man's World enjoy the privileges which their status as mothers or neuters allows them, as long as they stay within the limits prescribed to them by the state. The existence of both mothers and neuters, however, is at risk when it is revealed that plans are already under way which, if successful, would reduce the population of mothers (and possibly neuters) down to one woman, who would be solely responsible for the continuation of the race, like 'a sort of human termite queen' (MW: 77).

All members of the scientific state are classified according to a rigid hierarchy. The women are mothers or neuters (entertainers, artists, writers or administrators). The men are grouped according to their abilities. The Brain of the state is constituted by the scientists; the Patrol comprises its administrative and executive officers and the Body of the state comprises the 'masses'. There is no room for those who cannot conform to the ruling norms as is the case of the two individualists, Christopher and Morgana, who must be sacrificed (they commit suicide).

In an analysis of the gender distinctions inherent in Man's World I shall take Helene Cixous' table of binary oppositions as a starting point and then discuss C. S. Jung's process of individuation and its application to the novel. (4)

Cixous (5) offers the following table of binary oppositions in her analysis of phallocentrism and shows how women have been allotted the category of 'not man', of absence of word, law and meaning in a hierarchy in which man is and woman is not: -

                        Activity / Passivity
                        Sun / Moon
                        Culture / Nature
                        Day / Night
                        Father / Mother
                        Head / Heart
                        Intelligible / Sensitive
                        Logos / Pathos

The norms on the left are, according to patriarchal tradition, to be listed under male = positive = master whereas those on the right would bear the reading female = negative = mastered. In order for the one side to acquire meaning it necessarily has to destroy the other. Thus, as activity equals victory in patriarchal thought, it follows that the male is the winner and the female the loser.

Both the mothers (to an exaggerated degree) and the neuters (to a lesser degree) 'fit' the norms described as 'feminine' in Cixous' patriarchal binary table; likewise, the male members of the scientific state fit the description the table presents as 'masculine'. Not only does this equation of femininity leave no space for the development of woman's self or a change in the status quo, it also denies men the possibility of achieving wholeness by withholding from them the feminine principle.

The only person who receives any characterisation in the novel is Christopher. Christopher is a seeker of a religion, an individualist in a society of stereotyped people, in search of his self. He is also an artist. He is a musician who takes his inspiration from nature: he learns from the song of the bird, the moaning of the wind, the humming of insects and the murmuring of the stream. As an artist he is tolerated by the scientific state, but Christopher has a defect: he is emotional rather than rational, he possesses a 'mystical understanding of the ways of women' (MW: 105) is described as having 'a streak of femininity' (MW: 104) and as being 'intermediate sexually' (MW: 322) and 'submasculine' (MW: 322). People in the scientific state insist that he has not grown up yet and that he needs special assistance to 'think like a man' (MW: 265). Christopher cannot and will not think like a man. Furthermore, he seldom thinks, as he himself stresses: he feels.

Applied to the Jungian theory of individuation, which is the quest for self, Christopher's journey seems doomed right from the beginning. Jung believed that a fully developed individual personality must transcend gender; it must not be endowed by either excessive masculinity or excessive femininity. It is true, as Annis Pratt points out, (6) that Jung's definition of 'masculine' and 'feminine' are rigid and almost stereotypical, but it is also true that the same gender stereotyping is present in Man's World and I believe that this is what classifies Haldane's novel as a dystopia. (7) To achieve wholeness, each person has to come to terms with, and incorporate, characteristics of the opposite sex into her or his personality. This means that a man would have to listen to what Jung calls the 'inner voices' of his 'anima' which is feminine and a woman would listen to the 'inner voices' of her 'animus' which is masculine. The feminine anima or soul is represented by the moon and is erotic and mysterious, sentimental and irrational. The masculine animus is represented by the creativity of the sun and by the logical and spiritual. To become whole, the individual has to become reconciled with those aspects of his or her personality which have not been taken into account. No one can become whole by repressing the 'inner voices' in the unconscious.

In the individuation process a man might become 'possessed' by the anima and this will cause him to behave in a manner stereotypically expected of women, such as openly expressing emotions like moodiness, sulking, lamenting and tearfulness, whereas a woman who is possessed by her animus will become shrill and opinionated. (The blatant sexism in Jung's theory has recently been discussed in depth by Demaris S. Wehr.) (8) At the beginning of his individuation process, Christopher suffers from neurosis: from a split between his conscious and his unconscious. He cannot relate to the other people in the scientific state, people whom he sees as '100 per cent man and 100 per cent woman' (MW: 298), and this, together with the fact that there is no free will, causes the neurosis. By free will he means, not the right to choose between good and evil since both concepts have been dispensed with in this futuristic society, but the right to choose one's own destiny, the right to self-government which is true anarchism. At the same time, he has not been able to enter a dialogue with the 'inner voices' of his unconscious; he is not aware that the basic reason for this split is that the 'problem' is not only an external one (incompatibility with the community and the state) but also one which is internal; and to solve this he has to assimilate his homosexual soul.

One outcome of this neurosis is that Christopher projects onto his much loved sister, Nicolette, what are actually his own characteristics. He imagines she is like him, is a rebel at heart, shares his desire for the mystical and transcends her gender. It is only when Nicolette falls in love with the 100 per cent manly geneticist, and becomes pregnant by him, that she shakes off her homosexuality and slips into the hierarchy as a 100 per cent mother. This ironically helps Christopher is his quest for self. By projecting less onto his sister he enlarges his own personality. He accepts the 'inner voices' of his anima which encourage him to be more emotional, more feminine. But as his individuation process reaches its completion it becomes clear that Christopher's alienation from the society he was born into offers no way out except death. With this knowledge, he climbs into his small plane, the Makara (9) (which is always referred to as 'she') and flies higher and higher into the sky in a suicidal flight which seems more like another beginning than an end. Christopher as a 'whole' person would be characterised as follows:

                        Activity ! - -
                                           ! Moon
                                           !Nature
                                           !Night
                                           !Emotions
                                           !Sensitive
                                           !Pathos

A 'feminine' mind within a masculine body has no possibility of survival in a society which insists on polarising gender differences. As Christopher sails higher up into the clouds he ponders:

That word sex (words were like stepping-stones in the pools of thought to-night) - that had to be thrown overboard too, before Christopher could soar freely towards his destination. It was another feeble monosyllable, a euphemism, masking emotions which had been institutionalized by man. You might turn away from it, withdraw, deny, deny, deny - it was useless, down there. Neutrality was not negation. On that ground you were either one of the army of propagatives, or an enemy whom they would ultimately extirpate. Moses and Luther between them had seen to that. Their modern successors did not preach; practice was more efficient. It was not the homosexual body they dreaded, but the homosexual soul; the soul in which the seeds of 'love' were doomed to infertility, the soul that was sufficient unto itself. (MW: 307)

Christopher's femininity is the result of his mother, Antónia, having been disobedient during her pregnancy. She had already borne five sons for the scientists but then, although she knew she was carrying her sixth son, she consciously desired a daughter. Thus, instead of obeying the scientific state by concentrating on the masculinity of her son, she spent her nine months' pregnancy in 'dreamy reverie' and 'romantic solitude'. When Christopher is born, the near-symbiotic relationship he has with his mother makes his entry into the symbolic order (the law of the father) difficult. Instead of treating him as 'other', Antonia perceives Christopher as an extension of herself and he, in turn, cannot -and does not - repress the female parts of himself. (10) Christopher's individuation process thereby becomes a reversal of that which Sheila Ruth describes:

Flight from woman is flight from feeling, from experiencing, from the affective; it is flight into distance. It is mind-body split, priority of cognition over feeling, fear of ambiguity (loss of control), preference for deduction over induction, faith in systems rather than responses, preoccupation with logic to the detriment of aesthetics, and so on. (11)

Although the plot centres on Christopher, the other deviants from the dominant ideology are all women, and personal initiative and the rebellious spirit are all represented by the feminine principle. Antonia is the deviant mother; Morgana, the deviant neuter. Morgana - whose name indicates that she is doomed to die (12) -has been sterilised by the state, desires a child, rebels, and is denounced as 'hysterical' and 'unbalanced': 'She would have to be silenced. She was a nuisance. . . . Women like that were useless' (MW: 318).

The polarisation of male/female is more pronounced in Swastika Night than in Man's World. The mothers in Haldane's dystopia are kept in gilded cages whereas those in Burdekin's dystopia are kept in real cages, their heads shaved and their male babies taken away from them once they have been weaned, so they will not be corrupted by femaleness. First published in 1937, this was one of the many anti-fascist dystopias which appeared in Britain in the late 1930s and early 1940s,13 but it is different from the others in that Burdekin offers a powerful feminist critique of Nazism by relating power politics to gender politics, and, like Haldane, adopts the voice of Cassandra in warning 'that the pliancy of woman is the tragedy of the human race' (SN: 109).

In Swastika Night, the Nazis are competing with the Japanese for world power. Europe has been dominated by Nazi rule for 700 years and its strength lies in the Nazi male who believes in 'pride, in courage, in violence, in brutality, in bloodshed, in ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues' (SN: 6). Totalitarianism offers two possibilities to ensure the continuance of the human race. It can either make motherhood especially attractive or it can make it obligatory. The real Hitler began by making it attractive, although his ultimate plans suggest that he considered compulsory motherhood and prostitution. (14) Haldane chose the first option for her dystopia, Burdekin chose the second. Whether mothers are in gilded cages or behind iron bars, the result is the same: their loss of freedom is absolute when their sole reason for existence is reduced to breeding.

The women in Swastika Night have been reduced to empty vessels, to 'unwomen'. They possess nothing: no name, no voice, no language they can call their own. They do not possess a soul. Their absolute subjection to man had been relatively easy as it had all begun with rape. The sentences for rape had become lighter and lighter until the rejection right of women was taken away from them. Love then gave way to lust. The women were further punished if they stood up straight 'like a man' or if they wore any garment which enhanced their features. Once they realised what the men wanted them to be, they did their utmost to live up to the new image. By accepting men's idea of their inferiority they not only lost their identity but also contributed to the male supremacist society: 'The human values of this world are masculine. There are no feminine values because there are no women' (SN: 108).

Man is active, woman is passive. Man is the giver, woman is the receiver. Daphne Patai has pointed out the similarity of ideas between Von Wied in Swastika Night and the Viennese ideologue, Otto Weininger, whose pre-fascist and misogynist work, Sex and Character, was published in 1903.(15) Swastika Night is, indeed, a critique of fascism but its treatment of gender distinctions also recalls much of the misogyny to be found in the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It is well known that the Nazis adopted and misinterpreted Nietzschean thought, especially those aspects of it which alluded to the 'super race'.

Some of the most virulent misogynist writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from Germany. Schopenhauer, a misanthrope and misogynist, loathed feminine sensuality. He greatly influenced Nietzsche, who assigned women to what he termed the 'slave morality' and denied them an existence unless they could produce an Übermensch (Superman). For Nietzsche, women were dark and evil and wished to be 'taken' completely by men. In The Gay Science, he writes: 'The woman gives herself, the man adds to himself by taking her.' The Christians in Swastika Night consider women to be 'nothing but birds' nests' (SN: 183); the Nazis in the dystopia consider women to be the vessels which will carry the warrior foetus. Nietzsche's famous maxim 'Men should be trained for war and women for the recreation of the warrior' received a new interpretation by Mary Daly, who aptly sums up the situation of women in Swastika Night: 'Indeed, the War State requires women for the re-creation of its warriors.' (16)
 
When Katherine Burdekin wrote Swastika Night she could not have guessed how horrifyingly accurate her vision of the Nazi régime was to be. The Jewish population in her dystopia has been annihilated and the Christians are tolerated as a sub-race but are termed 'untouchables'. Nietzsche had blamed Judaeo-Christian morality for what he saw to be the degradation and decadence of humanity in the nineteenth century. As Jean Grimshaw points out, he felt contempt for the Christian concept of 'other worldiness, its emphasis on the spiritual, on self-abnegation, altruism, duty, pity, meekness, humility and poverty'. (17) Mary Daly believes that Nietzsche attributed this type of morality to women and to the feminine principle. (18)

According to Nietzsche there are two types of morality: the master" morality and the slave morality. To achieve the former the individual has to act out of a desire of self-affirmation and of self-aggrandisement (this is what Nietzsche terms 'the will to power') and by doing so, the individual will become a superman. The superman (representative of the master morality), must take care not to be corrupted by the 'humanitarianism' of those who acquire the slave morality since:

they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle; they make small, cowardly, smug. . . . The man who has become free . . . spurns the contemptible sort of well being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. (19)

Nietzsche's options, either the master morality or the slave morality, find expression in Swastika Night (20) although they have been adapted to fascism:

                     Master morality                                   Slave morality 
                     Nazi Men                                              Women
                     Self-aggrandisement through              Women Self-abasement                                                                                             through violence to their                                                                                            selves
                     violence and brutal strength over others

                     Fear of women and female sexuality    Self-loathing which
                     which they express through comtempt  is the reflection of male                                                                                              desire
                   
                     Activity                                                Passivity
                     Sun                                                     Moon
                     LIFE                                                    DEATH 
Self-loathing which is the reflection of male desire Passivity Moon

The real German Nazis adopted the right-pointed swastika (the sun swastika) as their symbol tfi which they thought was pure Aryan because it had been used as the cross of the Germanic god of thunder, Thor. There is, however, also a left-pointed moon swastika rt which represented the Hindu godess, Kali Maya, the goddess of creation, preservation and destruction. In Swastika Night, the sun swastika represents the loss of the feminine principle, the male supremacy over female, militarism over peace and hate over love.

According to the ancient Hindu myth, the world was to come to an end when human beings had become 'violent and sinful, failing to perceive deity in the feminine principle'. (21) After a period of darkness and nothingness, the goddess would re-create the universe and give birth to a new race.

The women have been reduced to 'nothingness' in Burdekin's dystopia. They are described as 'female things', 'female animals' or 'hags'. They have neither a will nor a soul. The fascist empires of the Nazis and the Japanese are also approaching their end, for there is a shortage of baby girls and the percentage of female births is declining rapidly. Thus, the scorpion has given itself a mortal sting. The men in the empires have failed to foresee the consequence of absolute female submission which is, ironically, that it will result in the destruction of male supremacy.

After a period of darkness and nothingness, Kali-Maya will recreate a new race...

In both the dystopias described here male victory over female seems to be evident. In Man's World there is no space for the feminine principle to develop freely. Emotion, sensitivity and pathos are crushed unless they are channelled into reproduction of female babies only. In Swastika Night the feminine principle has been totally destroyed and the victory of the male over the female seems to be absolute.

There is, however, one main difference between the two dystopias. The vocational mothers in the scientific state are aware of their biological power over men, the power to create life, and do not foresee that this can ever be jeopardised. The ectogeneticist visits the vocational mothers and sums up his concept of their power. Note the binary opposition here between you = women and we = men:

Let us look back a little. First you had birth control, then you had sex control. The two enabled you to impose your will on us in collective bargaining. Both met, in the beginning with opposition from those of you who would not realise the advantages they brought you. But when you did, you knew an era was beginning for you such as motherhood had never known since dim antiquity. (MW: 75-6)

The time has come, the ectogeneticist continues, to let science (= male-controlled) run its course, and although women's power lies in their biology, this will no longer be the case in the future. If the present is a man's world, the future will be even more so.

The situation in Swastika Night is radically different. The women.are not aware they possess any power at all. They do not realise the existence of the moon swastika. In a sermon which Von Hess delivers to the women, he unwittingly discloses the secret which threatens to wreck and destroy Hitlerdom. Instead of commanding them to bear strong sons, as was the custom, he tells them to bear daughters. The women cannot believe their ears and hastily convince themselves that Von Hess has made a mistake. Yet:

If they knew that the Knights, and even der Fuhrer, wanted girl-children to be born in large quantities; that every fresh statistical paper with its terribly disproportionate male births caused groanings and anxieties and endless secret conferences - if the women once realised all this, what could stop them developing a small thin thread of self respect? If a woman could rejoice publicly in the birth of a girl, Hitlerdom would start to crumble. (SN: 14)

Hitlerdom would start to crumble if women developed self-respect, which in turn would come about by giving birth to and rejoicing in female children. On the other hand, Hitlerdom will crumble anyway, without women's self-respect, due to the total absence of female births. Furthermore, women will eventually cease to exist in a world totally populated by males, and this would lead the world into destruction.

Reading Swastika Night today with the hindsight of Nazism and the Holocaust is a chilling experience. Read together with Claudia Koonz's Mothers in the Fatherland, which is a historical account of how women complied with, or struggled against, National Socialism, Swastika Night shows how accurate Burdekin's nightmarish vision was. Koonz suggests that the Nazi creed was easier for women to follow than men, because it stated: 'You are nothing. Your Volk is everything' and such a message no doubt harmonises more with women's upbringing than with men's. Koonz continues: 'In the service of this selfless crusade, Hitler's followers discovered their selfhood. Hundreds of thousands of "nobodies" began to feel like "somebodies".' (22)

Koonz's work is an honest analysis of the fascination that fascism held for many women. Klaus Theweleit, in his thought-provoking Male Fantasies, insists that fascism is directly connected with hatred and fear of women and with female sexuality. According to Klaus Theweleit: 'What fascism promised men was the reintegration of their hostile components under tolerable conditions, dominance of the hostile "female" elements within themselves.' (23) Moreover, fascism is not a monster that rears its ugly head only now and again, it is always present in our daily relationships with each other.

Charlotte Haldane and Katherine Burdekin both depicted dystopian societies of the far future in which women and life are worthless. The horrifying experiments carried out on the brain in Man's World and the glorification of violence in Swastika Night are, however, not only crimes of the past, nor of the future, but of our present. This is Cassandra's voice. What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we prefer to be strangers. (24)



NOTES

The following editions were used for this essay: Charlotte Haldane, Man's World, New York, Doran, 1927; Katherine Burdekin, Swastika Night, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1985.
References to Man's World are followed by the abbreviation MW and the page number, those to Swastika Night by SN and the page number.

1. Christa Wolf, Condition of a Narrative in: Cassandra, London, Virago, 1984, 268.
2. See Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction, London, Methuen, 1980, 76-82 for examples. Parrinder mentions J. B. S. Haldane's essay, Daedalus, but refrains from mentioning Man's World. Richard Gerber, on the other hand, grants Man's World a few lines in his work, Utopian Fantasy, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973, 60.
3. This quote is taken from Charlotte Haldane's autobiography, Truth Will Out, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949, 15.
4. Although Haldane was well acquainted with the work of 'Freud and his successors' (Truth Will Out, 34) it is not clear when she read his work and whether she included the work of Jung.
5. Hélène Cixous' table of binary oppositions is to be found in La Jeune Née, written in collaboration with Catherine Clément and first published in 1975. Cixous' theories on femininity and masculinity are further discussed in Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, London, Methuen, 1985, 104-5.
6. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, Brighton, Harvester, 1982, 7.
7. In Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction, London, Routledge, 1988, the author, Nan Bowman Albinski, is correct in stating that Man's World can be read either as a Utopia (= good society) or as a dystopia (= bad society). She settles for the first option on the evidence of critics' reviews and quotes taken from Charlotte Haldane's work, Motherhood and its Enemies (1927). I would insist that it is to be read as a dystopia. In her autobiography, Truth Will Out, Charlotte Haldane described herself as being a feminist and a suffragette at the age of 16 (Truth Will Out, 304). She also discovers that her mind 'was not in the least scientific, either in discipline or in outlook' (31) and that she had an 'emotional need for a religion, or a substitute for one' (31). These remarks plus the fact that her novel is titled Man's World surely would make it a dystopia.
8. Demaris S. Wehr, Jung and Feminism, Liberating Archetypes, London, Routledge, 1988. This essay owes much to Wehr's work.
9. In Hindu religious myth, Makara was the name of the water monster, which was the steed of Varuna, son of the Hindu sun goddess, Aditi, 'It is significant that Varuna sometimes appeared as a female and sometimes as an androgyne.
10. According to Nancy Chodorow, because the father does not usually take part in the primary care of children, boys find it more difficult than girls to begin the process of separation and individuation. A girl will identify with her mother, who will perceive her as 'same', as an Elizabeth Russell Chapter 2 extension of herself. A boy will identify with the absent father and will be perceived by his mother as 'other'. See Nancy Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, Ch. 5.
11. Sheila Ruth, Methodocracy, Misogyny and Bad Faith: The Response of Philosophy, quoted in Jean Grimshaw, Feminist Philosophers, Brighton, Wheatsheaf, 1986, 54.
12. Morgana chooses her name in memory of the biologist Morgan but Morgana was also the name of the Celtic goddess of death.
13. See Andy Croft's article, which lists and discusses anti-fascist novels of that period: Worlds Without End Foisted Upon the Future - Some Antecedents of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1984, 183-216.
14. See Marilyn French, Beyond Power, Women, Men and Morals, London, Cape, 1985, 231.
15. See Daphne Patai's excellent critical introduction to Swastika Night.
16. Nietzsche's maxim comes from his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra and is quoted and contested by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, London, Women's Press, 1984, 356.
17. Grimshaw, op. cit., 153.
18. Grimshaw discusses this view by Daly. See ibid., 155-8.
19. This quote comes from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and is cited in Grimshaw, op. cit., 154.
20. It must be stressed that Nietzsche would never have approved of the Nazis representing the master morality, nor would he have given his consent to his philosophy being 'used' to promote fascism - as it was by Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler. Nietzsche's superman was an individualist who used control over self not over others.
21. See Barbara G. Walker (ed.), The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths, and Secrets, New York, Harper & Row, 1983, 248.
22. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, London, Methuen, 1987, 79.
23. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, 434.
24. This quote is from Christa Wolfs Model Childhood and is cited by Claudia Koonz in Mothers in the Fatherland, vii.


In: Where no Nan has Gone Before. Women and Science Fiction. Edited by Lucie Armitt. London, Routeledge, 1991, pp. 15-28.

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