Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Susan Watkins. Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix +219 pp. Several days after September 11, 2001, Guardian critic James Wood commented on contemporary novels' attempts to contain the uncontainable through encyclopedic proportion. Wood proposed that hysterical realism overtook literary fiction at the turn of century, conjuring a picture of an emasculated generation of (male and female) storytellers, with a couple exceptions (such as Don Delillo), who just don't have it in them to respond adequately to the times. Wood took to task the then-first-time author Zadie Smith for falling into a characteristic evasiveness and lack of authentic feeling. In a [End Page 586] wry response entitled "This Is How It Feels to Me," Smith conceded that the millennial literary landscape is shadowed by fear and the realization that the center is not, in fact, holding. But after all, she averred, is it so irrational and weak-minded of a writer, particularly right after the apocalyptic event in New York, to feel (like everybody else) disoriented or untethered, fearful—even terrified? If the self-proliferating stylistics of her and others' novels targeted by Wood are some form of psycho-social defense, thanks to a general sense of approaching doom, what makes such self-conscious defensiveness inauthentic, or lacking in writerly craft and moral seriousness? Twenty years on, as Susan Watkins's Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction notes, the question of adequate response to the manifold anxieties attending the collapse of one world and the emergence of another remains. She cites Ursula Heise's observation that the prevalence of contemporary dystopias indicates a desire to "unsettle the status quo, but by failing to outline a persuasive alternative, they end up reconfirming it" (10). The suggestion of inauthenticity appears again: "survivalists [are] hard to tell apart from hipsters, their portrayals of apocalypse [recycling] well-known motifs" (Heise qtd. in Watkins 10). Watkins concurs to an extent but warns against extending critical skepticism onto today's postapocalyptic fiction, which comprises critical dystopian and utopian modes. An increasing number of women authors, less committed to the legacy of the heroic narrative and its sense of an ending, are leading the way. As Watkins states at the opening of her study, "conventional apocalyptic fiction (usually male-authored) tends toward conservatism" (1), toward a nostalgia for the time before, and/or a restoration of the world, centered around the nuclear family. Woman-authored novels in this genre, Watkins argues, go a different way—and they must: "My argument is not that women are bound to write end-of-world fiction in a particular way because they are intrinsically different from men . . . Rather, I claim that women writers' fictional engagement with apocalyptic ideas and forms is inevitably related to their specific subject positions in the contemporary moment" (2). In short, we are talking about a feminist standpoint. Feminist critical intervention has meant writing against the end, argues Watkins, "focus[ing] on analysing the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration . . . they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse" (1). Feminist attention to situatedness and embodiment, gender and sexuality, crucially distinguishes women's [End Page 587] postapocalyptic fiction from men's, the author claims, and Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction lucidly articulates how women writers since Mary Shelley (especially her The Last Man [1826]) have interrogated apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative as symbolic form. Imbricated in this study of (un)anticipated endings and belated beginnings is the urgency of women's agency, not in driving the rebirth of mankind but rather in generating radical forms of difference that open up possibility or hope. A rich introductory chapter ("Rewriting and Transforming Traditions") gathers the threads of feminist literary and philosophical critiques by Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Heise, Melanie Klein, Adrienne Rich, and others who have remarked on the absence of intersectional analysis that feminist and postcolonial writers and scholars bring to bear. Watkins also situates her monograph...