Erdrich’s “Future Home of the Living God” describes an untraditional apocalypse in which humanity is fading out due to evolution. As a result, pregnant women are being persecuted. What is interesting about this book is that many of the book’s antagonists are also women. My original assumption about this book was that it would be groups of men who are looking to capture women to use for reproductivity, but Atwood circumvented this expectation. At first glance it seems unrealistic that women would assist in oppressing their own gender, but similar situations have happened in real as well.
Ginzburg’s “Journey into the Whirlwind” is a historical memoir that follows a Russian woman’s descent from a professor and member of the communist party to a prisoner in a gulag. This first occurred when Stalin took power. He began systematically eliminating opposition by imprisoning people who had the knowledge of communism necessary to question his rule. This included Ginzburg. First the most radical elements of the party were removed, but soon anyone who criticized Stalin at all was being sent to the gulag. This relates to “Future Home of the Living God” when the ethnicity of the newscasters was limited to white men. The people who have a platform to criticize those in power were systematically removed slowly, but deliberately. This sets the stage for pregnant women to be dehumanized as the fringe groups who might have rebelled against the oppressions have already been removed. There is another motivating factor in that the women who oversee the prisons that house the pregnant women benefit from the structures in place. The Kapos were Jewish prisoners in concentration camps that oversaw making sure other prisoners were in control. The website https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kapos gives a good overview of this group of people. Because of the Kapos, the SS did not need to have very many guards in the camps. This relates to the nurses in charge of the pregnancy centers. Even though they work there they are just one step away from being in the position of the pregnant women. So, in some ways the women themselves are responsible for their own persecution in the novel. Although a few powerful elites mandated that the pregnant women be captured. It was the self-preservation and complicity of other women that allows this to happen.
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AuthorI am a mechanical engineering student graduating this semester. Studying the role of societal change in the apocalypse interests me. Archives
April 2021
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