Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Power, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Violence
Corruption
Gender Reversals and Sexism
Stories, History, and Perspective
Religion and Manipulation
Revolution and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
Margot and Daniel are having a heated argument about the video from Nigeria that Tunde filmed. Margot believes it’s fake, but Daniel swears it is not: many other videos have sprung up since. Daniel insists that she close the schools, but Margot knows that she’ll look like an idiot for closing the schools over something that might be fake. But she also knows that if she doesn’t close them and something bad happens, Daniel will win against her in the upcoming governor’s race. She agrees to close them.
Margot’s story provides yet another initial perspective on power dynamics, and how the power to hurt trickles down into other forms of power—like political power, as can be viewed in this scene. Margot, the mayor of an unnamed town, doesn’t dare to go against Daniel’s instructions. It is only after Margot gains the power that she recognizes her ability to defy Daniel and become more assertive.
Themes
Margot barely goes home over the next few days: no one knows what is going on. At first people say it is a virus, and it just looks like girls are electrocuting people. For fun, the local news brings in a few marine biologists to talk about electric eels, and two news anchors (Tom and Kristen) joke about using the girls to power Christmas tree lights.
The two anchors, Tom and Kristen, are a recurring bit that Alderman uses to show the progression of women’s ascent to power. At first, Kristen is given the fluffier pieces, while Tom is given the serious news, which reflects power dynamics and how typical gender roles tend to play out.
Themes
Margot and the Mayor’s office, however, take it more seriously. They get early reports of fighting on playgrounds, with mostly boys left breathless and twitching with leaf-like red scars winding up their bodies. Margot reads a report from a team in Delhi who discover a strip of muscle across the girls’ collarbones which they call the organ of electricity, or the skein for its twisted strands. Buds of this muscle are even found in newborn girls; it seems like the only good science for a few days.
The fact that the women’s power has a biological source makes it directly comparable to men’s power in contemporary society, whose biological power generally comes from greater physical strength and stature. In some ways, the novel promotes the idea that biology is destiny, because those with more biological power are the ones who are destined to rise above the others—at least in a society that doesn’t actively strive for equality.
Themes
As she sees the power become more and more widespread, Margot thinks about her house at the lake, and how the winged ants there would live alone underground all year long, biding their time and waiting. Then, one day, when the temperature was just right, they would swarm into the air all at once, to find each other.
The ants become a metaphor for sweeping social change. If the ants came into the air one at a time, they would not be able to find each other. Instead, taking flight all at the same time allows them to swarm the air, find each other, and have a much more massive effect—so, too, with the women as the novel progresses.
Themes
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Parents are already telling their boys not to go out alone—one woman says on TV that she saw a girl attack a boy for no reason, leaving him bleeding from the eyes. They’d separated the boys from the girls on the fifth day when they worked out that only the girls were doing it, taking the boys to boys-only schools. But the girls cannot be separated from each other. There are injuries and accidents; teachers are afraid.
Already Alderman demonstrates some small gender reversals: while the young girls are normalizing violence in their lives, parents are already counseling boys to be safer and more cautious when dealing with the opposite sex. In today’s society, advice like the parents give is usually reserved for girls—but here the reverse is true.
Themes
Three weeks in, Margot’s daughter Jocelyn is caught fighting. Margot returns home and finds Jocelyn upstairs, very upset. Margot assures her that the boy is not hurt badly. Jocelyn confesses that she’s had the power for six months—though sometimes it is strong, and sometimes it is weak. Margot asks Jocelyn to show her. Jocelyn is hesitant, saying she can control it so that she won’t kill Margot, but not so that it won’t hurt. Margot insists.
Jocelyn’s use of her power, and the fact that sometimes it is very strong and other times not, becomes a deep source of insecurity. The fact that she sometimes is unable to conduct it makes her even more susceptible to peer pressure and the corruption that befalls other women, as Alderman illustrates in later chapters, because she does not want to appear weak.
Themes
Jocelyn shocks Margot. The pain “burrows through the bone like it’s splintering apart from the inside.” It spreads across her arm and throughout her body. When it hits her collarbone, she notices something stir there. She is reminded of a game she played as a child, in which she pretended she was a witch and could make a ball of light in the palm of her hand. The feeling starts to return to Margot’s arm, and she realizes something else: Margot herself has burned a pattern into Jocelyn’s comforter. The narration notes: “She sendeth her lightning even unto the ends of the earth.”
Alderman continues to drop in these adapted Bible verses: this one is an interpretation of Job 37:3. It demonstrates the results of Eve’s later editing of Scripture in order to suit her own narrative. Additionally, Jocelyn’s ability to wake up the power in her mother (and, more globally, the ability of younger women to wake it up in older women) is again a metaphor for the way in which revolutionary movements are often begun by young people and then spread to older generations.
Themes
