The Power imagines a world in which women worldwide suddenly acquire the ability to conduct and send electricity through their hands. While this ability is an inherently neutral one, women quickly discover what becomes its primary use: to hurt others by sending them severe electrical shocks. Alderman examines the 10 years between women acquiring this power and an event called “the Cataclysm,” focusing on several primary characters: Margot, the mayor of an unnamed New England town; Roxy, the daughter of a British crime lord; Tunde, a Nigerian journalist; and Allie, a teenager from Alabama who begins her own religion. Each of these characters provides a different exploration of how “the power,” as it is simply called, shifts the power dynamic in all aspects of life. Through her portrayal of these four characters, Alderman shows how the ability to inflict violence on others imbues individuals with power, which can then expand into political, religious, and economic influence.
Before women receive this electrostatic power, Alderman establishes the baseline dynamic between men and women, which reflects contemporary society. As men generally have a greater ability to hurt, they have made and continue to uphold a patriarchal system. Alderman introduces two of her main characters with visceral examples of the ways in which men are able to hurt women. The book begins with 14-year-old Roxy trapped in a closet after two men arrive in her home wielding knives. They kill her mother and beat Roxy to unconsciousness with very little opposition, demonstrating the relative powerlessness that women have as compared to men. Allie, a teenager living in Alabama, is violated by her foster father, Mr. Montgomery-Taylor. After her foster father sees Allie trying to fend off two boys attempting to have sex with her, he calls her a whore for encouraging them, while beating and raping her. Alderman reveals that this violence has been happening for years, and each time Allie’s foster mother, Mrs. Montgomery-Taylor, willfully ignores it. Both Allie and Roxy’s stories demonstrate how the ability to hurt provides men with power—particularly the power to carry out such violence and get away with it. On a less violent note, Alderman switches gears to focus on 21-year-old Tunde, who lives in Nigeria. Tunde pursues his first relationship with a girl named Enuma, but Alderman makes a point to show how their flirtation is a performance of their gender roles. When Enuma coquettishly refuses to bring him a Coke, Tunde calls her a servant girl and play-wrestles her to the ground in order kiss her, though he “takes care not to really force her.” Even without violence, Alderman illustrates how simply having an ability to overpower someone else can be just potent as actually physically hurting them, because they are unable resist.
After establishing a portrait of these initial power dynamics, Alderman’s single change to the contemporary world reinforces how the capacity to hurt is what determines power. The previously victimized characters, now possessing “the power,” suddenly find themselves gaining status in many aspects of their lives, and the previously dominant characters start to lose it. Tunde continues to pursue Enuma, but she flips the interaction on him. As they play-wrestle, she gives him a shock that makes him temporarily lose all feeling in his left arm. It excites him, but it also hurts him deeply and makes him feel ashamed that he doesn’t understand what is happening. Later, when he sees another woman kill a man using her power out of self-defense, “he feels the fear travel down his spine like a hot wire. He knows then what he felt by the pool: that Enuma could have killed him if she’d wanted.” Tunde’s experience hints at a new social order, in which women have more power than men, because men are becoming fearful of the pain and injury women can cause. The female characters, by contrast, start to take advantage of this ability to hurt. After Allie gains the power, she uses it to kill her abusive foster father. The power becomes explicitly interchangeable with violence for her: when she decides to run away, she thinks briefly about grabbing a knife for protection. But then she recognizes with amusement that she has no need for a knife, because she has just killed a man with her bare hands. Roxy, whose electrostatic power is stronger than almost any other woman’s, kills a man who was involved in her mother’s murder for vengeance. She also takes over her father’s crime ring instead of her brothers, proving how the ability to hurt others can translate to other kinds of power. Margot, the mayor of an unnamed city in New England, is constantly undermined by the state’s governor, Daniel, and feels certain that she will lose to him in the upcoming governor’s race. But once she gains her power, Margot speaks harshly and bluntly to Daniel in their meetings, comforted by the knowledge that she could kill him if she wanted to (even though, she assures herself, she never would). When she uses her power against Daniel in a debate on television out of anger, voters view her as strong and elect her. With this result, Margot recognizes that “the power to hurt is a kind of wealth.” Thus, violence becomes a means for gaining power in other aspects of life.
Ultimately, the power of the book’s title is manifold: it is the ability to hurt others, which the women gain on a grand scale, but it is also the secondary forms power that stem from this first ability. “The change,” as it becomes known, is a shift not only in capabilities, but also in who is dominant and who is subjugated, who has confidence and who feels shame, who can rise in status and who cannot. Alderman writes that the shape of power is a tree, and her book demonstrates how power branches from violence to its many other modes.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power and Violence ThemeTracker
Power and Violence Quotes in The Power
The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree. Root to tip, central trunk branching and re-branching, spreading wider in ever-thinner, searching fingers.
Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. “Once you’ve seen it happen,” says a gray-faced woman on TV. “I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The eyes. Once you’ve seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight.”
“Saw you. Saw you in the graveyard with those boys. Filthy. Little. Whore.” Each word punctuated with a punch, or a slap, or a kick. She doesn’t roll into a ball. She doesn’t beg him to stop. She knows it only makes it go on longer. He pushes her knees apart. His hand is at his belt. He’s going to show her what kind of a little whore she is. As if he hadn’t shown her many times in the past.
Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs.
It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.
She speaks quite suddenly, across Daniel, sharp like the knock at a door. “Don’t waste my time with this, Daniel,” she says.
Eve says, “So I teach a new thing. This power has been given to us to lay straight our crooked thinking. It is the Mother not the Son who is the emissary of Heaven. We are to call God ‘Mother.’ God the Mother came to earth in the body of Mary, who gave up her child that we could live free from sin. God always said She would return to earth. And She has come back now to instruct us in her ways.”
Moldova is the world capital of human sex-trafficking. There are a thousand little towns here with staging posts in basements and apartments in condemned buildings. They trade in men, too, and in children. The girl children grow day by day until the power comes to their hands and they can teach the grown women. This thing happens again and again and again; the change has happened too fast for the men to learn the new tricks they need. It is a gift. Who is to say it does not come from God?
You can turn money into anything. One, two, three, presto. Turn drugs into influence with Tatiana Moskalev, President of Bessapara. Turn your ability to bring pain and fear into a factory where the authorities will turn a blind eye to whatever you're cooking up there that sends purple-tinged steam into the skies at midnight.
“You want to employ NorthStar girls yourself.”
“As my private army, here and on the border.”
It’s worth a lot of money. […] The board would be very happy to continue their association with Margot Cleary until the end of time if she could pull this off.
“And, in exchange, you want...”
“We are going to alter our laws a little. During this time of trouble. To prevent more traitors giving away our secrets to the North. We want you to stand by us.”
When he walked past a group of women on the road—laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky—Tunde said to himself, I'm not here, I'm nothing, don't notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see.
When the historians talk of this moment they talk about “tensions’’ and “global instability.” They posit the “resurgence of old structures” and the “inflexibility of existing belief patterns.” Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.
When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.
UrbanDox says: Do it.
Margot says: Do it.
Awadi-Atif says: Do it.
Mother Eve says: Do it.
And can you call back the lightning? Or does it return to your hand?
