REPRESENTATION OF FEMINISM IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH LITERATURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE POWER, NORMAL PEOPLE, AND THE TESTAMENTS

Abstract

This conference paper explores the portrayal of feminism in three influential texts of modern Anglophone fiction: Naomi Alderman The Power, Sally Rooney, and Margaret Atwood The Testaments. The article claims that these works are not mere repeats of the same feminist message but, in fact, feminism is staged in them in three narrative modes, namely speculative reversal, intimate realism, and institutional testimony. The paper examines the construction of female agency, embodiment, desire, vulnerability, and resistance in each novel through close reading, on qualitative grounds and using a comparative approach, within the social order of each novel. The Power speculates a world where women acquire a new ability to the body and unveils the process of reproduction of domination in the absence of power in justice. Normal People is a feminist literature that embodies relationships of every-day, classed intimacy, emotional labour, consent, and spoke in the world of unequal privatities hard to talk about. The Testaments goes back to Gilead as a reminder of how patriarchal structures endure in surveillance, religious punishment, and gendered educational efforts, and also how witnessing and cooperative patricide weakens authoritarianism. By demonstrating that modern feminist fiction can be the most effective when it recognizes contradiction: the empowerment can become the domination, the intimacy can conceal the coercion, and the survival can cost the compromise. The three novels together illustrate that contemporary feminism in literature is plural, contestive and structurally conscious.