“To be rational rather than a mere creature of feeling”: Challenging the Discursive Construction of Masculinist Modernity in Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night Oscar Williams College

As Beatrice Battaglia rightly notes, Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is not exclusively a “premonitory warning” about the threat of Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War (183). Rather, it confronts the discursive construction of a modern masculinity that typified European sexual politics in the interwar period, and which Burdekin perceived to be akin to the form of manliness mobilised by fascism.

Battaglia concludes her analysis by arguing that the central theme of the text is “the relationship between … a male system of values and a female one” (182). Certainly, in Burdekin’s dystopia the ideology of male supremacy is legitimised by the belief that female nature is innately inferior. The indoctrinated Hermann regards traditionally feminine traits, such as “softness … gentleness … mercy and love”, as the antithesis to his conception of the ideal man as “a being of pride, courage, violence … [and] ruthlessness”. However, by focussing the allegorical voice of the narrative on Alfred’s gradual intellectual enlightenment, which involves deconstructing the theoretical basis upon which Hermann’s ideology is premised, Burdekin reveals “that femininity-as-female-nature is a male myth constructed to complement prevailing...