The late-stage Second Wave feminist conceit that men made the language and therefore manage to oppress women through its every other idiom has found new life in a summer novel, its premise plucked from a gender studies fever dream. In Vox, by linguist and first-time novelist Christina Dalcher, men make that microaggression macro: A right-wing regime elected by the Bible Belt about year before the book’s action begins has affixed word-counters to the wrists of every woman and girl—counters that electrocute the wearer who speaks more than her allotted 100 words per day.
Though Dalcher demurred in a recent interview, it’s fairly obvious our current political moment inspired her vision for a not too distant American future. Take, for instance, references to an Obama-like former president whose message of hope was more than the flyover dwellers could tolerate, so much more that they chose a Moral Majoritiarian dictator to succeed him. Then, there’s the centering power of civil disobedience—events like the Women’s March are made to seem both the reason the counters seemed like a good idea to this regime in the first place, and somehow also the only guard against its supremacy. Dalcher’s heroine is Jean McClellan, a neuro-linguist whose pre-revolutionary research into the brain’s speech center is a little too interesting to the regime’s top silencers: As the plot picks up, she uses its value to them to bargain for a semblance of her former freedom.
The few scientific asides our linguist author peppers in are unsatisfying answers to the actually interesting problems the story could play with were it not preoccupied with attempting to conjure an inconceivable political future. Misogyny is the foundation of the ruling political party in Vox. Which leaves our protagonist, Jean, an accomplished scientist and mother of four, wishing she’d protested while she still could. Often, Jean thinks of her former Georgetown roommate, professional feminist activist Jackie Juarez—a lesbian now locked away in a labor camp—and wishes she’d put down her studying to join Jackie and march on the Mall more often. “Jackie was right,” Jean laments. “I wonder what Jackie would say,” she thinks more than once, hating herself for having taught her daughter to survive in silence. Vox, not to be confused with the website that explains current events for a left-of-center audience, also has an explicatory air. Jean’s regrets have all the depth and command of a press release from EMILY’S List or the Women’s March: Only the record number of women running for office in 2018 will save us from Brett Kavanaugh’s hatred of women and Mike Pence’s weaponized chastity!
The ideas and anxieties of Jean as protective mother and thwarted academic are more realistic—and more engaging—than her political regrets. Jean worries about her radicalized teenage son and linguistically subdued young daughter and resents her husband whom she takes for a kind of Vichy liberal, as he works in the not-too-distant dictatorial White House as a science advisor.
The interior action that fills the silence is short-lived. The world Dalcher has created for her heroine—and the 17-year-old son and husband who, right along with those Bible Belt voters, keep her down—isn’t just a feat of panic-stoking political pandering perhaps unsurpassed in our new age. It’s also overtly cinematic, at least once it kicks into high gear. Sarah Jessica Parker called dibs on the adaptation before publication, but Dalcher sees Dr. Jean McClellan as more of an Ashley Judd starring opposite a husband as bland as his khakis and an Italian biochemist Lorenzo who fills her fantasies and, we hope, will one day whisk her away—if only they were working together again, if only she were allowed enough words.
There are two types of men in the new world order, she tells us early on, alone in her domestic prison dreaming of Lorenzo: There are true “believers” and “women-hating assholes.” Her husband, Jean determines, is neither, “He’s just weak.” Later, she finds out she was wrong: If you’re inclined to believe that navigating a fiercely misogynistic dystopia would require some coed teamwork—that women and men need each other, equally and absolutely—you won’t hate Vox. Neither, probably, will the box office for the inevitable film. For all its purported timeliness, Vox manages an optimistic handling of those ordinary human truths—facts about men and women that moviegoers tend to look for: In a predictable and not unmarketable twist, there turn out to be men, more than a few of them, whose ordinary heroism Jean has underestimated in her largely silent rage.
The problems of women’s silence and the science of language do belong in literature, but they deserve consideration beyond that of a politically loaded sci-fi thriller marketed to Women’s Marchers. Mary Beard’s recent book Women & Power, a manifesto made of two lectures and published at the peak of #MeToo, was even better timed than Dalcher’s. “The culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment” was Beard’s subject—and the world that Dalcher’s hewn belongs to a category of feminism Beard dismisses, albeit gently, as it depends too much upon, “the simple diagnosis of misogyny that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on.”
Vox, while bleak in its own ridiculous way, doesn’t stand up to the Trump era’s first favorite feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale. It lacks the descriptive sorcery of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel which, in its richest achievement, imagined how female society would reshape within cruel new constraints. And the world the women of Vox have lost has none of the palpable ache of Atwood’s heroine’s flashbacks to her old, unappreciated freedoms. But the comparison only highlights these novels’ deepest difference. Whatever you make of its renewed political currency (hogwash), Atwood’s best-known novel remains a riveting read—and Vox’s silliness is only more apparent in light of their common comparison. It’s goofy enough for Trump-era resistance types to impose their misdirected doom projections onto Atwood’s novel. But Vox projects onto itself. It’s a set-up for panicky projection, a play for the profitable feminist fad market—and not much else.
