Procreation in the interwar dystopias: Economic regulation and emotions in three literary works

Komplitt seminar with Signe Leth Gammelgaard.

In this text I examine the structures of reproductive work in the dystopian novels What not by Rose Macaulay, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Kallocain by Karin Boye. I discuss views on population management and regulation, linked to the discussion about various kinds of domestic work. In What not I examine the eugenic system and relate to the contemporaneous debate on eugenics, welfare planning, and state regulation. In We I outline the well-ordered life of the citizens, their statistic-mathematic deployment of logic, and the notion of “child production” versus the forces of love and attraction that drive the plot forward, in the context of Soviet theorists’ ideas on the family and women’s emancipation. And in Kallocain, I analyze the structures of family and affection in relation to the points on population reproduction voiced by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in their influential Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1934), and the debate surrounding it (Svedjedal 2011; Carlson 2018, 97–100). The article will thereby discuss views on the radical rethinking of gender and family structures in economics, which took place in the three states of the UK, Soviet Russia, and Sweden in the period.