Bleak Bodies: Genetically Engineered Women in Louise O'Neill's (Anti-)Utopian Patriarchal Satire Only Ever Yours

Abstract

In the latest years, Louise O’Neill (1985-) has drawn in the reading community with her novels, which depict the stark reality of rape culture in our contemporary society. Particularly, her debut masterpiece Only Ever Yours (2014) makes use of a feminist dystopian scenario to explore the origins of female brainwashing and subjugation that stigmatize women’s nature. The community of O’Neill’s novel brilliantly pushes to the limit the nightmarish day-to-day of young girls and their pressure to become compliant patriarchal women, by immersing them since their creation in an educational centre until they reach seventeen. For this, the author presents a two-fold method of feminine conditioning: pre-natus, with the aid of genetic engineering and artificial birth, and post-natus, since girls undergo isolation and strict indoctrination of the patriarchal standards in female educational centres. After this period of internment, their destinies are fixed for the rest of their lives, either as companions or as concubines, but always silenced and ready to give pleasure to men. This community of eves ironically reflects the phenomenon of ‘sorority without solidarity’, persistent in the creation of patriarchal utopias and that turns as an obstacle for the understanding of what feminism should be. Only Ever Yours necessarily disturbs the mind of the reader and denounces the need to understand feminism not as a homogeneous bloc, but as unity in diversity and mutual understanding, in order to fight back against patriarchy from within.