The Power

For historian Neil Adam Armon, Allie is a deeply spiritual visionary. She is a self-styled prophet of a new age of empowered women whose theology re-imagines Christianity to create a woman-centered religion. Like saints in traditional hagiographies, Allie is shaped through suffering and trauma, specifically a long series of abusive foster care homes after the death and disappearance of her birth mother. Drawing on another device common to hagiographies, Armon uses the device of an internal voice driving Allie toward her destiny.

Although Allie is both a teacher and a healer, she is no gentle maternal figure. Her expressions of moral displeasure, her uses of the skein to dispatch others, and her willingness to allow humanity to bomb itself back to the Stone Age all testify to a sense of conviction uncomplicated by empathy. Her ethos is summed up by Armon as “When the people change, the palace cannot hold” (4). Allie is driven by an idea and compelled by a vision. For Armon, who seeks to understand how humanity provoked itself into apocalypse, Mother Eve’s uncompromising and dispassionate embrace of The Cataclysm is both chilling and heroic.