Introduction
The violence rooted in male entitlement is powerfully embodied in the charismatic son of a Mississippi pastor, depicted in a sharp and unflinching portrait of cruelty and inheritance in Addie E Citchens’s debut novel, Dominion, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.
‘To woman he gave a womb, and to man he gave dominion’, that’s what I teach my boys,” the Rev Sabre Winfrey Jr tells his wife, Priscilla, midway through Addie E Citchens’s formidable Women’s prize-shortlisted debut novel, Dominion.
In Citchens’s skilled hands, this dominion is exercised not only through violence but also through charisma, piety, and the everyday banality of male entitlement.
Setting and Characters
Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfrey family, a prominent Black church family whose apparent grandeur conceals deep and hereditary decay. Sabre Winfrey Jr leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist Church, dispensing wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts. He exudes the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks exclusively in his voice.
Priscilla, his long-suffering wife, writes his sermons, raises their five sons, and silently maintains the machinery of his authority without ever receiving credit for her efforts.
Their youngest son, Emanuel, known universally as Wonderboy, is beautiful, gifted, and terrifying: a prodigious athlete with the voice of an angel. He moves through Dominion with the dangerous ease afforded to beautiful boys who have never encountered meaningful consequences.
“When he passed, the teachers got nervous; the girls sighed.”
Yet beneath this polished exterior, something is deeply warped. Violence trails him like heat, a foreboding presence throughout the narrative.
Narrative Perspectives
The story unfolds through alternating perspectives of Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy’s teenage girlfriend. Diamond is vulnerable and “smelly poor,” carrying the psychic bruises of childhood abandonment. Loving Wonderboy offers her the illusion of belonging and access to another world.
Both women become tragically bound to the same young man: Priscilla has helped create, excuse, and enable him; Diamond begins to experience the sharp edge of the cruelties that flourish under such indulgence.
Central Drama and Themes
The novel’s central drama revolves around the gradual, then sudden, surfacing of Wonderboy’s true nature. A transgressive sexual encounter with another man leads Wonderboy to a fatal outburst of violence, and the novel quickly takes a darker, more urgent turn.
This drama unfolds suddenly, and at times the reader may long for a deeper excavation of Wonderboy’s interior life, particularly the implications of his sexual repression and brutality. His unraveling is both the engine of the narrative and yet somewhat underexplored.
Perhaps this absence is intentional: men like Wonderboy are often produced in plain sight, their damage normalized. His violence is presented as almost inevitable.
He is “one special boy”, Priscilla reflects, “but I had long known his cabbage was done, while his cornbread was soft in the middle”.
Still, the making of Wonderboy, the “beautiful monster,” would arguably be more compelling than the hurried excesses of his downfall.
Religious Power and Hypocrisy
Citchens astutely interrogates how religious performance can become a theater for power. Sabre, a philandering patriarch whose “very being was a lie,” embodies the grotesque hypocrisy of public holiness masking private cruelty.
He excuses his son’s predation as “boys being boys” and insists that scripture can smooth over disaster. When confronted with mounting evidence of Wonderboy’s violence, he demands of his wife:
“Find me a scripture, Cilla! Type me something good up.”
Priscilla’s Role and Emotional Core
Priscilla stands as the novel’s emotional center: witty, exhausted, kept from the brink by an addiction to her “fulfilments” (pills) and liquor. She becomes a case study in the false seductions of female martyrdom and the way women are taught to confuse endurance with love.
In one of the most moving moments, she tells Diamond:
“Never, ever, ever will you try to lose or find yourself in somebody else because you’ll be lost in the desert if you do.”
Humor and Setting
Despite its often macabre subject matter, Dominion is gloriously and deliciously funny. Citchens’s prose crackles with southern Black humor and idiom: a poorly dressed woman is described as “looking like the last slave freed”; oppressive heat becomes “boil-a-nigga hot.”
When Priscilla decides she has finally had enough of her husband, she laments mordantly:
“Normally, a Black woman could depend on something like diabetes or colon or prostate cancer to put rest to a problem husband.”
The textures and tones of semi-rural Mississippi life are rendered in vivid detail—the food, the gossip, the church politics, and the family histories.
Conclusion: A Tale of Inheritance
By the end, Dominion reveals itself as a tale about inheritance: the inherited scripts of masculinity, the inherited submission of women, and the inherited sadness of towns built atop generations of grief.
Citchens has crafted a bruising, funny, and deeply intelligent novel about how women’s lives are warped by the whims and cruelty of men, and about what becomes possible when women begin to imagine lives larger than those who seek to diminish them.
