Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Amy L. Montz, Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Amy L. Montz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317135937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Responding to the increasingly powerful presence of dystopian literature for young adults, this volume focuses on novels featuring a female protagonist who contends with societal and governmental threats at the same time that she is navigating the treacherous waters of young adulthood. The contributors relate the liminal nature of the female protagonist to liminality as a unifying feature of dystopian literature, literature for and about young women, and cultural expectations of adolescent womanhood. Divided into three sections, the collection investigates cultural assumptions and expectations of adolescent women, considers the various means of resistance and rebellion made available to and explored by female protagonists, and examines how the adolescent female protagonist is situated with respect to the groups and environments that surround her. In a series of thought-provoking essays on a wide range of writers that includes Libba Bray, Scott Westerfeld, Tahereh Mafi, Veronica Roth, Marissa Meyer, Ally Condie, and Suzanne Collins, the collection makes a convincing case for how this rebellious figure interrogates the competing constructions of adolescent womanhood in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.

PART I
Reflections and Reconsiderations of Rebellious Girlhood

Chapter 1
Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young

Sonya Sawyer Fritz
University of Central Arkansas

In Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (2004), Anita Harris observes that:

in a time of dramatic social, cultural, and political transition, young women are being constructed as a vanguard of new subjectivity. They are supposed to offer clues about the best way to cope with these changes. Power, opportunities, and success are all modeled by the ‘future girl’—a kind of young woman celebrated for her ‘desire, determination, and confidence’ to take charge of her life, seize chances, and achieve her goals. (1)

Harris’s study traces this representation as a “popular story” about contemporary girlhood that is transmitted through discourses based in a variety of socio-political and cultural contexts, including education, the consumer market, employment and the workforce, and national and global citizenship (8). In contemporary popular culture, however, nowhere is this story about the “future girl” and the “new subjectivity” she models being more explicitly and compellingly told than in dystopian fiction for young adults. Female protagonists have taken center stage in YA dystopias as girls who resist the forces of their broken and corrupt societies to create their own identities, shape their own destinies, and transform the worlds in which they live. Authors such as Julianna Baggott, Lauren Oliver, and Veronica Roth—to name a few of the most recent contributors to the genre—portray their adolescent dystopian heroines as key agents in the resistance of dystopian governments and the rebuilding of a new world. In this way, contemporary dystopian fiction seems to bear out Harris’s claims that, in the twenty-first century, “young women are imagined and constructed as the ideal new citizens for a changing world [... who] lead the way for new modes of civic life” (94).

This essay explores how much dystopian fiction’s articulation of the adolescent girl as an empowered citizen and a heroic trailblazer has emerged as a trend within the past decade, and how this fiction engages various contemporary discourses on girlhood—specifically those regarding the idea of girl power and the practice of girl activism—in order to create this representation of the girl. I examine here three sets of texts, ranging in publication dates from the early stages of the dystopian fiction trend to more recent developments: Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” trilogy (2005–2007), Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy (2008–2010), and Moira Young’s Blood Red Road (2011) and Rebel Heart (2012). Collins’s and Westerfeld’s series of YA dystopian fiction have reached extraordinary levels of popularity over the past decade, with the profile of The Hunger Games growing even higher due to the release of film adaptations of the novels, while the first two novels in Young’s not-yet-completed “Dust Lands” trilogy have quickly become favorites among adolescent readers.¹

Embedded in the plotline of all three authors’ books is the celebration of the defiant teenage girl, as female protagonists are catapulted to the center of their societies’ attention because they dare to test their boundaries by fighting against the laws and norms of their deeply flawed worlds. For all three protagonists, average teenage behaviors such as breaking rules, keeping secrets, mistrusting authorities, and asserting one’s independence take on new significance as crucial acts of resistance when performed by the female protagonist. In this way, Westerfeld’s, Collins’s, and Young’s novels render the gendered period of female adolescence as a condition of their protagonists’ heroic political activism and highlight this developmental stage as a particularly important time of empowerment and socio-political awareness. What makes this representation of girlhood so potentially powerful for female readers, however, is the way in which it is communicated; this essay traces how the dystopian girl rebel is constructed in these novels through engaging various definitions of girl power, a perennial and quintessential rhetoric of girlhood in contemporary culture, and through echoing the lived experiences of real-life girl activists who engage in what Jessica Taft identifies as the process of “replicating and reconfiguring” conventional gender roles and identities (79). In doing this, these books not only tell what Harris calls a “popular story” about twenty-first-century girlhood but also connect their dystopian girl characters to complicated cultural realities regarding what it means to be an empowered, socio-politically conscious and active girl in the twenty-first century.

“Girl power” was originally developed as a slogan by the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s to refer to the resistance of patriarchy and passive consumerism that Riot Grrrls advocate, but it has since evolved into a multivalent term with implications and applications that often conflict with one another.² Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick, and Anita Harris describe girl power as “a complex, contradictory discourse used to name a range of cultural phenomena and social positioning for young women. Associated with a new take-charge dynamism, this discourse re-writes the passivity, voicelessness, vulnerability and sweet-naturedness linked to some forms of raced and classed girlhoods” (19). While the term has been criticized by some in the decades following the Riot Grrrl movement “for the way in which it is formulated around an individualism fraught with neo-liberal ideals” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 19), as well as for the ways in which it has come to be exploited by various commercial industries, its original significance as “an explicitly political concept” that highlights girls’ collective strength can still be located within the phrase (Taft, “Girl Power Politics” 69). Taking into consideration Taft’s suggestion that “scholars and professionals interested in girls’ political agency need to be cautious about our use of the language of Girl Power” (“Girl Power Politics” 77), I employ the term here to gesture to its continued use in reference to girls’ socio-political empowerment and capacity for self-determination to signify “a celebration of both the fierce and aggressive potential of girls” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 20).³ In this vein, Shauna Pomerantz suggests that girl power figures girls as “powerful social actors, unhampered by structural forces and the historical oppression of women within patriarchal culture” (159). As a rhetoric, Pomerantz claims, girl power enables girls to assume a variety of identities through which they can demonstrate their agency: “powerful ‘bitches’ with social clout, wild exhibitionists with unlimited sexual power, overachieving perfectionists who are exceptional at everything they attempt to do, butt-kicking babes who embody masculine strength while still remaining feminine, and unconventional rebels who resist dominant expectations of femininity through alternative lifestyles” (159–60). In this way, girl power as a rhetoric that continues to circulate in popular culture today can be understood as framing girls as individuals with personal, cultural, and socio-political power who, like the Riot Grrls who coined the phrase, can claim the right to change the world around them. It is this version of girl power that can be traced with increasing explicitness as a feature of the dystopian heroine in contemporary adolescent fiction.

In Westerfeld’s “Uglies” novels, the adolescent girl is figured as a rebel who fits Pomerantz’s description of a “powerful social acto[r]” (159) in a variety of ways. Throughout the series, Westerfeld’s heroine, sixteen-year-old Tally Youngblood, struggles to resist her government’s efforts to control and exploit her, both as a member of a dissident faction and as an individual seeking to live her life on her own terms. Born into a world of privilege set centuries in the future, Tally begins the series carrying out an uncomplicated existence in her isolated city, waiting impatiently for the day that she turns sixteen and can undergo the first of her city’s mandatory surgeries, a radical operation that will transform her into a paragon of physical perfection called a “pretty.” However, when Tally’s friend, Shay, decides to avoid the surgery by running away to an encampment of dissidents called the Smoke, Tally’s life becomes much more complicated: her relationship with Shay and her access to the Smoke place her in the crosshairs of Special Circumstances, a covert government unit that runs the city from the shadows and “want[s Tally] as a spy, an infiltrator” (Uglies 134). When Special Circumstances threatens to deny Tally the “pretty” surgery unless she travels to the Smoke and exposes the rebels who live there, Tally feels forced to comply; after arriving at the Smoke, however, Tally soon finds herself conflicted by the sympathy she feels for the rebels and her growing attraction to their leader, David. Despite her efforts to join the Smoke and sever her ties to Special Circumstances, Tally is tricked by the Specials into betraying her friends, which annihilates the Smoke and riddles her with guilt. Tally struggles with feeling responsible for the destruction of the Smoke and the captivity of her friends, and her government does everything it can to reinforce this feeling in order to remove focus from its own tyranny.

Throughout her interactions with Special Circumstances, Tally is reminded again and again by its leader, Dr. Cable, that “‘You always [have] a choice, Tally” (Uglies 307), an assertion meant to place the responsibility of Special Circumstances’ manipulations firmly on Tally’s shoulders and render her complicit in their plans. But Tally, growing more and more strong-minded and independent, does not accept this as her choice; she asserts that “‘I’m not confused …. I didn’t want to betray the Smoke. I was blackmailed’” (Uglies 397). With the same political awareness espoused by the girl power rhetoric of the Riot Grrrls, Tally refuses to internalize the machinations of her society’s governing bodies as matter of her personal choice; in believing what she knows to be true instead of what Special Circumstances and other city officials tell her, Tally begins to become a “produce[r] and creato[r] of knowledge, as [a] verbal and expressive dissente[r]” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 21). Doing so enables Tally to accept and own her role as a social actor by assuming responsibility for rebuilding the Smoke as a political dissident movement and working to educate other adolescents in her city about the ways their government deceives and controls them; working alongside other members of the old Smoke, Tally acts as a crucial witness, a citizen of the city who has experienced firsthand the cruelty of Special Circumstances and can testify by “show[ing] [other uglies] the plastic handcuff bracelets still encircling her wrists, and invit[ing] them to try to cut the cuffs off” (Uglies 406). By the end of the first novel in the series, Tally has gone from a passive and manipulated subject to, in Taft’s words, a “social and political sel[f]” (“Girl Power Politics” 75).

In the second and third novels in the series, Tally contends with even greater manipulations of her body and her mind as she is forced against her will to undergo two surgeries. The first, which takes place at the end of Uglies, is the city’s “pretty” surgery, which remodels Tally’s body but also damages her brain to make her vapid and docile; the second, which takes place at the end of Pretties, is the “cruel pretty” surgery that transforms Tally into a member of the Special Circumstances, with super-human physical prowess and “‘flashes of anger or euphoria, countersocial impulses, [and] feelings of superiority’” (Specials 253). In both cases, Tally is placed under the knife by her government in an effort to control her behavior and exploit her as a resource. Beyond the physical adjustments, the result of each surgery is an alteration of Tally’s mind that makes her more manageable and useful to Special Circumstances. Because of the radical changes caused by these surgeries, each of the novels in Westerfeld’s trilogy has the effect of beginning with a brand-new protagonist, a version of Tally Youngblood—silly, shallow, and gorgeous in Pretties; ruthless, arrogant, and weaponized in Specials—that readers have never met before. Yet what the novels reveal is that the real Tally, empowered, independent, and aware, lurks beneath the surface of each new façade and proves capable of rising up again despite the efforts of her government.

Following each transformative surgery, Tally is offered a cure that can change the effect of the surgery on her brain, but, in each instance, she finds that she does not need it; Tally discovers that “‘it’s still me inside’” (Pretties 327), and she is able to find her way back to being herself and to becoming a politically and socially conscious individual again each time. In Pretties, Tally takes what she thinks is the pretty cure and becomes clearer and more critical in her thinking but discovers later that she had taken the wrong pill; the only explanation is, as the Smoke’s doctor tells Tally, that “‘[s]omehow, you cured yourself’” (Pretties 337). This revelation causes Tally to realize that “she’d always been bubbly, somewhere inside” (Pretties 347).⁴ In Specials, Tally’s efforts to remain in control of her body and mind are even more fraught, as those around her try to force her to accept cures that will return her mind and body to the state of a normal human being. By the end of the novel, however, Tally has resisted these efforts and proven once again that she does not need to be manipulated by others in order to find herself; without the intervention of others, she has been able to return her mind and her personality to their original, pre-operation forms. The trilogy closes with a manifesto that Tally writes and shares with the world: “I don’t need to be cured.… From now on, no one rewires my mind but me” (Specials 371). Tally’s statement demonstrates that she fits the Riot Grrrls’ figuration of girls as “empowered to resist and, moreover, to produce their own self-representations” (Munford 269). It also reveals Tally to be an enduring agent for social and political change; her manifesto explains that she has developed a plan “‘to save the world’” by protecting the world’s natural resources from the new, post-pretty era of civilization that is dawning (Specials 368). Throughout the series, then, Tally’s engagement with the world around her and her own perceptions of herself reflect many of the values found in girl power rhetoric, particularly those regarding the girl’s ability to produce her own knowledge regarding her personal identity and her lived experience of the world.

While Tally’s modeling of girl power is portrayed primarily as a process that develops over time, Katniss Everdeen, the sixteen-year-old heroine of Collins’s Hunger Games novels, is in many ways figured as a paragon of girl power from the very beginning. Because Katniss is characterized from the opening pages of the trilogy as a survivor, an intelligent and independent individual who daily confronts the tyranny of her country’s oppressive and opulent Capitol, it is relatively easy to locate her character within the matrix of girl power as it is defined here; in Katniss’s case, the description of girl power as an attitude of “self-assertiveness, bitterness, and political insight” embodied in the adolescent girl is particularly apt (Gonick 311). In general, Katniss consistently demonstrates her empowerment through rebellious behavior that reflects her abilities to think for herself and to take action when it is necessary for her well-being; she trusts her own judgment, works to keep others’ attitudes and expectations from dominating her behavior or self-perception, and exhibits acuity regarding the politics of her world—all features of girl power as a refutation of the “passivity, voicelessness, vulnerability and sweet-naturedness linked to some forms of raced and classed girlhoods” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 19). Katniss’s ability to resist internalizing these traits is made all the more significant by her own marginalized social class and ambiguous racial/ethnic background, which render her an outsider, a girl from the wrong side of town, even within her own impoverished district.⁵

As an individual whose socioeconomic marginalization is explicitly linked to her district’s political standing as a group of unsuccessful rebels who continue to be punished by the victorious Capitol, Katniss is primed to interpret the socio-political implications of each action that she takes—certainly more so than Tally in the Uglies books or Saba in Young’s novels, both of whom are at first oblivious to the political machinations at work in the worlds in which they live. Katniss’s political awareness becomes even stronger after she replaces her younger sister, Prim, as a tribute in the Hunger Games, a gladiator-style event that requires its child participants, one boy and one girl from each of the oppressed districts, to fight one another to the death for the entertainment of the Capitol. After participating in extensive training periods at the Capitol designed t...