Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults

Brave New Teenagers

Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136194757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award

From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market, Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. With its capacity to frighten and warn, dystopian writing powerfully engages with our pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and justice, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self. When directed at young readers, these dystopian warnings are distilled into exciting adventures with gripping plots and accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood. This collection enacts a lively debate about the goals and efficacy of YA dystopias, with three major areas of contention: do these texts reinscribe an old didacticism or offer an exciting new frontier in children's literature? Do their political critiques represent conservative or radical ideologies? And finally, are these novels high-minded attempts to educate the young or simply bids to cash in on a formula for commercial success? This collection represents a prismatic and evolving understanding of the genre, illuminating its relevance to children's literature and our wider culture.

Part One Freedom and Constraint Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination

Chapter One What Faction Are You in? The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth's Divergent

Balaka Basu

DOI: 10.4324/9780203084939-1

Whatever else they may do, all heroes of young adult fiction—and by extension, their readers—are eventually asked to consider the two great questions of adolescence: “Who am I now? And who do I want to be when I grow up?” As they do so, they inevitably embark upon a quest for identity, an apparently innocuous pursuit that lies at the very core of the genre. Consistently featured in these novels, this search for a tangible identity seems so natural that it has almost entirely escaped interrogation. It is perhaps all the more unsettling to realize, then, that at the end of their quests, the heroes of YA narratives tend to find not an individual identity but a collective one, defined mainly by membership in a particular group. Forming an adult identity is not understood by these novels as forging a unique, never-before-seen, and thus ultimately unclassifiable self, but instead as fitting in with an already extant type of self. Perhaps nowhere is this better encapsulated than in Veronica Roth's Divergent (2011), a recent and immensely popular “high concept” entry into the YA dystopian arena that seeks to critique this troubling understanding of identity but succeeds only in perpetuating and celebrating it.

A high concept narrative has a premise that is both “striking” and “easily reducible” to a single sentence, which too succinctly represents the experience conveyed by the entire text.¹ When this term is applied to a YA dystopia, the result is generally a narrative that centers around a totalitarian regime dedicated solely to the enforcement of this one-sentence premise and a spunky adolescent hero/heroine's resistance against said regime. Divergent's high concept—what if society divided itself into rigid groups, each dedicated to the cultivation of a single virtue, whose adherents are identified through a personality test?—overtly equates forging a personal identity for oneself with fitting into a pre-existing identity type, a slippage previously gestured towards by many of the novel's predecessors in YA fiction. While a dystopian novel might be expected to caution against the dangers of such a slippage, Divergent's narrative and rhetoric instead subtly endorse it.

Roth's novel appears to be positioned as a warning against the seductive pleasures of being categorized and classified: the truly admirable people in the story are “Divergent” and possess multiple virtues, making it difficult (though not impossible) to group them successfully. Beneath this surface message, however, the novel tacitly promotes the ideals of classification that have shaped its society, suggesting that its dystopia is the result of correctable corruption, not the product of a fundamentally misconceived idea. To be categorized is comforting and so, with a past nostalgically alluded to in her narrative, Roth suggests that a society explicitly organized by such categorization was at one point successful and possibly could be again. Divergent's attraction lies in its ability to define its protagonists, offering readers the hope of being similarly defined—the enchanting possibility of a world where their own interior minds can be “read” and essentialized, and in which their identities may no longer be so alarmingly fluid.

Reading Identity through Labels in YA Literature

High concept narratives like Divergent are often a “replication and combination of previously successful narratives”² or, in other words, a collage of preexisting texts; thus, in order to fully understand Divergent's perspective on identity, it will be helpful to examine the textual strands it incorporates and combines to construct its own narrative. These strands, I have suggested, are culled from a long tradition within YA literature, a tradition that begins with the need to make character and identity instantly decipherable and then goes on to conflate the resulting group label with personal identity itself.

Maude Hines remarks that the need to associate character with immediately and clearly comprehensible emblems

recalls earlier European and American responses to anxieties about “true” character that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These anxieties, produced in the wake of growing industrialization and urbanization, were reflected in fears of confidence men in the city, the merit badges of the Boy Scouts, and pseudosciences like phrenology and physiognomy.³

She notes how as early as in The Master Key: A Fable of Electricity (1901), L. Frank Baum invents the device of the “character marker,” spectacles that reveal the character of the person observed through the placement of a letter on the forehead: G for good, E for evil, W for wise, F for foolish, K for kind, C for cruel. Yet in Baum's novella, the main character, Rob, resists this knowledge: he is uncomfortable with the idea of using the character marker on his friends and family and eventually becomes hesitant about the ethical valence of using it on other people, deciding that anyone “who would take advantage of such a sneaking invention as that would be worse than a thief!”⁴ While the reasons for his discomfort are not fully explored in the novella and seem to relate to the unfair advantage over others that the spectacles bestow, it is evident that character, distilled into simple and visible signs of group membership, is likely to transform into the symbol of that membership itself rather than reflecting the complex interplay of traits that make up authentic personality. Identity under this rubric therefore begins to equal membership in the group, distinguished by a single marker of difference continually and disproportionately stressed.

Novels whose central focus is not on issues of identity, such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (1995–2000), are nevertheless popular in large part because of the readability of identity that they offer. As with Baum's novella, one of the most memorable aspects of Pullman's series is the method through which his characters’ souls are made immediately legible. In lieu of a letter on the forehead, in Pullman's parallel universe human characters possess a daemon: an autonomous manifestation of the person's spirit in animal form that makes their personality immediately visible “to others as well as themselves.”⁵ While the daemons of children are constantly in flux, changing form from one moment to the next, adulthood in Pullman's world is marked by the daemon's “settling” into a single, unchanging form, stilling the mercurial identity of a child into a defined and static shape.

The villains of His Dark Materials claim to oppose the daemons’ settling, and so it seems as if Pullman wants his audience to support it; indeed, Pullman's young heroine, Lyra, as well as her readers, seem to look forward to the fixing of identity with a fervent anxiety that generates a great deal of excitement and driving curiosity, perhaps because the child's desire to know the ultimate form of their daemon is paired by Pullman with the development of sexual desire. In fact, the antagonists’ wish to prevent the daemons’ settling is merely a byproduct of their efforts to curb this burgeoning sexuality and the growth of experience, efforts which are seen by the narrative universe to be in error. However, one wonders why exactly Pullman sees the rigid fixing of identity as a central part of growing up and sexual maturity in the first place: why do the daemons need to settle so finally? While adolescents might hope that puberty is the last moment of change and instability in a person's life, it seems somewhat invidious to claim that this is so.

Regardless, Pullman's narrative presents the fixing of the daemon's form into a specific animal as an essential aspect of entering adulthood. This fixing need not necessarily imply the complete erasure of individuality: after all, the animal world is probably diverse enough to offer each character its own “type” of soul. However, daemons explicitly function as markers of group identity as well. While Lyra, as the main protagonist, is delineated finely and precisely, as is her daemon, Pantalaimon, Pullman's minor characters fare less well: many of their daemons operate not just as a marker of personality, but also of position within society. For instance, the daemons of all witches are birds, while those of all servants are dogs. While a goose or beagle daemon may be a marker of individual personality, the encompassing classification of “bird” or “dog” is what utterly determines the person's role in life, thus subsuming his or her personal identity to their group membership. As Hines points out:

The form of the daemon is also an important key to character and even to class position … The natural place of servants (among themselves and as servants) is obvious, observable, through the dog shape of their daemons. Servant is not merely a profession, but ontology: the figure of the daemon naturalizes the rigidity of the class system in Lyra's world. While not all people with dog daemons are necessarily servants, the fact that all servants have dog daemons belies the infinite possibility the daemon represents before puberty.⁶

This “infinite possibility” creates an unstable identity that cannot be categorized, due to its multiplicity. Growing up in Pullman's world, then, means the stabilization of this identity into a single entity that will fit into a rigid system of classification.

In a recent study, Melanie D. Koss and William H. Teale performed a content analysis of current trends in the YA genre, and discovered that although

YA novels have the reputation of being hard and edgy, filled with harsh social issues such as sex, violence, drugs, and the like … the most frequent subjects were not so much the hard and gritty, but rather, again, related to the idea of fitting in.… Overall trends in subject matter included a shift away from coming-of-age stories to a focus on books with themes of fitting in, finding oneself, and dealing with major life changes.⁷

Their work further underscores the popularity of Pullman's suggestion that growing up is congruent with fitting in. Put another way, understanding oneself means discovering how to describe one's identity within the context of pre-existing categories.

A consideration of the elements which coalesce to form Divergent's perspective on identity would not be complete without a discussion of Harry Potter. In fact, one could easily describe Divergent as what happens when Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games (2008): an adventure-cum-romance set in a dystopian society based around the wizarding world's Sorting Hat. In J.K. Rowling's world, all the students of witchcraft and wizardry at Hogwarts are divided by this magical Sorting Hat into four distinct groups—Gryffindor (the brave), Slytherin (the ambitious), Ravenclaw (the smart), or Hufflepuff (the loyal)—based on their current personality at the age of eleven as well as what they consider to be important in life. This system is clearly, whether consciously or unconsciously, the source for Roth's factions. Though problematized in Rowling's text, the House system is never completely overthrown: when a character's complexity is discovered to be inadequately represented by his House allegiance, the novel's readers are told “sometimes … we Sort too soon,”⁸ not that in the final analysis, perhaps people can't or shouldn't be so easily sorted. It may be this very rigidity that audiences find so attractive and comforting; in any event, much like Pullman's daemons, the conceit of Hogwarts's four Houses endures as one of the most popular and compelling aspects of Rowling's fantasy world.

Indeed, legions of devoted readers continue to ask themselves what kind of animal their daemon would be and which House they ought to be in. As they do so, they encounter a plethora of fan sites that provide the option to take an online quiz to “get sorted” and find out who they are and where they belong. In her essay “Safe as Houses: Sorting and School Houses at Hogwarts” (2003), Chantel Lavoie catalogs a number of such sites, which she sees as reflecting competing interpretations of Rowling's text.⁹ Regardless of their interpretations, however, the proliferation of these quizzes reveals adolescents’ enormous interest in being sorted—especially by an external force that can make one's inner mind legible. Considering the number of online personality quizzes that have been based on fictional systems of identity categorization, it was probably only a matter of time until Divergent appeared: a book whose entire narrative is based around a personality quiz, a book which has of course in turn also produced its own “real world” online quiz.

Categorizing Divergence

Divergent takes place in a dystopian future Chicago that ironically believes it is still a utopia; its society has divided itself into factions, each of which is dedicated to the cultivation of the single virtue felt by its members to be the fundamental element in the eradication of war and other societal evils. Each faction is responsible for a specific function: the government is run by Abnegation (the selfless); the law by Candor (the honest); education and invention by Erudite (the intelligent); caretaking and social services by Amity (the kind); and defense and security by Dauntless (the brave). Children are raised in their parents’ factions until the age of sixteen, at which point they undergo an aptitude test that determines which faction they are suitable for. It is during this testing process that Roth's heroine, Beatrice Prior, discovers that her question does not have the easy answer she is looking for; instead of having a definite result as most people in her world do, her test reveals that she is “Divergent,” possessing traits and aptitudes that belong to multiple factions. By making her heroine Divergent, Roth appears to want to indicate that such classification into categories is itself problematic, but this thesis is subtly undercut throughout the narrative,...