Rebecca Allen

I read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve wanted to blog about it since, but everything I’d planned to blog in the last month kind of got pushed aside in favor of doing the Carnival. And before I get to the meat of this entry, a quick wrap-up on that:

I loved doing the Carnival. It was really an excellent experience for me, on a number of levels, but the major one is this: I know that I’m not alone. I’ve viewed most of what I read and watch through a feminist lens since almost before I can remember (the advantages of being raised in a very feminist household, thanks to my awesome family) and have started taking it a lot more seriously in the last few months. It feels great to know that it’s not just me, that other people care about the same things.

One other awesome thing about the Carnival was that I stumbled across a bunch of new sites to follow. A bunch of them are linked over at the side now, in fact. The only reason I drew a distinction between “media-based” and “political” feminism is because I like to keep the categories about the same length, for my own sense of aesthetics.

Anyway. It was a lot of work and took up a lot of time, but it was definitely worth the effort. I highly recommend hosting a Carnival to anyone who’s looking for a way to get more involved in the blogosphere — you find a lot of great sites, read a lot of very interesting stuff. It does take a time commitment, but it’s a particularly enjoyable one.

Speaking of the Carnival, the call for the eleventh edition is up.

Okay, one last note before the real entry: I’m trying to get onto a schedule of updating at least twice a week, which is more-or-less where I was before. However, I’ve just accepted my first actual 9-5 type full time job, and I don’t really know what that’s going to do to my free time and energy levels. So there might be a period of adjusting. (On the other hand, I have a real job! Doing what I moved to the city to do! Yay!)

And now, the post. Forgive me for it still being somewhat scattered — this series made me think a lot, but none of it gelled into an actual thesis. So here we go. (As usual, there are spoilers; I try to keep them general, but bits and pieces of the plot will be spelled out.)

The trilogy (Uglies, Pretties, and Specials by Scott Westerfeld) is a science fiction dystopia, set a few hundred years in the future. Our society finally fell apart, and the grand society that comes after it is (as far as they’re concerned) far superior — not just in technology, but in culture. They realized that the reason humans became violent was due to feelings of anger and inadequacy, brought on by the unfairness of nature. To counteract that unfairness, at the age of 16, everyone receives a major operation. It takes people from being ugly, the natural human state, to almost god-like in beauty. Every flaw is done away with, and as a result, everyone looks beautiful, and eerily similar.

Our hero, a 15-year-old named Tally, is waiting eagerly for her own operation. Her best friend has had his, and now lives with the rest of the pretties. She visits him, but he seems different, selfish and silly, and like he’s forgotten her. But while she’s waiting to join him, she meets a new friend, Shay, and they band together to spend the rest of their last year as uglies pulling pranks — including running away from the city to examine the ruins of the fallen culture. Through these adventures, Tally slowly learns that Shay doesn’t really want the operation; she doesn’t see what’s so wrong about looking natural. The week before their birthday, Shay runs off into the wild, claiming there’s a whole group of runaways who have decided not to have the operation. Tally is horrified — and it gets worse when the city’s secretive police group, Special Circumstances, tells her that she will not be allowed to have her own operation unless she follows Shay, brings her back, and betrays the location of the runaways. Stuck for options, Tally agrees — but when she finds Shay and the runaways, she learns that the operation doesn’t just make you pretty: it messes with your brain, making you stupid and complacent. That’s why the new society has no wars or violence; everyone is kept in a state of perpetual bliss, and rendered incapable of seeing what’s been done to them.

The premise is fantastic, and the first book (which contains all of the aforementioned set up) is by far the best of the three. I think there are a number of reasons, but the key is that in the first book, Tally has the most agency, and she’s easily relatable. The society is a parable for the sorts of body and self-esteem issues that today’s teenagers (girls in particular) cope with, and in the first book, Tally is worried about human seeming things. She’s dreaming of growing up and how being more attractive will solve all of her problems. She’s torn between loyalty to friends. She has a friend who’s done something stupid, and needs to decide if Shay really knows what she’s doing, or if the adults are right and Tally should fess up about everything she knows. These are situations which, despite being set centuries in the future, very strongly relate to real, tangible life.

Unfortunately, the series changes tone abruptly between books one and two — for a number of complicated plot reasons, Tally does end up having the operation, and it does mess with her brain. And there’s yet another operation between books two and three. Both times, Tally’s personality gets severely altered. So while the first book presents a struggling young woman and a coming of age story, the second and third books give us a confused character with little resemblance to our original protagonist, whose struggle is first to decide if she wants to go back to what she was, then the struggle to actually do so. It’s especially frustrating because the second book concentrates on Pretty Tally’s struggle to overcome the surgery and get her mind back under her own control (something that’s extraordinary and no one else has ever done without an external cure), and as she finally seems to get there, she’s kidnapped, has another surgery forced on her, and loses everything again. Sigh. It’s much easier to empathize with Tally, and to enjoy her story, when it’s Tally who’s driving the narrative, and making the major decisions. After the surgery, everything happens to her, and, despite her interesting internal struggles, I had a much harder time enjoying the story when the protagonist was muddling through it than when she was actually making the story happen. Or, in summary, book one gives the reader that illusive creature: the dynamic female protagonist. Books two and three give a pale echo of that; perhaps better than most books manage, but a disappointment after we’ve seen Tally as herself in book one.

Then there’s the question of Tally’s relationship to boys. It’s another case where the first book manages it best by far. In the first book, the three main relationships that drive Tally are the one with Peris, her male best friend who has had the operation; her relationship with Shay, her new best friend who doesn’t want the operation; and her relationship with David, a boy she meets in the wild while she’s pursuing Shay. It was extremely exciting for me to realize that Westerfeld intentionally gave Tally a non-romantic male best friend (he said so on his blog), and her changing relationship with Shay is one of the best parts of the trilogy, in that it remains relatable even after they’ve both had operations and have changed vastly. Tally’s relationship with David is interesting, too; it’s clear he’s going to be a boyfriend-type character, and through her relationship with him, Tally realized a lot about herself and grows as a character. I have no qualms with that.

The real problem is in the second book. Once she’s pretty, Tally forgets about David, which is an interesting dilemma when she starts to remember what she thought before the operation. But as a pretty, she meets another boy, Zane, and they become romantically involved right away. But unlike her relationship with David, it read as abrupt to me; and while her relationship with Zane is part of what causes Tally to change and try to regain control of her own mind, the tone is very different. What Tally learned from David was that she liked him, even though he wasn’t pretty, and from there, that it isn’t always outward characteristics that make up beauty. With Zane, on the other hand, Tally is trying to change because he wants to change, and wants her to change with him. Even though the changes are good (and many of the actions Tally takes, motivated by trying to save Zane, are also good), I’m hesitant about a story where female protagonist is trying to change herself to be a better girlfriend. Especially when, at the end of the second book, Tally basically spells out that it was falling for David that made her strong to begin with, and falling for Zane made her even stronger, and gosh, isn’t she lucky she had two boys who made her into such a good person? How can she possibly choose between them? Ick.

And then there was the disturbing. A major plot element introduced in the second book, carrying through in most of the third, involves self-injury. One of the characters, unable to heal her mind on her own, discovers that by cutting her arm she temporarily overcomes the brain altering surgery. She and her friends start a group called the Cutters who do this regularly. Which is pretty damn icky, but is also considered to be disturbing behavior. Tally is horrified by it. But at the same time, the series draws very direct parallels between its world and our world, particularly with regards to the ways self-esteem and body image problems can be very damaging. It touches on anorexia, drawing a parallel where Tally needs to lose weight for a plot reason and worries about becoming anorexic (which they teach in her school was one of the major dangers of our society, because not everyone was beautiful but everyone wanted to be). But there’s no direct parallel drawn between the characters cutting themselves and the very real problem of self-injury. And while Tally and others are shocked and worried that it’s happening, the character who is hurting herself is very sympathetic — we know why she’s doing it, and we actually see her benefit from it. All the more disturbing when, in the third book, Tally joins her group and cuts herself regularly, and the whole group becomes a part of Special Circumstances — shortened to Specials. To spell it out: cutting makes you special. So there’s a bit of a mixed message in that: cutting is a sign that a person is disturbed and needs help (though it’s never condemned directly), but it’s also a way to become special and feel better. It’s bad, but it’s intriguing. And while I’m positive that’s not the message Westerfeld meant readers to take away, it was the one I got, and it made me very, very uncomfortable.

I have a few other minor quibbles; I think the slang of the books got overused and annoying, and I’m not totally sold on the ending. Overall, I’d give Uglies four and a half whatevers out of five; Pretties and Specials would probably get three and a half. I think a lot of my disappointment with the trilogy is that the first book really is phenomenal, and the rest of the series didn’t live up to it. But it’s definitely worth reading; the world is full and fleshed out, the situations are complex and interesting, and when the characters are at their best, they’re fantastic, too. The series has its pitfalls and problems, but it’s still better than average; it made me think a lot as I was reading, which is always a good sign, and without any kind of lens — reading strictly for entertainment — it’s excellent. So I somewhat heartily recommend them.