Dystopia’s the new hot thing in young
adult literature. Ever since the bestselling success of The Hunger Games and its sequels, by Suzanne Collins, lots of other authors have tried to capitalize on this
trend. One of these so-called dystopias, Divergent,
by Veronica Roth, has been met with considerable success. Having read both,
it’s apparent to me that The Hunger Games
is superior—not only in terms of plot in characters, but in following the
traditional conventions of ‘utopian’ literature.
The two books resemble each other in
some ways: The Hunger Games tells the
story of Katniss Everdeen, a young woman from the quasi-Roman nation of Panem,
who volunteers to take her sister’s place in the titular Hunger Games, where twenty-four
children fight to the death on national television. Divergent follows another young woman, Beatrice Prior, in a
futuristic Chicago where everyone must swear themselves to one of five strict
factions that each strive to exemplify a different virtue. Certain surface features of utopias are
apparent in each—notably, in that each is a futuristic ‘traveler’s tale’, where
a character journeys somewhere new and is introduced to that society’s laws and
customs by a guide. Katniss travels from her poverty-stricken hometown in
District 12 to the opulent Capitol in the company of Effie Trinket, a chaperone
who instructs her on Capitol custom and the preparations for the Games.
Beatrice leaves her birth faction, which espouses selflessness, for Dauntless, a
faction espousing courage, and is initiated into their customs by Four, an
older boy. Katniss’s home country, Panem, is a play on words much like the word
‘utopia’ itself, which can mean both a ‘no-place’ and a ‘good-place’. Panem refers to an old Latin phrase, panem et circenses, ‘bread and
circuses’, referring to how Imperial Rome controlled its population. The word
also sounds like ‘pan-american’, referring to how Panem encompasses most of
North America.
On the surface, both stories appear
to draw on the utopian tradition. But utopian literature doesn’t just tell the
story of a fictional society—it tells the story of our own. Classical utopias,
like More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis describe societies made
perfect by solving a contemporary problem—More envisioned a world where the
elimination of private property would
end poverty, and Bacon described a society perfected through public funding and
respect of science. Dystopias describe societies ruined by extrapolating a
contemporary problem to its extreme—in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, backlash to the feminist movement creates a
strict theocracy that heavily limits women’s rights, and Huxley’s Brave New World creates a society where
mass production and materialism dominate every aspect of human life. In The Hunger Games, Collins describes a
country where the unequal distribution of wealth dooms millions to life in
poverty, where reality TV has degenerated society to the point at which
children are given makeovers and interviewed on national television before
being sent to their deaths. But the
factionalism in Divergent in no way
reflects modern society. Categorizing people by their greatest virtues may be
an interesting idea for a story, but it isn’t linked to any contemporary
problem in our society. Only one of these popular teen novels offers a
commentary on modern life.
First and foremost, the focus of any
utopia or dystopia is on the society. That doesn’t mean individual characters
cannot be well written or developed, but that the interactions of the
characters should reveal something about the system. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, the narrator, paints a comprehensive
portrait of the theocracy of Gilead through her interactions with characters
who play different roles in Gilead’s ridged social structure. The relationships
between the narrator and the other characters tell the story of the society as
well as the individual. In The Hunger
Games, Katniss initially only trusts the other people from her home
district and doesn’t think of allying with an outsider until one saves her
life. Initially, she fears and hates the competitors from the wealthier
districts, because she feels they have an advantage in the game. It’s not until
she watches those competitors die that she realizes her fear and hate should be
directed at the governing authorities that created the Hunger Games in the
first place. But in Divergent,
Beatrice’s story is much more about finding her own identity and making friends
than coming to terms with the society she lives in. Katniss asks herself who
the real enemy is—the other children coming to kill her, or the government that
created the Games? Beatrice asks herself
whether it’s possible for her to be brave and selfless at the same time (the
answer is yes, easily, if you’re a poorly written character in a bad book).
The word ‘dystopia’ is often used to
refer to any story set in an alternate society that has very strict, often
oppressive, rules. While genuine utopias
in the style of Thomas More’s are hard to find these days—probably because
books without conflict have a hard time holding the reader’s attention—modern
dystopian fiction builds off the earlier utopian tradition. Certain thematic
elements of utopia are easier to recreate than others, such as ambiguous,
symbolic names or framing the story as a traveler’s tale. But the ultimate
purpose of a utopia or dystopia is to tell the story of an alternate society
that either prescribes a solution (practical or not) to, or shows the harmful
extremes of, the writer’s society. While Divergent
may take place in an alternate society, its lack of social commentary and
connection weaken the case for it to be truly dystopian—and weaken the
narrative as a whole. Novels like The Hunger Games, which use characters
to tell the story of a greater struggle in society, and relate to the society
readers live in, are more than truly dystopian—they’re truly deep.
And if you want to check out my own novel, Iceclaw, you can find it here.
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