EMBODYING ECOTOPIA: DYSTOPIAN PERSONIFICATIONS OF NATURE (original) (raw)

The motif of Nature and the resultant presence of environmentalist problems in children and young adult literature has a long standing. Homologising pristine Nature with the innocence of childhood works along simple connotative connections and is almost intuitive: there exists „implicit, although not unproblematic or uncontested, sense that both children and nature are “innocents” which “naturally” align (remembering that “Nature” is also “red in tooth and claw”)” (Jaques 2015). However, David Whitley (2012) claims that specifically young adult literature tends to utilize urban settings, and it is largely confirmed in the juvenile dystopian genre. Whereas it is true that most of socially informed fiction for young adults undertakes environmentalist problems, the settings are either artificially constructed luxury spaces or deserted, ruinous cities. Obviously, dystopias would signal the necessity to act via the portrayal of loss and deprivation, however, Nature is always present at least in the background: as a threatening monster (Nature-skeptical narratives) or as pastoral loveliness (Nature-endorsing narratives) (Jaques 2015). Frequently, these two approaches are commingled, resulting in a problematized picture. One of the devices used by the dystopian authors to play up environmentalist themes is personification. Some of these representations can be seen as the embodiments of ecotopias: dreams of unspoilt, healing power, often conjoined with the paradisal moral perfection, continuing the tradition of „natural theology” (Stableford 2010). In the proposed paper I would like to analyze such personifications to disclose their interplay with environmentalist themes present in the novels. The primary texts will be the Matteo Alácran series (Nancy Farmer), the Hunger Games series (Suzanne Collins) and the Legend cycle (Marie Lu). In all of these specific representations of Nature appear, utilizing ecotopian images. Farmer sets her story in an enclave of unspoilt Nature in a polluted world and personifies the healing powers of Nature itself as Mushroom Man. Katniss Everdeen from Collins’s series is often discussed in ecofeminist terms as the representation of vengeful Nature (e.g. Garriot et al. 2014) – however, for the purposes of the paper, it is justified to focus the discussion on her younger sister, Primrose Everdeen. Marie Lu sets the dystopia in a post-disaster U.S. and organizes her narrative around finding and curing Eden, the protagonist’s younger brother, who is ironically being used as a bioweapon. Bringing together man and Nature in one literary representation would seem to signal embracing the precepts of deep ecology – seeking and advocating the balance between human and non-human. As scholars suggest, though, the literature for the young tends to be anthropocentric, and Nature remains inferiorized (Bradford et al. 2008, Jaques 2015) – here personified as children and an old man, who need to be taken care of. However, the picture of the interconnection between nature and culture in the mentioned narratives is far from uniform. Among others, we can observe the splitting and shifting of the meanings of Eden and Paradise in relation to technology and the wild, varying emphasis on the chtonic and the diurnal, and ambivalent relation to Nature itself (commingling of the Nature-skeptical and Nature-endorsing attitudes, especially in Lu’s cycle). Deeper analysis of the chosen examples will show that the emergent picture of ecotopia is not simply that of the return to the pristine natural conditions but more often the posthuman connection of Nature and technology, as well as it will present broader implications of the above-mentioned elements of the narratives.