Anna Carey's Eve: Mapping the Utopian Dream of Gender Equality Within Young Adult Dystopian Fiction by KELLI ANNE GUNN Thesis

Anna Carey’s Eve: Mapping the Utopian Dream of Gender Equality Within Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

KELLI ANNE GUNN

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University Spring Convocation 2017

This thesis by KELLI ANNE GUNN was defended successfully in an oral examination on 6 December, 2016.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

______Dr. Zelda Abramson, Chair

______Dr. Graham Murphy, External Examiner

______Dr. Jon Saklofske, Internal Examiner

______Dr. Andrea Schwenke Wyile, Supervisor

______Dr. Jessica Slights, Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS (ENGLISH)

………………………………………….

I, KELLI GUNN, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

______Author

______Supervisor

______Date

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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………….. 1

Chapter 1: Subverting Traditions by Blending Genres…………………… 7

1.1 .Separating Utopia as a Literary Genre from Utopian Desire…… 9

1.2 Young Adult Literature and Utopian Impulses………………… 14

1.3 Fantasy and Speculative Fiction……………………………….. 23

Chapter 2: Mapping Traditions and Progress...... 29

2.1 Revisiting 20th Century Feminist Literary Critique…………….. 32

2.2 Evolution of Gender Representation Within Literary Traditions 50

Chapter 3: Moving Beyond Traditional Gender Binaries…………………. 59

3.1 Heroic Quest……………………………………………...... 61

3.2 Challenging the Male Hero…………………...... 72

3.3 Deconstructing Hero Gender……………………………………. 73

Conclusion……………………………………………………………...... 81

Works Cited………………………………………………………………… 84

Abstract

Young adult literature needs to see an increase in the volume and variety of gender-fluid heroic figures to combat the almost exclusive glorification of the male hero. More focus needs to be placed on the unconventional ways young adult heroes succeed on their quests without adhering to traditional stereotypes that limit characters based on their gender. Anna Carey’s Eve presents a young adult female hero who survives based on her own ability to change and adapt, as well as a willingness to rely on her friends and to help them in return. Eve and her friends are compassionate characters who use their agency to transform The New America from an oppressive state to a democracy that does not emphasize or enforce gender-based roles, as well as positively influence YA literature as a whole by challenging gender stereotypes. Eve influences YA fantasy literature for the better, and emerges from gendered stereotypes in the process. This thesis focuses on 1) factors that reinforce patriarchal hegemony in YA heroic narratives, particularly in dystopian, post-apocalyptic settings, and the preference of conglomerate publishers to choose manuscripts where the protagonists perform masculinity and 2) how blending genres in young adult literature can result, as is the case with Eve, in marketable novels with less conventional heroic figures, which are relatable to a wider audience of young readers. At the root of Eve is a utopian vision for a society that places less emphasis on gender prescription and more on basic human growth, development, and acceptance.

Anna Carey’s Eve: Mapping the Utopian Dream of Gender Equality

Within Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

Introduction

“Utopia is about how we would live and what kind of world we would live in

if we could do just that.” (Levitas 1)

Anna Carey’s young adult dystopian trilogy comprised of novels Eve (2011), Once

(2012), and Rise (2013) challenges outdated gender representations in young adult fiction. The heroic quest within the narrative serves dual purposes by following the journey of a teenaged, female protagonist named Eve, as well as symbolizing Eve’s personal and societal progression away from patriarchal practices that bind physiological sex to certain gender roles toward a fluidity of gender, where individuals are free to choose their roles based on their personal skill sets and desires, rather than following the status quo. Within the dystopian landscape and quest narrative of the trilogy, which will henceforth be referred to as Eve, Carey reimagines a society that fights and overcomes a totalitarian regime that dictates the futures of orphans based on their sex. Literally, Eve’s quest is to rescue other girls from being used as birthing machines. In addition, Eve’s

quest symbolizes Carey’s desire for a progression away from Young Adult (YA) genre limitations and traditions. Carey`s approach to gender and genre limitations makes her

Eve trilogy a noteworthy intervention in YA fiction.

Set only thirteen years in the future, after a deadly plague has wiped out almost all of the people in the United States, the novel features the King of The New America rebuilding a city on the site of what used to be Las Vegas, by using orphaned boys as slaves and orphaned girls as baby-making machines. Because the government bombed all the cities to eradicate the unnamed disease, the King must start from scratch, and to do that, he uses orphaned boys as slaves to build his city, and girls as “sows” to repopulate.

Eve, a star student at her School, discovers, the night before her graduation, that she is destined to become one of these sows. Following this discovery, she runs away into the

Wild, vowing to return to the School and to rescue her friends from being victimized and exploited by the King’s regime because of their ability to have children. Likewise, the male characters are victimized and mistreated by the King, which suggests that, unlike some of her predecessors, Carey’s feminism takes into consideration and acknowledges the damaging effects of patriarchy on men, as well as women. The King tries to force the boys and girls into set roles within his new society based on their physiology, while Eve proves how arbitrary those roles are as she acts according to her personal strengths and weaknesses and encourages others to do the same.

Dystopian fictions like Eve serve as a critique of the present when authors construct futuristic and imaginative settings to reflect real world problems, such as imbalances in power due to patriarchal values. Rather than constructing a mirror image of reality, authors of such fictions exaggerate problematic aspects of real life in an attempt to

comment on, and critique, such conditions. Specifically, in the Eve trilogy, Carey prods at issues of power through mild disruptions of the heteronormative gender roles that the

Western hero formula is founded on. The representations of Eve, Arden and Caleb can thus be read as somewhat subversive to patriarchal hegemony.

Dystopian narratives are commonly set in a world that has been devastated by an apocalyptic tragedy where leaders are trying to reestablish order by enforcing societal control and conformity. It is against the totalitarian control of these leaders that the protagonists exercise their individuality and agency. Characters who live in post- apocalyptic dystopian societies have the chance to shape a society in its formative years, just like young adult literature has the opportunity the shape the minds of young readers by challenging them to think critically about the literature they read and how it reflects real life, in the hope of educating them against mindlessly accepting the status quo. The

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and The Forest of

Hands of Teeth by Carrie Ryan are all examples of YA fictions in which political leaders enforce tight restrictions and rules that are then subverted by the protagonists and set the stage for them to stand out as progressive characters, but the overreaching ideologies within the narratives are not necessarily progressive in terms of the roles the characters play in respect to gender stereotypes. Eve has a distinct, although subtle, progression in character development that goes beyond coming-of-age and beyond the heroic quest journey, which challenges many typical gender representations.

Dystopias, particularly those set in a post-apocalyptic world like Eve, are infused with utopian longings that encourage growth and change, represented by the main character’s resistance to an oppressive force. The force may be a totalitarian leader, bleak

environmental conditions, starvation, slavery, or any number of other situations, but the narrative exists to prove that those conditions can be overcome. Raffaela Baccolini asserts that “utopian [longings are] maintained in dystopia, traditionally a bleak, depressing genre with no space for hope in the story, only outside the story” (520). The subversive element, that aspect of Eve’s narrative which suggests, however implicitly, that Eve ultimately succeeds in overcoming her father’s patriarchal hegemony, can be identified as Carey’s utopian dream or longing: This dream consists of a wish for a female hero who can move beyond the limitations of the patriarchal heroic genre and so feed into the larger utopian dream of gender equality and fluidity in literature, one that can be “enjoyed and nourished through the fantastic” (Zipes, “Why Fantasy Matters” 2).

Equal does not mean identical, however, and part of what I will argue is that Carey’s implicit utopian vision is an inclusiveness within young adult literature for definitions of

“heroes” who are not defined by traditional gender binaries. Carey’s combination of genres allows her to introduce a heroic figure who defies traditional heroic archetypes, and this hero, Eve, is an essential figure in understanding Carey’s utopian vision of more inclusive and complex young adult fictional possibilities relating to gender representation and genre use.

Carey has effectively combined multiple genres that both anchor Eve to YA heroic traditions as well as ensure there is plenty of room to imagine her character as a less than traditional heroic individual. Considering Carey’s genre manipulation is vital to understanding how and why Eve can impact the YA literary market because, meta- narratively, young readers deal with a similar type of tyranny that YA dystopian heroes must face, in the way they must resist being dictated to by publishing conglomerates.

As well, the tradition of feminist literature alluded to in Eve is just as vital to understanding Carey’s utopian vision or longing. Eve’s geographical movement within

The New America can be read with correlation to the literary traditions that have previously prevented or failed to sustain a young adult female heroic figure. Eve’s journey through these geographical points represents a larger movement beyond typical generic tropes. These literary traditions are tied to the formulaic YA heroic genre discussed in the first chapter, the second chapter examines how this heroic formula is recognized as an ongoing problem in Carey’s allusion to feminist science fictions in Eve, and the third and final chapter argues that the traditional formula is ultimately challenged by characters who are less conventional in terms of how they adhere to patriarchal gender stereotypes.

The trilogy concludes with Eve and her boyfriend, Caleb, fleeing the City for their safety, amid ongoing socio-political unrest, similar to the ongoing friction between present day regimes that wish to continue enforcing oppressive patriarchal values and those who desire gender equality in all areas of society. Ultimately, Eve’s quest is a success, insofar as she frees the girls from the Schools and defeats the King, but much is left unsettled, indicating to readers that the challenge in Eve is a broader societal problem rather than just a coming-of-age story that celebrates a character’s growth. The unsettled ending of the series is crucial to understanding that a utopian longing or vision for a society, whether for reformed political structures or for a shift in power when it comes to gender relations, is not going to be resolved after one attempt at reform. The history of white, male heroes is not immediately exchanged for diverse heroes who represent every

kind of reader just because Suzanne Collins made Katniss the hero of The Hunger Games instead of her male companions Gale or Peeta. Katniss is one person, with unique traits and complications, just as Eve, Caleb, and Arden, who is another runaway and eventually

Eve’s closest friend and helper, are unique in their own ways. The movement towards diversity, however gradual, that Carey is participating in with Eve, provides YA readers with young adult heroes who succeed by using their individual strengths in slightly more fluid gender roles than their contemporary counterparts, rather than trying to conform to a mold that is not only antiquated, but procrustean to the diverse YA audience.

Subverting Tradition By Blending Genres

Despite the current rise of social and political awareness regarding the fluidity of gender, conglomerate publishing companies of YA fiction still favor manuscripts that feature masculine heroes. Carey presents Eve as a narrative that celebrates a female hero whose symbolic and geographical journey extends both YA literary genres and gender roles in order to convey a utopian longing for less binary, less patriarchal representations of YA heroic characters. Subsets of fantasy fiction, like heroic quest tales, rely on

“repetitions in formulaic details … with nearly no spontaneous anti-formulaic occurrences in mainstream, popular, unliterary fiction” (Faktorovich 48), and thus tend to rehearse, and therefore reinforce, traditional gender roles. Publishers are reluctant to promote portrayals of heroic characters that feature unconventional gender representations because they stray from tried and true generic formulas. The Gender &

Society Journal published, in April 2011, what they claimed was the “most comprehensive study of 20th century children's books ever undertaken in the United

States” (Sociologists for Women in Society). The findings, “based on a study of nearly

6,000 books published from 1900 to 2000, revealed a bias towards tales that feature men and boys as lead characters, and that females' representations did not consistently improve from 1900 to 2000." This could perhaps be explained in part, as Anna E.

Altmann suggests in her article “Welding Brass Tits on the Armor,” that while there are

“arguments that the ‘he’ of the mythographers … stands in for a gender-neutral pronoun that English lacks, [nevertheless], myths in which the hero is male dominate the canons of both traditional literature and scholarship, … and the sheer number of male images and masculine pronouns makes the hero almost ineluctably male” (145). Qualifying for advertisement in multiple genres makes a manuscript more broadly marketable to diverse audiences and at the same time less beholden to generic formulas that default to traditional representations of gender roles. Carey’s YA trilogy, Eve, is a fantasy narrative that incorporates formulaic sub-set genres like the heroic quest, which stems from epics, legends and mythology, and YA dystopia, which features post-apocalyptic catastrophe, yet is optimistic about the future. This multiplicity opens up the possibility for Eve to be a more nuanced hero figure than if Carey were adhering only to one generic formula that favors established gender roles, thus, increasing Carey’s appeal to publishers who will then market her books in spite of their content which gently subverts the patriarchal ideology to which most publishers typically adhere. Blending genres provides more creative space than if an author conforms to a particular genre. At the same time, formulaic genres, like the heroic quest, provide readers with familiar narrative patterns that can be distorted when moving away from one particular genre within the fantasy subsets. The combination of genres in Eve provides a creative space for characters to operate in non-binary gender roles and a means of critiquing the literary traditions imbricated in the YA fiction that is widely popular today. In Eve, the appeal to multiple genres yields nuanced and complex characters who demonstrate a recognizable utopian longing for an exchange of patriarchal traditions for more fluid gender roles that are not directly linked to biological sex.

The word “utopia,” has shifted from “Utopian form [,or a prescribed community, to a] Utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life” (Jameson 1). There is a connotative utopian vision in Eve that can be detected through the deeds, representations, or words of the characters involved. To accommodate heroes of this nature, literary genres themselves must be manipulated, which Carey accomplishes by not adhering to one generic form, which is not uncommon in YA fantasy fictions. Carey attempts to achieve fluid gender roles through blending both genre and gender in her Eve trilogy, which is not as common in YA fantasy. Eve’s quest narrative is rendered non-traditional through Carey’s blending of fantasy and dystopian elements that take readers to a place where they can witness Eve facing and surmounting various challenges and social interactions as a character who is not bound by traditional gender roles.

1.1 Separating Utopia as a Literary Genre from Utopian Desire

For the purpose of differentiating between the utopia in utopian longing and the utopian element of dystopian fiction, a brief explanation of the evolution of utopianism from its first roots in western literature until now is a useful starting point. The

“imaginary island where Thomas More place[d] his communitarian republic” in 1516

(Nancy 3) is the origin of the word “Utopia.” Etymologically, the word “utopia” is

“composed of the Greek topos (a place, in the precise sense of the determined place, a location, a particular region)” (3), and the Greek word “ou,” meaning “no.” Utopia is

literally “no place” in the sense that when utopia is traditionally referred to, it is never in reference to an actual place that currently exists, has existed in the past, or is expected to exist in the future, but is an imagined place where authors model their real-world desires.

Utopian longing, however, does not refer to a place, but relies on the base desires that encourage a utopianist to dream in the first place. The utopian longing, in reference to

Eve, is based on Ernst Bloch’s theory of maintaining “human wish pictures and day dreams of a better life” (Jameson 2) without “depreciating [into]… wishful thinking”

(Bloch 1). Utopian impulses propel the “social dreaming” that constitutes utopianism

(Sargent, “Utopianism and National Identity” 126). Social dreaming encourages what

Bloch refers to as “the education of desire” that “informs human action” (Levitas 33), and

“if the function of utopia is the education of desire, the function of the education of desire is the realization of utopia” (33). The shift from More’s utopianism, which includes models of government and societal structures, to the utopian longing present in Eve, began to evolve after the Second World War. Ruth Levitas observes that post-WW2 utopianism is “pragmatic” in nature, “abandoning the idea of blueprints ... and ambitious targets” (22) for a “process … incorporated in the daily construction of life in society …

[that no longer] aspires to change the world at a macro-level, and is focused now on operating at a micro-level” (22). Therefore, where More’s Utopia is an actual literary form, intended to address issues and problems that concerned him in his current society by modeling a less problematic society that was never meant to be realized, present utopia has evolved beyond the literary form, or prescribed communities, into a longing or desire. Fatima Vieira says that “utopia is innate to [humans] and has a perennial and immeasurable nature” (20), and is more than a longing—it is a desire for change.

Utopianism, as it is now understood, manifests in what Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone refer to as “active hope” (3) that first “involves hopefulness [that] our preferred outcome is reasonably likely to happen, [which] … is require[d] … before we commit ourselves to action” and will prevent us from acting when “we don’t rate our chances too high” (3).

Second, it “is about desire” and “knowing what we hope for and what we’d like, or love, to take place” (3). Essentially, utopia becomes an implicit or internal desire that can be acted on by an individual rather than a constructed material model or system of governance.

Exactly what those specific utopian “impulses” are can only be identified through the reciprocal relationship between author and reader. Readers have the opportunity to recognize or accept the optimism of the utopian visions imbedded in texts and so be led to question the validity of traditions that have been accepted as status quo in the active pursuit of change. If socially-conscious authors can move readers toward hoping and working for a better world collectively, utopia can be “not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to be pursued” (Levitas 1). Thus, rather than defining utopia as an image of how life could be, utopia becomes a conviction that life does not have to be the way it is. As

More conveyed his desire for the unfairness and corruption in British society to be addressed through Utopia, present day utopian longings are conveyed through narratives that do not necessarily involve the invention of a community within which those desires are acted out, but rather conveys the authors’ particular utopian message in subtle ways throughout their narratives and thus, are beholden to no particular genre. Eve is a YA fantasy that follows a heroic quest tale through a dystopian landscape, but the narrative itself does not directly address the utopian longings present within it in the way More’s

narrative, for example, expresses longings for fair property laws, peaceful existence, and political titles that cannot be abused for individual gain. The utopian longing that is most easily identified in Eve is for the presence of heroic characters in YA fiction that are not defined or restricted by societal expectations, both within the narrative and meta- narratively. Eve’s struggle against her father, who targets boys for their physical strength and girls for their child-birthing abilities, speaks to Carey’s awareness of and sensitivity to feminist issues and makes the utopian longings present in Eve that much more identifiable.

The genre of dystopian fiction replaces the traditional blueprinted utopian societies with “vaguer guidelines, indicating a direction for [people] to follow, but never a point to be reached” (Sargent 22). Dystopian narratives with open endings maintain the utopian impulse within the work … by rejecting the traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel (Baccolini 520). Witnessing characters living in an intensely bleak dystopian society gives readers room to hope because, although their world might be bad, it is not as bad as the dystopian world. Dystopian authors direct readers’ desire for change toward the elements of present society that they believe are in need of reform by creating fictional settings where those elements, such as the threat of nuclear war or destruction of the earth’s natural resources, are shown to be at their worst. Societal dysfunction in Eve, for example, is revealed to readers when they learn that the female orphans are taught to hate and fear all men except the King, and then to Eve when she finds out that she will be forced to bear children for the King’s army if she does not escape. Eve must transform from the sheltered girl she was at the School into an aware young woman because her

unwillingness to accept the inhumane ideology that the King is trying to enforce in The

New America moves her to action.

Dystopianism in the “general phenomenon of utopianism,” is part of “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives”

(Sargent 9). “Dys” comes from the Greek “dus,” meaning “bad, abnormal, [or] diseased”

(Vieira 16), and translates to mean a “bad place.” Using the “narrative devices of literary utopia, incorporating into its logic the principles of euchronia (i.e. imagining what the same place – the place where the utopist lives – will be like in another time – the future),

… literary dystopia … predicts things will turn out badly [and is thus] essentially pessimistic in its presentation of projective images” (17). Dystopia is defined by Lyman

Tower Sargent as “a non-existent society … that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (“The

Three Faces” 9). In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New

Teenagers, authors Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz state that dystopian literature “often functions as a rhetorical reductio ad absurdum of a utopian philosophy, extending a utopia to its most extreme ends in order to caution against the destructive politics and culture of the author’s present” (2). Dystopian fiction offers a warning to or critique of current society by chronicling the protagonist’s challenge with ruined geographical and social spaces, like the impoverished residents of the districts in

The Hunger Games, or through the character’s interaction with other members of the dystopian society who suffer under totalitarian rule.

Basu, Broad and Hintz suggest that “[w]hether [dytopias] depict a postapocalyptic struggle for survival or a valiant attempt to retain individuality in a totalitarian world, YA

dystopias are marked by their ambitious treatment of serious themes” (4). There is a didactic message warning readers that this is how the world could potentially be in the future if certain things are not addressed now. The element of warning in dystopian literature, mixed in with the “exciting adventures with gripping plots is used to deliver accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood” (Basu 1). However, dystopian fictions need not, and should not, be accepted as a prophecy by the author that the world will inevitably meet a horrible end. Rather,

“dystopian worlds are … designed to display—in sharp relief—the possibility of utopian change even in the darkest of circumstances” (3). In order to encourage change in society, dystopian fictions play on real-life fears that the world will end from nuclear war or zombie plagues, but at the same time dystopian worlds also serve as a dreamscape that manifest contingently with problematized aspects of the dystopian society, essentially a utopian dream within a dystopian fictional narrative.

1.2 YA Literature and Utopian Impulses

Dystopian fiction has become increasingly popular with YA readers over the past decade and when classroom teachers Justin Scholes and Jon Ostenson “investigated … why teens f[ind] this genre so compelling” (n.p.), they discovered that utopian longings are really at the root. Scholes and Ostenson discovered that although their students enjoy reading books that feature a protagonist with agency who is involved in close romantic relationships, they strongly respond to dystopian novels in which “the protagonists come

to understand that their society has become inhumane [and] … are appalled by the attitudes and actions of those within their culture, sickened at the complacency and even the open coldness of others toward situations that are cruel and unjust” (n.p.). The crossover to multiple genres appeals to a wider audience and the YA protagonists’ awakening “to this inhumanity … pushes [them] to action” (n.p.). In a sense, adolescence can be viewed as a dystopian time for young people as they transition from childhood and must learn, as Eve does, what information they will accept from those in authority over them, and what they must decipher on their own terms.

Teens who experience tension with authority figures in their lives can identify when protagonists in YA literature are “repressed as well as liberated by their own power and by the power of the social forces” (Trites 8). The tension between protagonist and overbearing authority figures works particularly well in YA dystopian fictions that feature an exaggerated role of a totalitarian leader because readers tend to side with the oppressed rather than the oppressor, awarding the readers a sense of liberation and satisfaction when the repressed succeed in revolution. As Roberta Seelinger Trites notes, the designation of certain works of literature as “YA” has become a “marketplace phenomenon of the twentieth century … in which adolescents can be depicted engaging with the fluid, market-driven forces that characterize the power relationships that define adolescence” (7). When the status quo suggests that heroes are male, young people learn to model their own behavior and feelings accordingly. For young readers who do not feel represented within the limited options for heroic figures, the result can be alienating, discouraging those readers from buying and reading further books of the same nature,

thus perpetuating the cycle. The popular genres will continue to be published. Antero

Garcia claims that

Contemporary novels do not get sorted into … popular genres: they are

written for the specific markets that young people are sorted into. This

isn’t something new. Young people are marketed to with regard to the

clothes they wear, the foods they eat, the phones they accessorize, and any

number of other youth cultural components … [even] seeping into the

academic lives of young people more and more. The choices they make

with regard to the books they feel they should read are guided by

deliberate commercial decisions well beyond the purview of youth agency.

(26)

Part of making gender equality the norm, rather than a utopian longing, is for young readers to not only have access to books that portray unbiased gender representations if they search in the far reaches of bookstores, or search out independent publishers, but to have those books lining the bestseller shelves. The influence of the publishing companies is specifically relevant to Eve as a YA novel that branches out into several genres because publishers can advertise in several categories at once, which appeals to a broad audience.

The library categories listed inside the books are Survival fiction, Orphan fiction, and

Science fiction. However, the Harper Collins Canada website categorizes Eve as Young

Adult Fiction, Fantasy, Social Themes, such as Family, and Romance, and “Gender” could, ideally, be listed as well. Fiction/Dystopian, YA, Romance, Science Fiction,

Fantasy, Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic, Fiction, Adventure, and Teen. There is no mention of Eve as a feminist fiction in any of these places, however, which seems like an

obvious exclusion. The goal of feminist fictions, of which there are many accounts by many authors, defined by Sarah Kaye Lewis in Gendering the Body, is to “fight for finite hierarchical, phallocentrical privilege … men have always taken for granted” (Lewis

142). Feminist literature brings awareness to the harmful effects of patriarchal ideology, yet it appears that the YA and fantasy/science fiction categorizations selected by advertisers and publishers preempt Eve from being identified as feminist fiction because feminist literature is a niche market.

The persistent voices of feminists over the last century have brought about change that, at times, was a discontinuous giant leap forward, like gaining voting rights Federally in Canada in 1919 or the passing of the United States Equal Pay act in 1963, and there are times when the push for change is not recognizable. Macy and Johnstone suggest that when “change … happens incrementally at a steady, predictable rate, … we can get very discouraged, [but] … sudden shifts can happen [causing] … discontinuous change,

[which] … opens up a genuine sense of possibility” (89). Discontinuous change is a

“threshold … crossed where rather than just more of the same happening, something different occurs” (90). To invoke discontinuous change or increase social awareness of issues like non-binary gender roles and feminist ideals through YA literature like Eve is challenging because, as Seelinger Trites explains in Disturbing the Universe: Power and

Repression in Young Adult Literature, “much of the genre is … dedicated to depicting how potentially out-of-control adolescents can learn to exist within institutional structures” (7) and therefore, as Basu suggests, encourages a degree of conformity.

Arden displays a fair amount of fluidity in her character and at times, pushes the limit further than Eve’s character, yet is ultimately tempered with a conservativism that

belies the potential for Carey to make a progressive stance through her character. Arden has a fairly androgynous presence most of the time. She presents herself as a man, in a

“black shirt camouflaging him against the charred pavement” (15) and … hair … cropped close to the skull” (16) when she arrives at Califia, the all-woman camp where Eve originally sets out to hide, and displays character traits that are drawn from both traditional male and female gender roles. She is sometimes a marginalized female—like when she is captured and returned to the School—and sometimes she is a traditional heroic figure—like when she leads the rebel army into the city. She also possesses skill and survival instincts characteristic of traditional heroic figures. Arden never expresses discomfort at having men look at her the way Eve does, and readers’ attention is never drawn to Arden in a sexual way. In his essay “Making Boys Appear: The Masculinity of

Children’s Fiction,” Perry Nodelman explains that when a male character is naked,

“triumphant animal masculinity is revealed, [but] a naked girl is a sex object, … she makes us uncomfortable because the revelation of her nakedness implies, not physical aggression and competence, but availability, lack of control or restraint, a dangerously or deliciously unbridled revelation of passion and instinct” (6). Although Eve’s narration describes her self-conscious fear of becoming the object of a male gaze, there is no mention of such objectification of Arden’s body. According to Butler, “to be not quite masculine or not quite feminine is still to be understood exclusively in terms of one’s relationship to the ‘quite masculine’ and the ‘quite feminine’” (Undoing Gender 44), which means possibly, that at some point even literary critics must cease to deconstruct gender roles in a way that draws attention to those who are not “the norm” and must

instead focus on character traits on an individual level, rather than as they relate to a character’s biology.

Basu, Broad, and Hintz also address the question of whether young adult dystopian texts actually “espouse radical change, or [if] their progressive exteriors mask an inner conservatism” (2). While Eve is certainly progressive on many levels, and is arguably, although mildly, subversive to patriarchal literary practices, Carey tends to default to conservativism in regard to the relationship between Arden and Eve. When Eve is alone with Arden in the Wild, they find comfort in each other and nurture each other: “Arden closed her eyes … [and Eve] inched closer to her, letting [her] head rest on her shoulder.

[She] lay like that for a while, listening to her breaths, each one a faint reminder that

[she] was no longer alone” (Once 24). When they are staying in Califia, there is even a sense that their relationship, apart from Caleb or any man, is enough. One scene that demonstrates this natural bond happens just before they leave Califia:

The seals kept going until they were just tiny black dots on the surface of

the bay. The sun didn’t seem too bright anymore. The birds were welcome

visitors overhead. Sitting in the boat with Arden, I forgot about Maeve and

whatever she was planning back on shore. I was with my friend. We were

out on the windblown water, alone and free. (Once 41).

Carey takes a conservative approach to the relationship between Arden and Eve and keeps it entirely platonic, in spite of the suggestion that they could ultimately find fulfillment with each other. In this way, Carey offers the possibility of more open and fluid romantic relationships that transcend gender, but does so without breeching the

limitations of the publishing industry that she simultaneously subverts through character representations in other areas.

Arden’s character appears to be the more likely hero, in comparison with Eve because Eve essentially retreats into a primarily domestic role, giving up the political power she could have, while Arden remains close to the prize, which is the Castle. While

Eve realizes she is still “in danger” from the “faction of New American soldiers [who] resented the rebels for taking control of the army and loosening security at the wall” (Rise

303), she encourages Arden to take a “permanent place in the Palace” since as “one of three rebels from the west who’d inspired the colonies to come forward, in the wake of the failed siege … there were murmurs that Arden would be considered” for President

(Rise 304). The suggestion is that Arden will receive the City as a reward, whether she becomes president or dedicates her life to making sure another leader never gains the power the King had to misuse. The story ends with Eve and Caleb living together with their five-year-old daughter, Pippa. Arden is “working with Caleb for the President, Clara pursuing law, … Charles … in charge of building the Outlands” (Epilogue 7). Eve is

“finishing her teaching program, [but she] … fe[els] like ... raising Pippa … [is] the only course [she’s] wanted, … [and wonders if what she is doing is] big enough, [or] important enough” (Epilogue 7). However, Arden and Eve share such a close bond by the end of their quest that it almost seems like they are two halves of a whole. When they say goodbye in the Epilogue, as Eve and Caleb prepare to leave the City of Sand with their daughter, Pippa, Eve says, “I felt how it could happen, how if I stayed there for even a minute longer I would be there forever, that I could grow roots in that very spot. I wrapped my arms around Arden, resting my head next to Pippa’s… Her arms were my

arms—clinging, needing” (13). Eve feels the need for Arden as much as her daughter does. There is a sense of family and dependence between them all. As well, the symbol of feminist resistance to patriarchy, Califia, still has “autonomy” at the conclusion, but the

“settlement rules [were] … loosened… [and] some of the women were married now,

[and] others living [were] with men there” (10). So while Califia has been a symbol of divisiveness and seclusion in past literary uses, Carey has altered it to bring cohesion between the sexes.

In his discussion of YA genres, Garcia asserts that “the majority of readers … expect heteronormative characters with heterosexual romantic quests, but that may not be because of sexual or personal interest as much as the way they are assumed to be a heterosexual audience” (87). When distinguishing teen or YA literature from children’s literature, the main factor is “the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative [as the] … protagonists … learn about the social forces that have made them what they are” (Garcia 3). Garcia also notes that it is “[p]ublishers rather than teenagers [who] bestow the designation ‘YA’ on these books” (3) and it is assumed that

“even when the authors have not intentionally written for adolescents, they invariably portray adolescents engaging in a domination-repression model” (7-8). In Relentless

Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling,

Jack Zipes asserts that “it is through fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality”

(78), and therefore, any didactic elements in the narrative directly reflect the author’s belief in how YA fiction should be presented to readers. Eve is an example of YA fiction

that does more than repeat stereotypes and plot patterns and is there presented for readers to either ignore, absorb, or question.

Escaping from adult control may be more implicit in YA utopian narratives where adult control is present to add plot tension and to be a teaching tool for the young protagonist, than the type of overt friction experienced in dystopian fiction where authority figures are a direct and dangerous force the protagonist wishes to evade. In Eve, for example, the King is not there as a teaching tool because he has nothing positive to offer. Instead, Eve must draw conclusions on her own regarding morals and values. In her article on dystopias, Hintz states that “in utopian writing for children and young adults … the child or young adult often becomes the central character in a utopia [that] takes the form as a means of escape from adult control, and is critical of adult governance” (254).

The role of YA dystopian heroes is not only to learn how to function and fit into their society, but to understand the wider implications of social and political power. Dystopian societies are so badly damaged that learning to function within them is really only a means of survival until revolution evokes necessary change.

Carey’s books provoke wider understandings of social and political power without modelling conformity. She subtly challenges the heteronormativity of many YA novels such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games through Eve’s close relationship with

Arden, which mildly suggests a homosexual relationship while remaining conservatively platonic. Rather than having a male hero with a female and male friend for support, such as with Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione, Eve’s main support person is also female, demonstrating the strength and ability they have together. Katniss has two males for her support, although they are both vying for her attention, which is a different dynamic

altogether than Eve’s relationship with Arden and Caleb. As well, Eve challenges narratives that privilege male heroes, like Michael Grant’s Gone or James Dashner’s The

Maze Runner, since the only potential male heroic figure, Caleb, is injured and missing for most of the novel.

Eve keeps readers guessing as to what her strengths will be and defies stereotypes in as many ways as she fits them. Eve differs from characters like Tris or Katniss because she is not restricted or defined by specific strengths from the outset. While Eve functions in some traditional female roles, she does so with the same fluidity she assumes for all roles, and therefore the traditional female roles should not be seen as conformity or regression. Although Eve seems like a less impressive character than Katniss with her bow and arrow, or Tris with her “dauntless” courage, in her subtle way, Eve demonstrates a fluidity of character that enables her to adapt to new situations and meet each challenge with which she is faced, and she demonstrates that she is very much at ease in the role of mentor to other girls who need encouragement as well as to be sustained emotionally and physically by her relationship with Arden. Carey encourages utopian longings for a freedom from assigned gender roles by simply offering a reimagining of characters who do not default to what is expected of them both inside the narrative and by readers.

1.3 Fantasy and Speculative Fiction

In spite of the formulaic nature of some sub-set genres like dystopian fiction and the heroic quest, speculative fiction, as a whole, invites multiple interpretations and is

open to less conventional analysis than other literary forms. Thus, fantasy is an effective literary entry point from which authors can encourage readers toward utopian visions of inclusiveness and fairness and encourage a change of attitude or action from readers in serious social and political matters through positive reinforcement. Baccolini suggests that “the notion of an impure genre, one with permeable borders that allow[s] contamination from other genres, represents resistance to a hegemonic ideology and renovates the resisting nature of science fiction” (520). Unlike the genres of YA dystopian fiction or YA heroic quests, which mainly hold to formulas, Judith Butler says

“fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home” (Undoing Gender 28). One compelling form of fantasy, on which Eve borders, is what Farah Mendlesohn calls “immersive fantasy,” one of four forms defined in her article “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy;” such fantasy invites readers to share “a set of assumptions … present[ed] … without comment as the norm both for the protagonists and for the reader” (7). She notes that “once the fantastic becomes sufficiently assumed, … it acquires a scientific cohesion all of its own” (6). Immersive fantasy provides the author with power to direct readers in any direction, and welcomes new and imaginative ideas. In the fantastical world, anything can happen, and stereotypes need not apply. Eve is borderline immersive because, although Carey does invite readers to share assumptions of The New America, it is not “without comment” since no more than twenty years has passed between the devastation of the plague and the present of the narrative, many of the characters who survived the plague are still living there has not yet been time for an entirely new set of assumptions to have been instilled.

Although fantasy fiction allows the narrative to diverge from realism to a realm where almost anything is possible, which destabilizes expectations of the readers and creates a sense of the unknown, YA readers can consider the possibility of positive social change in conjunction with a narrative that is not heavily muddled with realism.

According to Zipes, fantasy narratives are conducive to, and built to include utopian longings:

[fantasy contains a] quality of hope and faith in serious fantasy literature

and film that offsets the mindless violence and banality and contrived

exploitation that we encounter in the spectacles of everyday life. If fantasy

can be subversive and resistant to existing social conditions, then it wants

to undermine what passes for normality, to expose the contradictions of

civil society, to right the world out-of-joint in the name of humanity.

(“Why Fantasy Matters Too Much” 82)

Although the effects of an author’s utopian longing “cannot be totally predetermined or determined” (6), Zipes asserts that fantasy fiction does effectively “convey the fantasies and intentions of the artist” (6). Thus, fantasy fiction is a useful tool to aid in the education of utopian desires. As well, because fantasy literature “blurs the lines between commodities produced for children and for adults and between boundaries built by governments and corporations” (Zipes Relentless Progress 5), YA readers can more easily make connections between how the literature they are reading translates to the real world than if YA fantasy is markedly separate from that written for adults. Essentially, publishers seem less inclined to differentiate between YA and adult fantasy literature and as a result, there is less control over how the gender portrayals are treated by the authors.

Eve is set in the not-so-distant future, in a post-apocalyptic America, where YA characters remember life as it is now. Therefore, Eve is closest to being immersive fantasy, yet does not fit perfectly in the category because Carey provides explanations and back stories to help readers understand how America went from now to how it appears in the future.

Even though The New America may not be a foreign world or city, Carey still manages to make Eve feel like an outsider, which is crucial in fantasy fiction.

Mendelsohn asserts that fantasy fiction involves an “alien culture that welcomes us as guests [through the eyes of an] otherworldly visitor” (2), and although Eve is not fantastical in the magic sense or full of counter-factual science fiction, there is the element of entering an alien culture. Eve is not technically an alien, but she is kept in seclusion from the age of five until she is eighteen, and when she leaves the School to go into the wild, she is essentially an alien facing a whole new set of cultural assumptions.

Eve does not have to travel to a distant country to experience this alienation, since she is already alienated in her own country because as a female orphan, she is segregated from males and mainstream society. For readers, the alien effect is not lost in dystopian narratives because they must do the work of recognizing the fragments of the real world they are familiar with amongst the strange ruins of the fictional dystopian future. Just as the readers of Carey’s books leave behind their familiar world, but also try to recognize it within the landscape of the trilogy, Eve leaves the safety of the School and enters a dystopian landscape where she discovers things are much worse than she knew or believed.

Eve draws attention to many aspects of society that are missing or broken, especially the ongoing lack of equality for all individuals on the gender spectrum.

However, the uncertainty of the future at the end of the series prompts readers to consider possible solutions for themselves. Readers can question elements of the ending such as why Arden ends up alone, why Carey did not resolve all of the political issues, why she chose to end the series with Eve and Caleb leaving once again, or why and how Califia, the all-female camp for girls fleeing the birthing initiative, is open to accepting men as well as women to live there, but still acting as a place of refuge from the City. The speculative nature of the series invites readers to consider many different possibilities, which trains them to engage with the novels they are reading, rather than allow generic formula to set their expectations. Speculative fictions like Eve provoke thoughts of “what would happen had the actual chain of causes or the matrix of reality-conditions been replaced with other conditions” (Gill n.p.). Mendlesohn asserts, “in science fiction, how the reader is brought into the speculative world profoundly shape[s] the ways in which that world can be described, so that the incredible invention story rapidly gives way to the completed future, because the incredible invention permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror” (2). In contrast, speculative fiction need not consist of the immediate moment of horror as readers adjust to the new

“reality.” Rather, “speculative fiction envisions a systemically different world in which not only events are different, but causes operate by logics other than normal ones … [and therefore] is not identical with counterfactual fiction” (Gill n.p.). Speculative fictions are

“often governed by commercial interests [of] … publishers and booksellers [along with]

… science fiction, fantasy, and some versions of pulp romance” (Gill n.p.). The fact that

speculative fiction is not a pure genre, similar to fantasy, is advantageous because “a literature genre that had always been on the outlying fringe of the reading world,”

(Johnson n.p.) means freedom from the constraints of expectation that tradition instills in publishers and readers. YA dystopian fiction is in itself speculative fiction because it looks ahead to a future and predicts a certain outcome due to the effects of plagues, wars, or environmental collapse and imagines a hypothetical world. Eve imagines a future where the world has been almost totally wiped out by a virus, necessitating the destruction of all man-made structures. The towers and cities that people have been building for centuries are destroyed in Eve’s world. The King’s regime is the one remaining societal structure, and it is this regime that Eve participates in destroying.

Politically, Eve’s world is almost completely destroyed, just as her physical world has been, but what emerges is a society where human-made structures, whether they are physical or political, are not permitted to dominate. The series ends with political unrest; however, the unrest is mainly due to a new stage of negotiation between the leaders, rather than an oppressor/oppressed political model they had before. Likewise, a utopian dream of a society where non-binary gender roles are the norm may never become fully realized until there is a similar period of power juggling and negotiating until a new, and unprecedented equilibrium is reached.

Mapping Literary Tradition onto Eve’s Heroic Journey

In addition to the blending of literary genres Carey employs to provide some unconventional leeway for her hero, Eve’s journey is marked by specific geographical symbols. Eve’s physical journey throughout The New America can be seen as representative of the evolution YA fiction has experienced over time. The symbols serve to set the stage for unconventional heroic models. The specific geographical markers are also plot points of Eve’s journey and a meta-narrative challenge to conventional YA fiction models, with the purpose of aligning those markers with specific linear points in the history of YA literature. The specific locations that mark Eve’s journey are, as

Deirdre Baker explains, the “furnishings, topography and inhabitants of a concrete landscape [that] provide the signposts to what the writer presents as significant, inner change” (238). In Eve’s journey, the topographical signposts are glaring: the School, the

Dugout, Califia, the City of Sand. Her journey has destinations that are both physical and internal as she travels and experiences a coming-of-age at the same time. Eve must achieve womanhood via a Bildungsroman arc from childlike innocence to mature experience, as well as serve her purpose as the dystopian protagonist responsible for defeating the tyrannical leader. Adherence to the heroic quest genre narrative is loosened as Carey joins the “visionary writers of fantasy, those who are able to map for us a new

and hitherto unknown terrain, to help us understand what journey we’re on, where it might lead” (Baker 250). As Baker notes, the reader’s journey through the terrain is also representative and so worth analyzing. As Eve travels through the Wild to her various destinations, she and her companions experience a fluidity in gender roles that is not possible when she is within prescribed environments like the School, the Dugout, or

Califia. As well, the destinations represent important ideas about YA literature and publishing.

Eve’s evolution as a character, and the tension she experiences at each destination as she travels, suggests a utopian desire on Carey’s part for a shift in literary genres that will welcome heroic figures other than a heterosexual male. As Deirdre Baker details, fantasy fictions are often epic journeys that “take place in a landscape, whether physical or emotional, literal or figurative—or most likely, all four, [where the] … development of the inner person is shown in an outer journey, in seemingly physical encounters” (238).

However, the topographical landmarks in Eve can be directly correlated with the outdated and stagnant literary genres that have influenced YA literature to date, (particularly, the patriarchal representations of heroic figures), as well as with Eve’s own internal journey of growth and maturity.

Eve’s journey, which represents not only her growth and development as a character, but also Carey’s challenge to patriarchal traditional literary genres and the publishing companies who reinforce those traditions, begins when she leaves the School the night before her graduation. The School as seeming refuge that distributes information on a need-to-know basis behaves in a similar fashion to publishing companies who decide what literature is distributed and promoted to YA readers. Eve has

never been outside the School walls since before the medical apocalypse and has been taught to fear and avoid all men, except the King. Her internal journey, or evolution as a character, begins when she finds out that she can no longer trust those in authority over her and must think critically for herself and search for facts by leaving the School. Carey advocates for her young readers to participate in a similar type of awakening and to develop an awareness of the controls placed on the kinds of literature as she guides readers, through Eve’s journey, through stopping points that highlight literary traditions that have not provided enough diversity or balance in character portrayals. The Dugout,

Califia, and the City of Sand do not provide the type of environment, collectively or separately, in which the youths can learn their full potential because each place comes with its own set of gender expectations and prejudices.

Eve first arrives at The Dugout, along with Arden, and led by Caleb, which is a male-only society that provides a contrast to Califia, and is also reminiscent of the original frontier explorers who settled America and began establishing how the country is defined and who holds the power. The Dugout celebrates the traditional, western male stereotype and Eve and Arden clearly do not fit in. Symbolically, the Dugout can be aligned with the male-dominated literary world that mistrusts or does not have a role for female heroes to play. The girls’ presence in the Dugout forces the boys to reconsider their rules and rituals. Thus, the Dugout symbolizes that initial reluctance and eventual adaptation of more progressive narratives and ideas within YA fiction, but rather than become progressive, the Dugout community is eventually dissolved after Eve’s second visit and becomes irrelevant.

After leaving the hostile Dugout, Eve travels to Califia, a feminist all-female camp which is militantly protected from male outsiders. The women of Carey’s Califia ostracize men as vigorously as some of the feminist science fictions of the 1960’s and

1970’s, like Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines. E. M. Wulff states that the “radical social realities [that] began to emerge during the collision between ‘second wave’ feminism and science fiction in the 1960s/1970s, … created a fluidity of boundaries or territories that mark the genre of feminist science fiction with diversity” (1). Yet, a diversity that is more inclusive of men and women, but which reinforces male and female stereotypes, only further exacerbates the issue. Carey’s Califia evolves past the point of earlier feminist fictions from the ‘60s/‘70s, which were not necessarily YA fictions, but still resonate in literature where women take on roles that are traditionally given to male characters. The geographical locations not only mark points in the growth of Eve’s character beyond expected gender-based norms in YA protagonists and literary traditions in general, but Eve’s journey also parallels the development of YA fiction during the 20th century. Together, both associations demonstrate reasons to consider the Eve trilogy is making significant and unique contributions to YA literature, and justify an increased attention to Carey’s work.

2.1 Revisiting 20th-Century Feminist Literary Critique

Removing gender binaries from YA literature is crucial for two reasons. The first reason is because binaries force individuals to choose a side and force society to

automatically define people as either male or female, and patriarchy has been around far too long for the traditional roles and traits that are associated with binary genders to be put aside. The second reason is to make those individuals who do not even come close to fitting into one of the binary molds feel included. Eve’s journey symbolically brings her to a more temperate social and political climate where individuals chose their future paths based on their personal strengths and interests, which definitely supports a non-binary approach to defining individuals within society. Earlier feminist fantasy works reimagine all sorts of fantastical and alternative societies where women are either completely depraved or completely superior, and not enough has been done to break down the walls between binary gender associations. However, the feminist literary traditions that are connoted in Eve exploit gender binaries in order to expose the unfairness of patriarchal ideologies. In many ways, stories like Eve fill a gap left after the onslaught of feminist science fictions written during the mid-twentieth century. A closer look at some examples of earlier feminist fiction is useful to reveal the wealth of feminist history that Carey draws on in Eve and to more clearly articulate the utopian vision with which she suggests a more inclusive, less binary, way forward.

A renewed interest in utopia during the 1970s led many feminist authors to write utopian, dystopian, and science fiction novels with reimagined societies where patriarchy did not rule. Baccolini says that “genres are culturally constructed and rest on the binary between what is normal and what is deviant” (519), so in feminist fiction, even when women rule or there is an all-female society, it remains deviant in a patriarchal society.

Califia in Eve echoes the narratives in the twentieth century, particularly in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, wherein many feminist science fiction writers attempted to counter the male

dominated world of literature with the construction of all-female subcultures within male- dominated societies. Although these are not necessarily YA fiction, there are resounding echoes in Eve of dystopian fictions that feature oppressed or enslaved women who are treated as birthing machines such as in Charnas’s Motherlines and Margaret Atwood’s

The Handmaid’s Tale, which is linked explicitly to Eve in the epigraph of the first book.

Within the dystopian narrative of Motherlines, the free fems, who are runaway slaves, find refuge in the wild where they have a utopian-like existence alongside other tribes of women like the Mares, who do not allow men in their midst.

Female utopian societies are certainly not new creations of the twentieth century, for societies where women either rule or exist separately from men have existed for centuries. The word “Califia” is the mythological “title of each empress [who] … ruled over Islands … of black people” (Uwechia) and was “first mentioned in the records of the western European Christians in the seventeenth century” (Uwechia). The first recorded mention is when “Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo wrote about Queen Califia in 1500 in his novel, Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián)” (Ali). When Spanish explorers “first began exploring the Pacific Coast they thought that they were in search of a magical island, one filled with big black women and packed with gold” (Ali). They

“told stories about a mystical black [Moorish] queen that ruled the state of California, situated in the same location as the present day California” (Uwechia). Montalvo’s novel

“described the Island of Califia as being east of the Asian mainland, ‘very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; … peopled by black women, without any men among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons’” (Ali), and according to the myth, “men were only allowed on Califia one day a year to help perpetuate the race” (Ali). The

Spanish explorers “applied [the] name [Califia] on their maps to what is now called the

Baja California Peninsula, which they originally thought was an island” (Ali) and this is the location of Carey’s Califia. When Eve arrives at Califia with Caleb, she describes crossing “an enormous gray bridge … into the ruined city of San Francisco” (Eve 311); the bridge is the Oakland Bay Bridge. Soon thereafter she points “to the red bridge less than a mile in front of [them], stretching over the vast expanse of blue. ‘The bridge of

Califia’” (Eve 312), which is the Lion’s Gate Bridge, leads to the Golden Gate National

Recreation Area and Marin Headlands, which juts out from the California coast and appears, at least from the angle visible on the bridge, to be an island. These similarities are too close to be coincidental. Therefore, it is likely that Carey intended to invoke a previous utopian society where women attempted to live without men and, thus, connects

Eve, as a YA fantasy fiction, to the feminist fantasy tradition.

Feminist utopian writing, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, which actually features a model of a utopian society like Thomas More’s, or Suzy McKee Charnas’s

Motherlines, which is a feminist utopian society within a heavily patriarchal dystopian world, are deliberately constructed fictional societies designed to demonstrate potential living arrangements, gender roles, political structures, and social behaviors. These communities are such that the women who inhabit them must abide by the established rules or leave, as is the case with Carey’s Califia. Feminist visionaries like Gilman and

Charnas have a utopian longing to “keep feminist language and concepts alive in the face of media and mainstream backlash, appropriation and distortion" (Hawthorne,

“Bibliodiversity” n.p.). Gilman and Charnas’s utopian longings are acknowledged within

Carey’s Califia, but her Califia is also a temporary solution to avoid the King’s birthing

initiative, and is not the utopian dream in and of itself, like the community of free fems in

Motherlines. Charnas and Gilman both provide their females with the ability for asexual reproduction, but Carey provides no such sustainable ability. There is no viable way to sustain the all-female societies once the present generations grow old and die. The temporariness of these solutions suggests that Carey supports a solution that brings all people closer together, rather than leaving them segregated by a power struggle caused by resistance to socially imposed gender roles that are based on people’s biological sex.

Carey’s choice to include Califia in Eve is laden with symbolic meaning and nuance in regard to the history of feminist literature Carey is drawing into her narrative. It is troublesome, though, that the areas of contention expressed in Gilman’s Herland are not significantly different than those in Eve, that more progress toward gender equality has not been made over the past century. In her introduction, Ann J. Lane states that

Herland, written in 1915, was intended by Gilman, “to package her social vision in terms attractive to the mass of the population and at the same time to make socialism a legitimate, appealing, and reasonable idea” (Lane xii). Herland is about a secluded community of women who have thrived ingeniously without “a man among [them] for two thousand years” (Gilman 45), and is intended to poke fun at contemporary society in many ways, only one of which is the disparity in gender roles. In Herland, there are

“mothers … but there are no fathers” after they became secluded from the outside world during a “volcanic outburst, [resulting in them being] walled in, and beneath that wall lay their whole little army…There was no way up or down or out—they simply had to stay there” (Gilman 54-55). Three male explorers discover Herland and are welcomed there as the first male visitors in over two-thousand years. There are no men to take over the roles

the visitors assumed the women would be unable to do, both intellectually and physically, but after spending time around a society of women who do not comply with, and actually are not even aware of, patriarchal gender roles, the men begin to see the women differently. One man explains,

We had been living there more than a year. We had learned their limited

history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines, reaching higher and

going faster up to the smooth comfort of their present life. We had learned

a little of their psychology, a much wider field than the history, but here

we could not follow so readily. We were now well used to seeing women

not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.

(Gilman 137)

Gilman argued that since “’it is only in social relations that we are human … to be human, women must share in the totality of humanity’s common life’” (xi). She was concerned that women were “forced to lead restricted lives [which would] retard all human progress” (xi). In the introduction to Herland, Lane explains Gilman’s theory on how women came to be in a marginalized role:

Women’s historic subordination she dated from the expropriation by men

of the surplus that women produced in agriculture. It was, she said, the

first form of subordination, and it became the model for subsequent

exploitation. That subordination stunted the growth of women and thus

dehumanized the whole female sex. What we call masculine traits are

simply human traits, which have been denied to women and are thereby

assumed to belong to men: traits such as courage, strength, creativity,

generosity, and integrity. (xi)

Written just after the turn of the twentieth century, Gilman is reacting to lingering, but strong, normative roles that were closely adhered to during the Victorian era, where men carried out public duties and jobs and the women remained within the domestic, private realm. Gilman claims the patriarchal norms of the Victorians resulted in a society where

“women [are] … denied autonomy and thus are not provided the environment in which to develop” (Lane xi). Herland satirizes many aspects of western culture while proving that women were capable of performing the same functions as men in society, particularly through their superior engineering designs and agricultural methods. Although Herland presents a society of women who live harmoniously and successfully without men, the novel fails to offer a viable solution for how men and women could come together without one sex dominating the other. Still, Gilman’s utopian fiction has a utopian message.

Gilman is one feminist author in many who, throughout the twentieth century, wrote in reaction to patriarchal constraints on women in particular, and the assignment of gender roles in general. Although change is slowly taking hold, not enough has changed over the past hundred years for authors to stop writing with this important issue in mind.

At the Dugout, Eve and Caleb discuss Virginia Woolf’s feminist novel To the

Lighthouse, and disagree on how to interpret the reaction of Mr. Ramsay, a typical

Victorian gentleman, to losing his wife, who was a very traditional wife. Eve’s interpretation of the novel comes from the teachers at the School who used the book, and

Mr. Ramsay’s self-centered behavior, as a tool to make the girls fear men, whereas Caleb

interprets Mr. Ramsay’s behavior as nothing more than a man grieving his late wife.

Gilman’s reproach for patriarchal norms is echoed in To the Lighthouse as well as in assertions by Woolf, in her 1929 extended essay, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf explains the crux of binary gender roles in Chapter Two of A Room of One’s Own when she says that women have played a role in the past “as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (245). The protagonist in To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay, describes how she

enjoys holding the position of deflating or inflating her husband’s self-

image. She uses this as leverage to empower herself, manipulating the

exact moment she relinquishes her power to him. Other than withholding

her affection from him temporarily, her only outlet for personal expression

was “‘[t]o be silent; to be alone… where “’her horizon seemed to her

limitless’ (69).” (Gunn 3)

Her relationship with her husband is based on the misuse and balance of power, rather than on mutual respect. Mrs. Ramsay’s only weapon against her husband is to refrain from boosting his ego, and retreat into herself, because she has no way to outwardly express her loneliness, rage, or even her dreams. In a Room of One’s Own, Woolf talks of

“an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually [which] must have lowered [women’s] vitality, and told profoundly upon her work” (597). Mrs. Ramsay seems to buy into the practice of withholding herself from outward expression; reminiscent of the way Eve’s teachers have taught her to withhold herself from men, for different reasons. Woolf suggests that men have enjoyed the positon of power over women, and are reluctant to change the status quo. She states,

The masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the

women’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be

inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks,

not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when

the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and

devoted. (246)

In Eve, the relationship that the King has with his subjects is not unlike that of Mrs.

Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay. In fact, the King comes very close to reestablishing patriarchal norms in his new version of America. The only major difference is that the King is driven by the need to rebuild America, and exploits physiological differences to achieve that, rather than wanting to establish strict societal norms for the purpose of control and decorum. He demands that the citizens of The New America follow his commands, and they praise him publicly, and plot against him in private. His citizens, with the help of

Eve, overthrow him and experience a brief time where the balance is tipped totally in favor of the revolutionaries, which can be paralleled with the way feminist utopian and dystopian novels attempt to reverse roles between sexes. Eventually, the City of Sand returns to a more balanced political climate, which matches the feminist climate in Eve.

Just as the earlier feminist science fiction writers have written revolutionary material, banning males or giving their characters physiological traits that ensure men are no longer needed for procreation and prosperity, Carey joins the contemporary writers who take a much more moderate approach to the issue. Unlike Gilman’s and Woolf’s works, the imbalances in Carey’s Eve are not only recognized, they are rectified, rather than reversed, at least to some degree.

Even though Gilman and Woolf write in reaction to patriarchy, Herland is a light hearted satirical novel, and To the Lighthouse is as much experimental as a stream-of- consciousness novel as it is a Victorian drama. Neither reflect the darkness that accompanies a dystopian narrative like Eve. However, many of the feminist dystopian novels in the 1970’s, like Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, which includes

Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, play on extreme depictions of gender binaries, which are emphasized in order to expose the depths of patriarchal hegemony.

The Holdfast Chronicles depicts a post-apocalyptic world where only the men have power, and all women (“fems”) are slaves and treated worse than animals and, although all previous feminist literature needs to be considered when discussing the literary traditions that led Carey to produce Eve, Charnas’s work is one of few that bears direct correlations to Eve. Walk to the End of the World succeeds only to point out the potential totality of patriarchy by hyperbolizing a male-dominated society. The evolution of the society is described in the following passage:

The predicted cataclysm, the Wasting, has come and – it seems – gone:

pollution, exhaustion and inevitable wars among swollen, impoverished

populations have devastated the world, leaving it to the wild weeds. [Only

a] handful of high officials … survived… [because they] had access to

shelters established against enemy attack. Some of them thought to bring

women with them. Women had not been part of the desperate government

of the times; they had resigned or had been pushed out as idealists or

hysterics. As the world outside withered and blackened, the men thought

they saw reproach in the whitened faces of the women they had saved and

thought they heard accusation in the women’s voices … they forbade all

women to attend meetings and told them to keep their eyes lowered and

their mouths shut and to mind their own business, which was

reproduction. (5)

Charnas gives an example of a world that began much like The New America, only

Charnas’s world has been functioning, or rather malfunctioning, much longer, and roles are not only established by authorities, but part of their societal mentality. Thus, a revolution will take much longer and be much more challenging. Eve, on the other hand, is part of a revolutionary movement that seeks to break apart the King’s regime before it even has a chance to take hold, and before another generation is raised in an America that has been built on subjection and enslavement. The speed at which Califia opens its doors to men after the revolution speaks to Carey’s eagerness to move past gender exclusion, unlike Charnas, who glorifies the all-female camps in Motherlines, which are, by all means, utopian alternatives to the Holdfast. The story tells of a fem slave named Alldera who escapes the Holdfast—the male-dominated society—to look for free fems in the

Wild who might help her return and exact revenge on the men and free the other slaves, much like Eve’s mission to reach Califia and ask for help rescuing the girls at the School.

The fems in Motherlines are forced to live in the “Rendery” which “emphatically belonged to fems and only to fems” (Charnas Walk 141), in the same way that the School

Eve attends is only for female orphans. The garrison mentality is also used in Motherlines to keep the fems from running away, just like at Eve’s School. We are told, “the Wild was worse than the sea… [and] the land beyond the Holdfast appeared to support no life whatever… Fems thoughtful enough to consider the Wild at all dismissed it as of no use

to them, since it seemed to offer no sustenance for fems who might try to escape into it’

(Charnas Walk 142). Alldera runs away from the Holdfast hoping to find other fems who had been “bold enough to dare a concerted and determined break into the Wild under the mistaken impression that they would find allies there, then … of necessity turn[ed] into free fems” (Charnas Walk 149). Likewise, Eve leaves the School with not much more hope than Alldera, with only the word of Teacher Florence—whom Eve now knows had lied to her during her entire time as a student—about an “all-female settlement founded more than ten years before as a haven for women and girls in the wild” (Once 2). Eve’s first encounter with a person in the Wild is similar to Alldera’s in the way she interprets the stranger as a monster, or “other.” She sees the monsters’ bodies “were long, slung horizontally on two pairs of legs. Two trunks rose from their backs, one human-shaped with arms, the other smooth and topped with a head like a log of wood stuck on at an angle, and a sweep of hair hung from the back end, like one lock from the top of a shaven scalp” (Charnas Motherlines 242). Similarly, Eve describes how,

in our Dangers of Boys and Men class, the [t]eachers told us stories of

their own heartbreaks, of the men who had left them for other women or

the husbands who’d leveraged their money and influence to keep their

wives in domestic slavery. After seeing all that men were capable of in the

wild—the gangs who slaughtered one another, the men who sold women

they’d captured, the Strays who resorted to cannibalism in desperation—

some of the women in Califia, especially the escapees from School, still

believed that men were universally bad. Life after the plague seemed to

prove that over and over again. (Once 45)

In order to fight back against the King, the women who live in Califia have to do exactly what the tribes of women, Mares and free fems in Motherlines had to do: run away and band together defensively. The women of Califia keep constantly armed and watch over their borders to make sure no men can enter. Likewise, “the Mares had patrolled the borderlands for generations, preventing the men from learning of their existence and coming over the mountains in force. Marish patrols had never once let a man come as far as the Grasslands” (Charnas Motherlines 306). The Mares live a relatively peaceful existence, without need or care for other communities. However, the goal of the free fems is revenge. The flaw in this type of feminist utopian dream is that, in order to exact revenge, the women must become like the men against whom they are revolting, so instead of introducing a new pattern that makes society more accepting for all, they are merely fantasizing about reversing the power dynamic. In comparison, Eve recognizes the imbalance of power, not as a woman, but as a human, and moves forward with her band of friends and allies to address those imposing the unfair power, rather than furthering division based on gender, as is the case in the above examples of feminist fictions.

All female societies are clearly not the solution. The flaw in this thinking is a misconception that women are gentle and passive, which stems from patriarchal definitions of women. However, Charnas proves that even in all-female societies, hierarchies will form and eventually, an imbalance of power can develop. Alldera finds a home with the Mares, one of the many communities of women who live in the Wild, but the group of women, outside Alldera’s tent family, is hardly a welcoming, nurturing warm brood of mother figures. The women are jealous, racist, judgmental, and very

territorial, making it necessary for Alldera to learn what lines to cross quickly so as not to invoke wrath from the warrior women. Eve experiences similar problems with the women at Califa who are vigilant and territorial about who enters their camp. As well, when the Mares find Alldera in the wild, they nurture her as though she was a child, caring for her until she is strong, even breastfeeding her for nutritional value. When

Alldera’s child is born, the women teach her to value the strength that comes from motherhood and from family ties. The theme of motherhood and family ties is also very evident in Eve, as she struggles to remember her mother, and eventually forms a lasting attachment to Arden that is similar to what Alldera experiences with the Mares. Like the nourishing and sustaining relationship Alldera finds with the Mares, Eve finds a mutual reliance with Arden, both physically, as they save each other from harm when Arden uses her survival skills to keep Eve alive (Eve 52), and emotionally, as they support and care for each other throughout their journey. Arden feeds Eve when she is starving (51) and even comes to find her in the night to make sure she is safe (88). In return, Eve cares for

Arden when she is dangerously ill with a chest cold (111). The resilient strength Eve and

Arden find in each other is realized when she discovers Arden has become “the rebel leader” (Rise 300). At this point, Eve is visibly pregnant, which is likely the only reason she is still alive, since a strange woman had pleaded with the soldiers that Eve is

“pregnant” and “shouldn’t be punished” (298). While Eve, the hero, is now at the height of her femininity, she is counter-balanced by Arden in “mud-caked clothes, [with] the red band tied tightly around her bicep, … look[ing] like every other soldier” (300). As a narrative point, the two girls coming back together is a possible heroic reward for Eve, as it briefly seems that she can find all she needs in Arden:

She came to me, enveloping me in a hug. The weight of it all lifted, my

body giving in to hers. I buried my face in her neck, letting myself cry for

the first time in days, the swell of it so intense I felt like someone was

choking me. We stayed like that, locked in a tight embrace, as if we were

the last two people on earth. (301)

The bond they share suggests that Eve and Arden can find enough support and love between them to exist without anyone else, even Caleb. Although Eve is in love with

Caleb, almost all her physical and emotional needs are met by Arden. Eve’s relationship with Arden hints at the possibility that same-sex bonds are as fulfilling as heteronormative relationships, as Alldera finds true with the Mares. However, a major difference, which transcends the type of safe harbor away from controlling males that

Charnas establishes in Motherlines, is that Arden never encourages Eve to avoid men the way the Mares breed hatred and prejudice. To do so would be counterproductive to

Carey’s utopian longing for inclusiveness and non-conformity. If women set themselves apart from men and say they are physically different and therefore must behave differently, they can then never embrace the useful traits that have traditionally been identified as male.

Another close similarity between Eve and Motherlines is the representation of childbirth. Carey’s idea for the King’s “birthing initiative” in Eve is so similar to

Charnas’s Holdfast that Eve could have been written with Motherlines in mind. Forced female reproduction under a totalitarian regime often appears in feminist science fiction novels, just as plagues or viruses often feature in mainstream science fiction. Feminist utopian writers often “develop alternative methods of procreation [because] alternative

reproduction (without heterosexual intercourse) is, for some an emancipatory dream

[that] enables gender separatism” (Sargent 304). However, narratives that promote gender separatism necessarily deal with the problem of the opposite sex. The Mares in

Motherlines are part of a different type of birthing initiative. They explain to Alldera how

they fixed the women to make seed with a double set of traits (274), [then]

…. they perfected the changes the labs had bred into them so that [their]

… seed, when ripe, will start growing without merging with male seed

because it already has its full load of traits from the mother … Simple and

clean, compared to the rape in the Holdfast. (Charnas 273)

The Mares use horse semen to stimulate reproduction, while only using their own DNA, but this fact is kept a mystery until the final pages of Motherlines. The source of male

DNA in Eve is never revealed, but both novels hint at a process of asexual fertilization, devoid of an actual male human body, that Gilman describes in Herland. The King’s motives are clear: “There’s no progress without sacrifice…. The race is on now. Nearly every country in the world was affected by the plague, and they’re all trying to rebuild and recover as quickly as possible. Everyone’s wondering who will be the next superpower” (Once 101). Thus the subjection of women is continued.

Carey is borrowing sentiment from a well-established canon of feminist science fiction writers who have employed narratives similar to that of the New American King’s methodology of breeding the graduates, or “sows” (Eve 104). Marleen Barr discusses

Walk to the End of the World, a novel in which the “near-comatose mothers are inferior to farm animals…” (Barr 85) and Barr also says this of Margaret Atwood’s The

Handmaid’s Tale:

Women who have viable ovaries are condemned to a silenced existence as

handmaids … Handmaids are analogous to an indistinct genre, women

forced to function as a juxtaposition of the human and the mechanistic.

Their bodies become birth machines, reproductive technology composed

of female flesh. The dehumanized handmaids result from an extreme

version of equating fertility with powerlessness. (Barr 92)

When Alldera runs away from the Holdfast, she is lost in the wilderness with nothing to eat and heavily pregnant with a “rape-cub” (Charnas Motherlines 226). She plans to murder the “efficient little parasite, [who] steal[s] from her the nourishment of whatever she could find to eat” (226). The imposed burden of pregnancy is present in Eve as well.

When Eve crosses the lake at the beginning of the story to see if Arden is telling the truth about the building with the graduates, her description is similar to Alldera’s:

There, on the other side of the glass, was a girl on a narrow bed, her

abdomen covered with bloodied gauze. Her blond hair was matted. Her

arms were strapped down with leather restraints. Beside her was another

girl, her giant stomach stretching nearly three feet over her body, the

thinned skin covered with purple veins. Then the girl opened her deep

green eyes and stared at me for a moment, until they rolled back in her

head. It was Sophia. Sophia, who’d given her own valedictory speech

three years ago, about becoming a doctor. I covered my mouth to suppress

a scream. (Eve 21)

Eve realizes the horror of reality for herself and the other graduates. Pregnancy, wanted or not, is her destiny, and, ironically, whether confined in the building by the School or

running “free” in the wilderness, Alldera and the graduates are still slaves because they are held hostage for their biological abilities to bear children.

The history of feminist utopias includes reoccurring attempts by feminist authors to create a way for the burden of reproduction to not solely be the responsibility of the female members of society. Biology determines who will bear the children. However, in a feminist utopia, many writers have tried to undermine this law of nature because of the overwhelming ideologies of society that associate childbearing with patriarchal ideals of motherhood. Carey denounces the imposed control over childbirth as she reveals the distorted and unnatural implications of intervening with nature. A feminist utopia that only allows women in their society will invariably have to integrate men somehow, if only to allow for procreation, or kill the men off and risk going extinct. Coming from opposing backgrounds, where isolation of the sexes was meant to become a new norm under the “utterly repressive … regime in which ideology and state-sanctioned violence combine to control sexual activity and reproduction,” Eve and Caleb demonstrate that

“sex is more powerful than the state” (Sargent 305). The fact that Eve gets pregnant after her first time having sex with Caleb suggests that pregnancy or procreation is an inevitable side effect of biology and once a method of trying to change this fails, a new plan needs to be put into effect. In other words, the changes feminist utopian writers have suggested in their utopian fictions are both highly impossible and impractical to sustain, whether or not patriarchal gender roles are followed or enforced. However, even if biological function cannot be changed, Eve demonstrates that women can maintain agency over their bodies, provided they can choose how and when, or if, they will have a child.

In a way, Eve closes the door on the historical attempts by feminist utopian writers whose reimagined worlds lifted the labels of “mother” and “wife” from women and allowed a freedom from the burdensome gender roles that patriarchy has dictated to women for centuries. Eve shows herself to be an independent and assertive individual, yet she happily takes on a role of mother and wife, even admitting that she would rather be a mother than teach school. The upheaval that Eve and Caleb still live in by the end of the story can be symbolically interpreted as uncertainty, not only as ongoing societal evolution in regard to gender roles, but as uncertainty over the function and purpose of the traditional family unit. This uncertainty is a good and progressive state which invites readers to imagine their own ending.

2.2 Evolution of Gender Representation Within Literary Traditions Throughout the series, Eve finds herself moving between physical landmarks that can be viewed as symbolic representations of the treatment of gender roles within various literary traditions and genres that are present in the Eve narrative. At the heart of these conflicts is a probing critique of gender roles. In “What We Found on Our Journey through Fantasy Land,” Deirdre Baker suggests, “the conscious questioning of conventional roles and plot structures can liberate readers to look critically at the way they construct their own stories—their own personal odysseys and heroic ideals” (248).

Eve’s journey, which begins inside an enclosure with a fifty-foot wall, is one of perpetual change and coming to terms with her false beliefs. Unlike the typical type of hero who is confident from the outset that Margery Hourihan outlines in her discussion of children’s

literature Deconstructing the Hero, Eve gains confidence as she acquires knowledge.

Although she is awarded a Medal of Achievement by her School (3), she is separated from what she believes is the opportunity to begin her adulthood by “the long, moatlike lake, which stretched from one side of the wall to the other … [to] the giant windowless building beyond it” (4). Because Eve is rewarded for blindly accepting the lessons she is taught at the School, she is satisfied and has never considered that there is truth being withheld from her. Symbolically, if YA readers are satisfied with the heroic narratives that reinforce a status quo that readers continue to accept, they will never look beyond and question whether representations of heroes in YA fiction are truly representative of the variety of the readers in the world, or if these fictions are privileging only white males. Eve’s trust in her superiors to do the right thing by her is a misplaced trust that echoes YA readers’ misplaced trust in publishing companies who dictate to them what literature should be popular and what represents Western values. Teacher Florence explains to Eve that the King replaced the graduates’ individual rights and freedoms with the birthing initiative because he “believe[s] … [that] science [i]s the key to repopulating the earth quickly, efficiently, without all the complications of families, marriage, and love” (30). The King’s vision is essentially a totalitarian utopian vision, which is not only outdated, but dangerous in the sense that he must treat his subjects with cruelty in order to enforce his vision. In similar fashion, as the International Alliance of Independent

Publishers states, "[b]ibliodiversity appears today to be threatened by an editorial glut and financial concentration in the world of publishing, which paves the way to the supremacy of a handful of major publishing groups and the quest for high productivity” (n.p.).

Publishers may not be using force, exactly, but their position in society borders on

tyrannical because they hold so much power and influence over what young adults are provided for reading material. And just as the publishing conglomerates profit from giving young readers the illusion of choice when selecting their own reading material, and as the freedom of choice Eve believes she will have after graduation is threatened by the King’s plan for repopulation that trumps individual expression or agency, author

Susan Hawthorne asserts that “Big publishing and big bookselling with their big marketing will weed out anything different, flatten it, make it a one-size-fits-all cultural product” (n.p.), much like how the King uses his power to control and universally subject teachers at the Schools, soldiers, and the colonies outside the City. Hawthorne further specifies,

global megacorp publishing does not encourage the quirky, the original,

the risky, the inventive – the books that will become staples for the next

generation because they have something new and relevant to say.

Megacorp publishing is all about numbers, about sameness, about

following a formula based on the latest megasuccess. (n.p.)

Authors like Carey can broaden their appeal to publishers by blending multiple formulas

– in this case heroic and dystopian – which appeal to fans of speculative fiction, romance, and YA dystopia and thus broaden their marketing potential, as well as challenge literary conventions so that rules are not all totally broken, but bent enough to bring about change in a fairly rigid industry. Like Eve, readers who recognize the limitations imposed on authors by publishers and who dare to voice their concerns serve as both rebellious and redemptive figures because they are acting in the cause for change to the status quo.

Without such courageous action, there will be no change, only collusion. Eve’s story

provides plenty of examples of how and why individuals choose to collude rather than to work for change. The one way in which the King does not correspond as smoothly with publishing companies is that Eve kills him in an extreme act of defiance, whereas Carey is not setting out to slaughter the publishing companies, but rather cooperating with them and subtly subverting their methods at the same time.

Because YA readers are so familiar with the formulaic novels they are constantly being sold, they may come to identify marketing strategies that perpetuate a patriarchal status quo as the master narrative of western society. Eve experiences a similar problem during her “twelve years … at School, … [as she listens to] the [t]eachers, and … radio addresses … broadcast[ed] in the main hall … [telling her how] the City of Sand [is] an extraordinary place, the center of The New America, a city in the middle of the desert, restored by the King” (Once 67). Unaware of the larger scheme where the King uses orphans for his own greedy purposes, Eve can only accept what she is told as the ultimate truth. The King reinforces a new status quo for The New America, which, instead of the traditional family unit, encourages the girls to “fear … men [so they] would never desire them [and] … never want love or families of [their] own” (Eve 142). The King wants to take the “Golden Generation” (Once 261) to the City and raise them with a Western egocentrism that will ensure their patriotism and strong national identity as The New

America is built. By showing how an ideology begins with an idea that is reinforced until it is believed, Carey implies that all belief systems, whether political, social, or personal, can, and probably should, be questioned and deconstructed.

Young readers who employ critical thought will naturally evolve from their naïve state into a matured state of knowing, much like Eve does when she learns that she is

destined to be placed in the King’s birthing initiative as a child-bearer, and not for the career in the city as she has always dreamed. Eve is comparable to the biblical Eve, who is told she “may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, … [if she] eat[s] it, [or] … touch[es] it … [she will] die’” (Gen. 3:2-3) because, just as the mysteries of the Tree of Life are withheld from the biblical Eve, the true destiny of the graduates is hidden in the building across the lake.

The School is also, in a sense, a falsely Edenic place for Eve, where knowledge becomes the catalyst for change.

As well, the dystopian landscape in Eve is reminiscent of the world that Adam and

Eve were turned out into after they were expelled from Eden. In John Milton’s Paradise

Lost, Eve tells Adam just before they leave Eden, “lead on; / In mee is no delay (12.614-

6-15), and in similar fashion, Carey’s Eve keeps her quest clear in her mind, even if it means leaving relative safety for the unknown. Once she meets Caleb, a runaway orphan, and other “strays,” who disclose to her the truth about the King and what has been happening to the world while she was at School, Eve finds a confidence to act for the good of others. Like the original Eve, who “saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, ... took of its fruit and ate, [and] also gave to her husband with her, and he ate” (NKJV Gen 3:5-6), Carey’s Eve also discovers a truth inside the “garden” that has been deliberately withheld from her after she sought out Arden and demanded to know what Arden knew. After she receives the knowledge, Eve is obligated to act accordingly, and, just as Milton’s Eve does, she accepts her fate and carries on without delay.

In order for young readers to encourage change in the types of literature that is available for them to read, they must first deny the part of themselves that has accepted patriarchal hegemony as status quo. Likewise, for Eve to begin her quest outside of the

School walls, she must also deny the parts of herself that accepted the lies told by the teachers and her blind acceptance of the King’s role. Part of the King’s plan to ensure cooperation from the girls at the Schools involves what Northrop Frye calls a “garrison mentality” (qtd in Bentley 5), which comes about when “[s]mall and isolated communities [are] surrounded by a physical or psychological ‘frontier,’ [and] separated from one another and from their … cultural sources” (qtd in Bentley 6). The School is very much like a garrison with the “fifty-foot perimeter wall” (Eve 1) to make the girls feel safe and protected from “the forest beyond” (1) and the wild animals and men that live there. The men outside the wall are considered “strays” and the King warns, “’Strays can be incredibly manipulative. They’re known for taking advantage of people in the wild

… There’s a whole ring of them who trade women ... Any girl they can find’” (Once 99).

Even from a distance, the King is able to control the girls in the Schools by establishing a common bond based on fear of “others” outside the School walls, directly connecting the girls with the City of Sand. Eve has always felt safe at the School, with the Headmistress encouraging the girls to “eat some more” food (5), so they remain strong and healthy, while their intellects are fed with lessons in “Latin, ... writing, … painting, ... always with the ... ultimate goal ... of the building off in the distance” (4) where they expect to train for the career of their dreams.

Carey’s Eve can serve as a model of critical questioning and of mild resistance for readers. Her departure from the School symbolizes a journey into the development of

critical thought and offers encouragement to young readers to do the same. Finding out that the King and teachers have all been lying to her and the other girls about what will happen to them after they graduate is an awakening moment for Eve that causes her to begin to question everything she’s ever been told. Once Eve knows the teachers have lied to her about life after graduation, she has to reevaluate her entire education by gaining experiential knowledge, rather than blindly believing what she has been taught. For example, when she encounters the bear cub right after leaving the school, Eve’s only frame of reference for bears is Winne the Pooh and Teacher Florence’s warning “that most bears were not so friendly” (Eve 57). Eve wonders if the little cub is “craving honey or if that was just some strange fiction” and after she “petted the little thing’s soft, brown coat, … [she decides he’s] just like Winnie” (Eve 58). She has to touch the bear and experience it for herself. The same goes for Eve’s experience with men, mainly Caleb.

Once she realizes that she has been given a less than adequate education, she slowly opens herself up to learn from new experiences. So, the first few pages of Eve result in her finding out a horrible truth about the only place she ever felt safe, discovering that all the authority figures in her life have been participating in a terrible lie, and that she must singularly act upon her knowledge. While she is in the Wild, Eve faces many obstacles to her ability to survive, mainly because, as Arden tells her, she is “book smart,” which

“doesn’t mean anything” (Eve 50) in the wild. Eve partners with Arden who has learned survival skills during her time at the School that Eve never acquired. While the source of

Arden’s survival knowledge is never revealed in the narrative, Arden seems to inherently have a skepticism and cynicism for those in authority over her. Her doubt, or awareness of the lack of humanity in her world, has already moved Arden to leave the School and

go outside the wall, which is an action that is unthinkable to Eve, who still trusts that the

School will deliver to her the bright future she has been promised. Arden has taken the initiative to learn many “little trick[s] … in school” (Eve 174), like picking locks and swimming, but Eve did not gain any practical knowledge. Eve laments, “I couldn’t hunt or fish. I didn’t even know where in the world I was. I was completely useless” (Eve

143). She only learned what was taught to her and never sought knowledge on her own, until the night she crossed the lake and discovered the graduates in the building. Arden is obviously very curious, having already discovered the truth of the graduates on her own, which makes an interesting comparison between the School to the Garden of Eden;

Arden becomes the curious Eve figure who acts first, and Carey’s Eve takes the place of

Adam, who is passed on the forbidden knowledge from Arden. Arden has survived as an orphan before the plague, and thus has thought about life after she leaves the School, which is likely why she has acquired survival skills. Regardless, Eve serves as a reminder of the dangers that come from not thinking critically for oneself, and blindly accepting information from authority figures as the absolute truth.

Hintz asserts that “sometimes an adolescent who feels out of place must attempt social integration within a utopia or dystopia” (255), which is the first step for Eve as she first must win Arden over as her friend. Although they were never friends, or even friendly, during their time at the School, Eve needs Arden in the Wild for survival as Eve feels “weaker than [she] had ever been…, with no food and no water and no sustenance to look forward to” (51). Eve is driven on her quest to rescue all the other girls who are

“imprisoned right now in those Schools, … being used like farm animals, like they never imagined or hoped for anything different” (Once 93). The second step is for Eve to

reconcile what she has been taught about men all her life with her own experience, particularly with Caleb, who she believes is kind and good. She finds it easier to accept that men are not all evil when she realizes that they are just as oppressed by the King as the orphaned girls have been. When Eve discovers that the King uses the captured male orphans for slave labor in the City of Sand, while the boys who have escaped live like

“wild Neanderthal[s]” (59) in the Wild, she moves into action to return to try to save her friends and the other girls from the school and enforced procreation. When Eve only had the word of the teachers, men were as much a part of the dangerous and feral wild as the animals. She equates “the dogfights, the distant rat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns, the horrible whining of deer being eaten alive” (Eve 3) with the horrors of the Wild and fears them all. Once Eve transitions from her naïve state into a more experienced awareness of the conditions in The New America, including the lies told about the nature of all men, she has no choice but to readjust her belief system and accept that there are problems in

The New America that need immediate and effective intervention.

An established belief is powerful because certain beliefs or practices are repeated so often that they become default, until they are gradually accepted as truth, even without a rational foundation. A break away from mainstream thinking can feel isolating and frightening, much like facing the Wild after feeling safe behind a wall for twelve years.

However, even though facing new ways of thinking and personal challenges may be frightening, these things are essential for growth and development on both personal and societal levels.

Moving Beyond Traditional Gender Binaries

The utopian dream of a YA genre that no longer reinforces the idea that boys are the only ones who can rescue people and that girls must wait to be helped on the sidelines has persisted, yet the dream has changed to acknowledge that under patriarchy’s gender binary, both women and men are subject to persecution. Unlike most of the feminist science fiction novels written in the second half of the twentieth century that focus on the persecution of women by patriarchal hegemony, the enslavement of the male orphans, as well as the confinement of the “sows” in Eve acknowledges that patriarchy subjects both sexes to persecution. Feminist novels mainly focus on patriarchy as the source of conflict.

Male women. This approach ignores the fact that patriarchy is oppressive to everyone because it links gender roles to biological traits, which excludes or alienates anyone who identifies outside of the male or female binaries. This type of polarizing misandry, which was typical of second wave feminist authors like Charnas, only serves to create a larger rift between the sexes. However, Beverley Pennell argues that in gender-inclusive literature, the “androcentrism of patriarchal discursive practices and the misandry of profeminist texts can be challenged and redressed both thematically and narratologically”

(77). YA narratives like Eve, in which characters display fluidity in their roles, maintain a utopian longing for non-divisiveness between sexes.

Women in Western culture have been fighting to be seen as equals to men since

Christian teaching pointed the finger at Eve in the Bible for being so easily tempted, and undoubtedly possessing a flawed, and sinful, nature. Carey offers a namesake redemptive figure in Eve. The biblical Eve is the target of shame and blame because she is the first human to sin against God, whereas Carey’s Eve lives in an already broken, corrupt world and, rather than being cast out of Paradise, she desires to bring peace and basic human rights back into The New America. Society in The New America has a chance to start almost fresh, like a return to Eden where the remaining members of society can work together to build their utopian dream. But just as the serpent found his way into Eden and ruins the chance for Adam and Eve to live in peace, human greed is present in The New

America and has already tainted the developing new world. Eve can be seen as a redemptive figure who will go beyond the formula of dystopian fiction to “chart new territory” and resist remaining “rooted in old conventional forms” (Basu 9). In the beginning, Eve’s character can be understood to reflect conventional ideals, a passive, submissive girl who finds pride in patriotism and will do anything for her King and country, as she appears in the beginning where she is valedictorian for a School that teaches these very values. By the end of the series, she can be understood as a character who is not bound by traditional patriarchal gender roles, as she ventures into literal and figurative unknown territory. Eve gains agency and clarity of vision while on her journey, and even when her choices are taken away, such as when she is kidnapped and taken to the King, or when she is forced to marry Charles in order to save Caleb, her resiliency

and ability to cope with less-than desirable situations compensate for what she lacks in experiential knowledge or skill. This resiliency helps to make her a relatable figure with whom young readers can identify, and so together, Eve, Arden, and Caleb help them to understand that individuals are not confined to roles specific to their sex, but rather, they are able to adapt and change to help themselves through tough situations.

3.1 Heroic Quest

Young readers need to see a more recognizable version of themselves reflected in heroic tales with utopian visions before they can make a connection impactful enough to inspire them to take action. Margery Hourihan warns that the danger from the

“predictability [of] the formula to which [hero stories] conform is so familiar that [it] present[s] no challenge to the reader’s interpretive or critical skills [and] … “the series of banal thrills [within the narrative] reinforces the standard perceptions and prejudices of our culture [and] assur[es] the young Western male reader of his innate superiority” (8).

This is problematic for young readers in Western culture where “the hero story has come to seem simply a reflection of the way things are” (Hourihan 14), which discourages readers from thinking critically about societal systems, like patriarchy, that need to be continually challenged until change occurs. Hourihan’s 1997 book Deconstructing the

Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature is helpful in understanding the patriarchal positions that are repeatedly reinforced in children’s literature. Hourihan’s theory is particularly helpful in analyzing Eve as she specifically defines the separate

roles that are typically found in heroic stories: that of the hero, the “wild things” or

“Other,” and the female roles. These are so well-established that they leave little room for progression or change. Hourihan claims that “the hero story is a myth in both the traditional sense and [in] the sense … [that it] describe[s] the way certain stories and images function to shape our perceptions of reality” (12). So, if the hero story is influential on young readers, it is extremely important to deconstruct, as early and as frequently as possible, the narrative formula that blatantly encourages and reinforces patriarchal hegemony.

The following list is an “invariable pattern” (8) from Hourihan’s book that establishes and defines a basic understanding of what it means to be a “hero” in children’s literature:

 The hero is white, male, British, American or European, and usually young. He

may be accompanied by a single male companion or he may be the leader of a

group of adventurers.

 He leaves the civilized order of home to venture into the wilderness in pursuit of

his goal.

 The wilderness may be a forest, a fantasy land, another planet, Africa or some

other non-European part of the world, the mean streets of London or New York, a

tropical island, et cetera. It lacks the order and safety of home. Dangerous and

magical things happen there.

 The hero encounters a series of difficulties and is threatened by dangerous

opponents. These may include dragons or other fantastic creatures, wild animals,

witches, giants, savages, pirates, criminals, spies, aliens.

 The hero overcomes these opponents because he is strong, brave, resourceful,

rational and determined to succeed. He may receive assistance from wise and

benevolent beings who recognize him for what he is.

 He achieves his goal which may be riches, a treasure with spiritual significance

like the Holy Grail, the rescue of a virtuous (usually female) prisoner, or the

destruction of the enemies which threaten the safety of home.

 He returns home, perhaps overcoming other threats on the way, and is gratefully

welcomed.

 He is rewarded. Sometimes this reward is a virtuous and beautiful woman. (8-9)

In spite of the recent examples of female heroes, strong male heroes remain the status quo and, even in novels that feature a female protagonist, a male figure is usually present to guide, protect, and support the female hero, or else she is only one hero amongst several others. James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2010), for instance, is an example of a novel that follows a patriarchal heroic pattern. The Maze Runner is an almost completely male- populated novel, except for Teresa, who arrives at the end to act as a catalyst to help the main character, Thomas, remember and understand his past. Her role is important, yet complementary at best. Another example that supports the patriarchal status quo of YA fiction is Michael Grant’s 2008 YA fantasy series beginning with Gone. The protagonist,

Sam, fights to keep a town full of children alive after everyone over fifteen disappears, while fighting his enemy, Caine, who leads a group of power-hungry rebels. Both boys have girlfriends; Astrid is Sam’s girlfriend and is constantly left out of plans in spite of the fact that she is Sam’s intellectual superior, and Diana, Caine’s girlfriend, is mistreated by Caine who even threatens to rape her at one point. Sam and Caine’s story focuses on

male power and experiences, relegating female characters to supportive and secondary roles.

It may seem like a change of pace when female protagonists are featured. However, female heroes are seldom solitary heroic figures as is demonstrated in best-selling novels like Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) and Veronica Roth’s Divergent

(2011). The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a post-apocalyptic YA series that takes place after a zombie virus has forced survivors to live in tiny, walled in communities, but the leadership has reverted to a religious control reminiscent of early Puritans. The protagonist, Mary, has a sense of curiosity that leads her outside the wall, but she is accompanied, and submissive to, a host of male characters including her brother and intended husband. As well, Tris and Katniss are two of the best examples to date in YA literature of heroic female protagonists whose success depends partly on support from friends and largely on their skill and ability to perform under pressure. Katniss is a skilled hunter and survivalist, yet she is closely watched by Haymitch and Peeta during the

Games, because they want to protect her. Likewise, Tris is never far from her boyfriend

Four, who watches over and protects her as well. This differs from Hourihan’s depiction of a male hero who completes his quest and is awarded a woman as a prize at the end, but one who was waiting for him at home, not participating on the quest with him. However, in contrast to the skills of Katniss and Tris, Carey’s protagonist, who does not have the advantage of survival skills like Arden or experiential knowledge of the world, like

Caleb, becomes a vulnerable and very unlikely hero, without any practical skill set that is typical of a heroic figure.

Eve is young, white and American, but at the beginning of her journey, she falters as a leader. Actually, she is not even able to feed herself and relies on others to take care of her. She does not leave a civilized home to venture out into the world on her quest.

Rather, the truth that she will be sedated and forced to have babies if she stays at the

School prompts her to run away, even though she is unprepared to live in the wild. The classes Eve receives at the School teach her that men are the enemy, the “other,” that she might fight or avoid. When Eve begins her quest, after leaving the School, readers are left uncertain as to whether she will be able to succeed, in spite of her obvious bravery and intelligence. However, Carey does offer Eve as a heroic figure who is helped on her quest by Arden and Caleb and many other friends and supporters, defying traditional heroic formulas that offer the hero as mainly a lone figure. To further complicate Eve as a heroic figure is the fact that although she completes her quest—freeing the girls from the

School, defeating the King, and starting a family—she is not welcomed home or handsomely rewarded, as Hourihan asserts will invariably happen for a male hero. The

Eve trilogy ends on a note of sadness and uncertainty as Eve is forced to, once again, leave her home and seek a safer environment because the citizens of the City are divided on whether her heroic acts were in their best interest or not. Eve also complicates the traditional image of a hero because although the society in which she lives constantly tries to define her and control her based on her biological sex, she does not operate under any pretense of set gender roles. The entire Eve series is much like Eve as the hero. Eve is marginalized for being female and orphaned, and living in a society that wishes to diminish her personal power and force her to conform to the status quo, but she is still able bring about large-scale change for the oppressed orphans. Likewise, the series itself

is in a similar position with publishers who wish YA fictions to conform to mainstream, marketable parameters, yet manages to lightly subvert those parameters by presenting a protagonist who operates outside the confines of traditional female gender roles.

In spite of the recent big screen successes of YA fictions featuring female heroic figures, where Katniss and Tris have dominated bestseller lists as well as the box office, the fact that these recent YA speculative fiction novels feature female protagonists is not necessarily proof that there is now equal opportunity for strong, female heroic figures in

YA literature. Katniss and Tris are female protagonists who subvert “existing social conditions” through gender-bending, in that they engage in behaviors and actions that are traditionally considered masculine. However, by that same token, they actually reinforce the status quo because their survival and success depends on their fighting and hunting skills, which essentially still privileges the same set of behaviors that have always been associated with masculinity, and diminishes traits that are traditionally categorized as feminine, which limits the characters’ chances of success if they are more fluid on the gender spectrum.

Hero stories are based on sets of binaries, such as the “qualities ascribed to the hero on the one hand and to his ‘wild’ opponents on the other” (Hourihan 15), and the strong, capable male versus the weak, helpless female. The hero story relies on a dualistic way of thinking, where “one of the two contrasting terms is constructed as superior and the other as inherently inferior in relation to it [and] … may be backgrounded, that is simply regarded as not worthy of notice, as is the case with females in boys’ adventure stories”

(Hourihan 16). Tradition “naturalize[s] domination” (17), so readers may anticipate that

Caleb will be the hero who continues to rescue Eve, because when Eve begins her quest

journey — as an unsure, unprepared, nerdy girl with no survival skills — it is hard not to read her as inferior. Eve is a different sort of female protagonist than Katniss or Tris because not only does she subvert the traditional male image of the hero, but she succeeds in her quest without exclusively engaging in any behaviors that can be conflated with those traits that are assigned to males like the ability to fight or hunt. While Katniss and Tris are to be celebrated for their skill and bravery, they preserve a masculine heroic default while attempting to challenge binary exclusivity. For example, Katniss’s mother and sister remain within the domestic realm throughout the series, staying behind at home while Katniss goes off to fight. Even before the Games, they never went out to help her hunt, so by all traditional definitions, she was taking over her father’s role by leaving the house to go out into the public space while her mother and younger sister remained in the home. Eve’s character appears to operate from the point of someone who has no awareness of what traditional gender roles are, and she ignores the inadequate conditioning given to her by the teachers at the School. She ultimately behaves according to need and desire, and not based on the expectations of others. Unlike Katniss, who has to spend a much longer time fulfilling her role as tribute before, and thus, has her journey laid out for her, Eve mostly chooses where she will go next.

In a traditional heroic quest, female characters are not only inferior, they are actually “not ‘characters’ at all but symbols of events in the hero’s psyche” (Hourihan

157). The hero story is always told from “the hero’s point of view [so] women appear only insofar as they are involved in his adventures, and the effect of this is to suggest that women are of no significance except when they make an impact upon men” (157). Unlike

Eve, women in traditional hero stories remain either in a domestic setting, as mothers

who are “gentle creatures with expressions of beautiful sweetness, or plump warm bodies who dispense food unfailingly” (157), or they are “goddesses, fairy godmothers, evil witches, sirens … found in the wilderness[, who] possess amazing powers and perform extraordinary functions” (157). Hero stories born from the Western “Christian era”

(Hourihan 17) “powerfully reinforce[e] the sense of the innate superiority of civilized, rational, male order … against [the] wild, emotional, female chaos” (17). The hero is very much a dominant figure who triggers a

sequence of events [as a] … consequence of his will, his ambition, his

activism, his rationality and his view of the world. He strives towards his

goal never doubting the rightness or the primacy of his cause. He regards

any opposition as evil, or at least as ‘wild’ and inferior, and he struggles to

subdue it. His mode is domination -- of the environment, of his enemies,

of his friends, of women, and of his own emotions, his own weaknesses.

To many readers his certainty is enormously attractive because it

reinforces established views of the way the world is. He embodies the

privileged terms of the interconnected dualisms which have shaped

Western thought and values. (Hourihan 57)

Nonetheless, in spite of the former dualistic rigidity of the heroic formula, “the dramatic depiction of these dualisms has evolved over time as the patterns of thought developed, with the hero and his opponents mutating to fit the changing conceptual and political environment but always demonstrating that ‘natural’ superiority of the Western patriarchy” (Hourihan 21). However, the incremental changes suggest that literature is changing to reflect social progress and the utopian dream is that these changes will

continue until gender equality has been achieved. There is potential for novels like Eve to initiate opportunities for perpetual and habitual change.

Another way to measure the degree to which Eve transcends traditional hero figures is to consider how she compares to other current literary heroines. Jane Tolmie notes that in many contemporary fantasy novels, “much as in many medieval sagas and romances, literary heroines remain at their best when rising above external conditions that are against them in a gender-based way. They dress up as men to escape restraints on their freedom, run away from abusive fathers, escape unwanted marriages, avoid, avert or survive rape, or take up arms” (148). Eve fits this description less than she fits the traditional one discussed by Hourihan. She does not dress as a man, she is unable to escape restraints and is repeatedly captured; she does not run away from her father, but plots and carries out a plan to kill him; she does not escape an unwanted marriage, but uses her marriage to work toward her goal of freeing Caleb. She does take up arms one time and kills a soldier (Eve 304), but on another occasion she would have undoubtedly been raped by Leif (195), the leader at the Dugout, if Caleb had not rescued her. These things perhaps do not make Eve the blockbuster heroic figure that gets an audience cheering, but there is an element of sincerity and relatability in Eve because she is a vulnerable and unsure person in many ways, with flaws and fears, but also with a diversity of character to which many readers can easily relate. In order for Eve, as a female hero, to move from the domestic space where female characters are normally relegated during heroic tales, she needs to lose her innocence and naivety and be introduced to the same unsheltered knowledge of the world that the boys possess.

As well as discussing speculative fictions, Tolmie also outlines traits of heroines in romantic epics, which is a heroic tradition that is more accurate in describing Eve, yet

Eve even breaks away from this pattern. According to Tolmie, the heroine of a romantic epic “does not exist within a system in which all women are independent, strong, feisty and passionate” (146). She must be

exceptional to catch our attention, … pick the man she wants, elude the

(many) others, escape rape, [and] live a life less ordinary. Behind her and

all around her is the silent rank and file of women who do not choose,

elude, or escape.… Strength needs weakness; extraordinary needs

ordinary; the exception depends on the general condition. (146)

Eve embodies almost every one of these traits. She is “exceptional” in school, she chooses Caleb as her lover, she eludes rape by Leif, and she certainly lives a “life less ordinary” as the princess. Eve’s progression into the role of this type of romantic heroine develops over the course of the narrative. It begins with accepting the fact that while she was at the “School for twelve years, … the [t]eachers there lied. It was never [her] life;

[she was] always under their control” (145). Eve recalls how “every part of [her] had wanted not to believe, that resistance lingering even after [she’d] seen the Graduates

[her]self.” She asks, “if everything that happened inside the School was a lie, then who was I now, after having based my identity around it?” (145). The girls’ independence is being suppressed by the regime and is by no means an accepted or normative way of life.

Her success is not founded on other women remaining weak so she can stand out as strong, even though she does initially leave the other girls behind, but rather, Eve helps other women, in the end, to discover the heroic capabilities within themselves. During the

time in the wild, while Eve takes the lead as the hero as she leads the orphan girls from the City of Sand to Califia, her cousin, Clara, who has lived a life of pampered privilege that has also prevented her from being independent, begins to behave in a heroic fashion as well. Charles, whom Eve marries in a bargain with the King to save Caleb’s life, loves

Eve, but grew up with Clara, who is in love with him. Charles tells Eve, before they are married, that “’Clara is incredibly smart [and] … talked about studying at the teaching hospital to be a doctor, [but] her mother is steering her in a different direction” (Once

155), meaning to get married to him. In spite of her intelligence, she is expected to marry rather than pursue a career. Yet, when Helene falls over the cliff, it is Clara who goes down with the rope to rescue her, after telling Eve that she “shouldn’t” (Rise 165) be the one to go because Eve is “the only one who knows where [they]’re going … [and because she] is pregnant … [and] there is more risk for [Eve] than there is for [Clara]” (165).

Clara learns, while in the wild, that she is capable of more than she has been allowed to discover in the “bubble” (161) she has been living in. The progression of Clara’s character applauds change and encourages personal growth and risk-taking. In contrast,

Eve’s friend, Pip, who only journeys from the School to the Dugout then dies after refusing to leave the place where she feels safe, warns of dire consequences for those who are either too weak to change or move forward, both geographically and personally.

Eve is influential in the success of others just as Carey’s trilogy has the ability to be influential in challenging YA dystopian limitations. YA dystopian fictions often feature narratives where societies are being oppressed and mistreated by a totalitarian leader and must work together to fight for a better life for all, a plot that leaves room for a conclusion that involves a plurality of heroic leaders in a community, rather than solitary

figures. Plots of this nature also allow for the hero to be less traditional, or who lack in traditional skills and strengths, because what the hero lacks, their supporters can provide, as they all work together toward their common utopian dreams of creating a better society, where no one is oppressed based on race, class, sex, or gender.

3.2 Challenging the Male Hero

The emerging picture Carey creates is of multiple people performing various roles depending on their levels of ability at the present time, but who are, by no means, confined to a role or stereotype based on one action. Rather than a female hero who is equipped with masculine skill and strength, like Katniss or Tris, which reinforces patriarchal assumptions, Eve’s roles are more fluid, as are the roles of Caleb and Arden, in terms of traditional heroic formula. Neither Eve nor Arden are sidelined into one- dimensional domestic roles, yet neither takes the forefront in the way a male hero does.

Caleb steps up into potentially heroic roles at times, like when he first rescues Eve in the

Wild, but he is actually sidelined for a large portion of the narrative. Those who are strong can also be weak. Those who are weak can emerge triumphant, and those who are connected to a supportive network of friends and/or people who share the same goal, can help each other achieve that common goal. Eve is celebrated for her bravery, intellect, and her internal moral code becomes the status quo that is being reinforced in readers as they cheer Eve on. That status quo allows for help from friends from all walks of life— even the elderly. It allows for the hero to fall in love and have a somewhat happy ending

with her family. However, the heroic status quo for Eve is different from Hourihan’s breakdown of heroic endings in that Eve is not rewarded with the City of Sand as her prize.

The genres of fantasy and dystopia have much more room to reimagine gender roles than Carey takes in Eve. As Basu suggests, “the dismantled structures of the dystopian world might possess a particular magnetism for readers who feel ostracized or otherwise alienated from current society” (7), but aside from young readers identifying with the subjection of the orphans to the King’s rule as symbolic of their own power struggles with parents and teachers, there is little to grasp onto for readers who may be struggling with gender identity issues and looking for “an island where misfit toys can shine, after traditional weights and measures of success have been discarded” (7). Rather than look for an alternative to centuries of tradition, Eve offers a more sustainable example of how a healthy society can emerge from the erosion of existing paradigms.

Carey offers a fair depiction of the current sexual-political climate in the western world, where people with progressive views are at odds with those who still hold to patriarchal norms. The function of Eve may not be to deliver the next new thing, but rather to highlight what still needs to change within YA literature in terms of gender equality.

3.3 Deconstructing Hero Gender

When female heroes are being re-assessed in how they are portrayed in popular fiction, there also needs to be a “degendering [of] social relations [that] requires the

resignification of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ so that they are not bounded and oppositional concepts” (Pennell 55). Female characters who survive and succeed only because they pretend to be male characters, or who behave in traditional male ways, are only trying to achieve what has been handed to men through patriarchy for centuries.

Nodelman states that “masculinity is taken to be somehow natural and free—the state one achieves by resisting societal norms and being one’s true self [and] as a result, what … many … in mainstream contemporary culture conceive of as a desirable solution to gender inequality is the adoption of traditionally male assumptions for everybody” (2).

For female characters this means nothing more than rejection of “the feminine role [to]

… become free to be themselves, supposedly natural and nonrestricted” (2). There needs to be an adjustment in how certain behaviors and roles are perceived, so that freedom and agency are not equated with maleness, and thus the male sex, and confinement and submissiveness are not equated with femaleness or the female sex. The problem is not that there is anything wrong with traditional masculine behaviors. The problem comes from telling young girls that because they have certain physical traits, that they cannot also be brave, intelligent, rational, skillful, or be leaders, and then reinforcing that ideology by publishing YA heroic literature that predominantly features male heroes.

Caleb is the character who traditionally would have been the hero, saving the girls from the School, but his character stays fairly peripheral to allow Eve room to complete her quest. If Caleb had stayed active in the narrative all along, he would have taken over, and Eve would be sidelined, which would be considered normal by heroic standards.

John Stephens points out that the question of “patriarchal ideology structured representations of male bodies and behaviors [has] only recently emerged as an issue”

after the prolonged focus on how patriarchy structures female identity (x). Charles, as a traditional male figure, expresses how confined he feels by the expectations that go along with being male. He says to Eve,

Ever since I can remember, people have talked about how I’ll marry Clara,

as though it were a given. I was sixteen and everyone had my whole life

planned out for me… and then you came to the Palace. You were

different. You haven’t spent the last ten years inside the city, doing the

same thing every day, seeing the same people. (Once 255)

Awareness is needed to point out the fact that “Western social structures and literary metanarratives remain underpinned by the intersecting mythologies of ‘patriarchy,’

‘Man’ (masculinity), and ‘Woman’ (femininity)” (x). Stephens claims that “by changing the relations within a configured pattern, it becomes possible to reconfigure subjectivities and move beyond socially determined representations” (xi), and a great place to start the change is within literary genres that a) are taken to represent the way things are, and b) are already accepted by masses of readers who employ no critical thought when they are reading, partly because of the predictability of the genres. As Stephens points out, “The constitution of an alternative hegemonic masculine paradigm may not in itself be a cause for celebration if all it achieves is the idealization of another model of masculinity” (xi), and to a great extent, this statement is also true of the feminine paradigm.

While there is nothing wrong with female heroic characters who possess strength, skill, or bravery, there is a narrow line between featuring a girl who can look after herself and essentially giving a female protagonist all the traits that have been associated with the

traditional male hero and letting her fill his role, rather than define her own. Judith Butler states that

Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist

signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the

totalizing gestures of feminism. The effort to identify the enemy as

singular form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of

the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. (Gender Trouble

18)

Female heroic figures must not mimic their oppressors, and, at the same time, male heroic figures must be free to also be other than the traditional stereotype. Peeta, for example, is also a hero in The Hunger Games, alongside Katniss, although his strength is in his artistic ability and his kind, honest nature. However, the story is set so that Peeta will die unless Katniss, the strong, violent one, saves his life, which positions him in a traditionally female role, so essentially, their roles are merely reversed, and nothing has really changed. Katniss and Peeta reveal flaws in viewing genders as binary, as they are reversing roles rather than adapting into new ones.

Writers like Carey must adhere to “conscious consideration and questioning of gender definitions [which] can alter youth’s senses of who and what they might be as girls and boys, women and men … [because they have the opportunity] to map … gender

… terrain differently from all that has gone before” (Baker 248). The Dugout and Califia, where the residents exert power and control in order to survive, and are chiefly concerned with keeping their existence a secret from the King and thus must live apart from the rest of society, reinforce the need for society to move past assigning gender based on

physiology by presenting symbolic challenges along Eve’s journey. As Kerry Mallan notes, in Western culture,

the male body is understood as phallic: hard and impenetrable. The female

body is its opposite: soft and penetrable. The focus on a specific part of

the male/female anatomy (penis/vagina) is a synecdoche for the whole

masculine/feminine body. Such bodily images of masculinity and

femininity not only articulate and confirm a hierarchical power

relationship between men and women, but also offer a fixed and limited

view of gender relations and inter/intra gender subjectivity. (151)

The peripheral female characters in Eve are mainly reduced to a uterus, while the male characters are often depicted carrying phallic weapons like guns and knives. The women of Califia, who are hiding from the King, basically adopt the same type of totalitarian rule amongst themselves that they are trying to avoid with their weaponry and masculine traits. By the end, however, most characters have laid down their arms, and Califia becomes home to men as well as women, suggesting that Carey encourages utopian longing for a society where people do not divide themselves based on their physiological differences and who do not continue to pay homage to outdated and dangerous patriarchal traditions.

Eve truly is not a natural or easy hero. She possesses very few skills to keep herself alive, particularly in comparison to Caleb—a more traditional fit for the role of hero— who uses “the Earth for his clock, … compass and … calendar” (Eve 91) and seems “lit from within” (64). Whereas Caleb, like Arden, has acquired knowledge and ability to survive with little or no help, Eve begins her journey without a working knowledge of

how the real world—the world outside the School—functions. She says in despair, “it seems like all the things I need to know, I don’t. And all the things I do know are completely wrong” (142). She struggles to find acceptance and understanding everywhere she goes, first with Arden in the wild, then with the boys at the Dugout, then amongst the women at Califia, and with the other people in the City of Sand. She finds reasons she would like to stay in each place she visits, especially the Dugout, but she is never safe because the King’s men are looking for her, so she invites danger upon her hosts. Eve is thus a non-threatening, albeit broadly adaptive, presence, which is perhaps an odd choice for a protagonist in a heroic quest, but she uses her feelings and intuition to guide her, which are resources every person possesses. She knows, for example, that

Caleb is a “good man” (156), and she knows “somewhere inside [her] there was a deeper knowledge [that]… held a place that even fear and a carefully crafted education could not touch” (148). But before Eve can see Caleb as a good person, she has to challenge the preconceived ideas in her mind that have been placed there by her teachers. Eve only knows about men through her vague memories from when she was a child, before the plague, the picture of the King, and the misandrist lessons she receives from teachers.

However, the teachers’ lessons never seem wholly convincing as a sincere attempt to make the girls man-haters, because the girls playfully talk about men without fear. For example, Pip tells Eve she “make[s] a very good man” when they are dancing, and Eve

“furrow[s] her brow to feign manliness” (2). Eve mimics her memory of what a man looks like, but she does not have a tangible example, only photos of the King, who “was to be trusted and obeyed” while all other “men could be manipulative, conniving, and dangerous” (2), a phrase which foreshadows that the King will also be someone who

cannot be trusted. There is the suggestion here that people have innate instincts and characteristics that cannot be controlled by imposing social or political structures, and

Eve uses both her intuition (traditionally a feminine trait) and logic, traditionally a masculine trait, (no man had actually ever hurt her except the one whom she was told to trust, the King) to conclude that the teachers were lying when they said all men are evil.

There is also the implication, in this example, that a person, man or woman, can be used as a symbol for another person’s ideologies so that misconceptions and lies become so deeply associated with that figure, that it becomes impossible to distinguish. Only by challenging the status quo can concepts become truths and representations of heroic figures that deviate from the patriarchal status quo allow young readers to re- conceptualize what it means to be a hero, and thus establish equality.

While Caleb initially rescues Eve in the wild, and helps her gain confidence in her ability to survive, he is also a distraction from her quest. When Eve is living in the City of

Sand, before she is caught with Caleb and he is shot, he asks Eve to “go East” with him, even though he has no plan, only that he will “figure out some way to live” (Once 218) so they can be together and away from danger. Even though Eve is happy and content with

Caleb, and at times feels like “nothing matters more” (185) than her and him together and in love, she chooses to first focus on completing her quest to help the dissidents take the

City of Sand from the King and rescue the girls from the Schools. Eve behaves truly like a hero in the second book, Once, when she tells the girls at her old School that as “the

Princess of The New America … there will be no greater champion for [them] inside the

City of Sand … [and she] will do everything [she] can to advocate for [their] needs”

(307). When some of the girls are finally brought from a School into the City, Eve

realizes they will not be safe and initiates a type of exodus from the City into the wild toward Califia, along with her maid, Beatrice, and her prissy cousin, Clara. She tells the girls “’we need to leave the City tonight, now, before you no longer have the chance’”

(Rise 127). Once the girls are safe in Califia, Eve embarks on the final part of her quest, saying “I have to kill my father” (Rise 257), and “I have to finish alone. I don’t want anyone else to be in danger because of me” (260). Eve has finally reached a level of maturity where she realizes she must act according to the knowledge she has at the given time. Finally, she seems to settle into a state of interdependence with her small family and her circle of friends. However, she also remains partly a fringe character as she leaves mainstream society to go to Califia with Caleb and her daughter, echoing the same fluidity and adaptability of character that she portrays throughout the series.

Conclusion

In analyzing Eve as a YA dystopian heroic figure, there are some basic conclusions that can be drawn about her character and the way Carey chooses to present her as a role model. The first is that Eve is a new face of speculative heroism, where the protagonist is not a lone adventurer, but rather part of a larger community from which he/she/they draw support, friendship and love. Eve, Arden, and Caleb all need rescuing at some point through the three novels, and they take turns helping and saving each other. Eve embodies the perceived weaker feminine traits, which harkens back to the original Eve, and acts as a redemptive figure in the heroic genre at the same time. Eve also allows young readers to see themselves as a potential part of a larger whole where they do not have to be the leader to be a hero. Second, Eve is a main character and model who does not misuse power, success, or victory to inspire faith in others, but who persists, adapts and adopts strategies from a broader pool of behaviors. In this way, Eve moves between restrictive communities more freely, just as Carey’s novel comfortably fits with mainstream YA fictions, but transcends multiple generic conventions at once.

Carey exaggerates the dangers of assigning societal roles based on biology and demonstrates how burdensome and confining it can be for an entire society to be subjected to the patriarchal practice of linking sex to gender. Eve’s relationship with her father, the King, is symbolic of the need to sever ties with the tyrannical past, however much pain or nostalgia it may bring. Historically, in western culture, “Eve” is often connotative of sin, deception, and of the curse of shame and childbirth put upon her by

God for her sin. Besides alluding to literary traditions in Eve, Carey imbricates her

protagonist with centuries of western Judeo-Christian misogynist ideology. When Eve kills her father, she not only renounces her birthright as the princess of The New

America, and symbolically destroys the institutionalized religious roots that feed patriarchal persistence, but renounces the societal expectations placed on her as symbol for all individuals who are oppressed by societies who prize conformity to patriarchal values.

Feminism made strides toward equality over the past century, but clearly equality has not found its way into all areas of society, since in 2016 it is still necessary to argue against, or at the very least, find ways to exploit, tyrannical, patriarchal publishing companies who continue to insist on subjugation through reinforced gender binaries, and thus, thrive within such conditions. Similar approaches have been tried in the past, such as Gilman’s utopian world which urges readers to locate the utopian impulse behind the satire and comedy in Herland. Likewise, in Carey’s dystopia, the open-ended narrative is full of optimism, rather than despair, as the King has been defeated, and The New

America has another chance to redefine itself. Eve is a utopia of second chances where mistakes are undone, but not forgotten. Unlike the biblical Eve, whose actions are believed to have caused the decline of the world into a state that can only be redeemed after death, Carey’s Eve reminds readers that mistakes are tools to learn by, not a life sentence. When status quos begin to feel tyrannical, as they did to Gilman a hundred years ago, it is time to take literary action to imagine new ways that will subvert current societal norms and create space, like an open-ended narrative, where new, redemptive norms can be inserted.

Carey enforces the message that “conventional gendered power relations need to be rewritten so that story coherences and closures can change too” (Pennell 61). In the past, literature like that of Gilman and Charnas has focused on exploiting the physical difference between men and women in speculative fiction to destabilize patriarchal power. The message in Eve is not to change the biology of a person, but to change the expectations and assumptions that are automatically assigned to a particular sex. The characters and many of the communities in Carey’s Eve are representative of what

Virginia Woolf called “the androgyny of the mind” which encompasses all traits without the interference of traditional allocation of traits to a particular sex. Like the undefined borders of the wild, the androgynous mind “is resonant and porous…[and] transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided

…[and] the fully developed mind … does not think specially or separately of sex” (Room

624). Separatism of the sexes has drawn attention to the discontent that patriarchy causes, but has not been successful in providing a long-term solution to the power differential.

Communities like Herland and Califia provide temporary relief as wishful thinking—a dream fantasy—with no real-life examples of how to counter patriarchal hegemony, but marginalized groups of people will continue to challenge the existing status quo until no one is left feeling second best. Without resorting to revolutionary action necessary in The

New America, YA narratives like Eve, which continue to push against patriarchal status quos, can lead to incremental and lasting change to the face of YA fantasy literature.

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