Mothers and Murderers in YA Dystopian Literature

In Christina Henry’s The Girl in Red (2019), a dystopian re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood, a pandemic called “the cough” strikes. The protagonist Red starts preparing for the long and physically challenging walk to her grandmother’s cottage in the woods, far away from cities, crowds, and contagion. Since Red has a leg prosthesis, not only does she have to prepare and pack supplies—she must also prepare her leg stump for carrying a heavy backpack on a very long walk.

I read Henry’s book in 2019 as part of my monograph project about Anglophone and Swedish YA dystopian texts, which resulted in the monograph Mothers and Murderers: Adults’ Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature (2021, Makadam Publishing). From the start, my book aimed to illustrate how the genre of YA dystopian texts can give insights into the world outside of the book pages. However, at the beginning of 2020, when the Coronavirus pandemic struck and changed the world in a heartbeat, I became even more convinced of the value of YA dystopian texts. Just like Red in Henry’s book, I started hoarding essentials and making plans for how I could most efficiently stay away from contagion and protect my loved ones. And just like Red, my knowledge of dystopian texts and media guided my choices.

“The cough” is frighteningly similar to the symptoms of the Coronavirus. The pandemic turned a book that depicted a future dystopian society into a text that dealt explicitly with the same issues that I faced during the pandemic. Thankfully, I was privileged enough to not be affected as much by the pandemic as Red, who must become an adolescent killer in order to protect herself from murderers, abusers, and rapists in a future fictional US that has fallen apart completely.

The aims of my monograph are three. First, I aim to explore how YA dystopian texts depict and problematize the power differences between children and adolescents, on the one hand, and adults, on the other hand. I argue that the genre establishes allegorical connections between the fictional worlds and the world of its readers, and then uses hyperbolic depictions of the power differences between the two groups to clarify how age is an important power category. Second, I endeavor to analyze how age intersects with other power categories, for example gender, ability, and race, and positions adolescent characters as variously oppressed and mighty. Third, I attempt to clarify how the texts’ depictions of these issues incorporate an educational potential regarding oppression and the power category of age that can be beneficial for teaching in the classroom.

In the book, I include a corpus of 100 YA dystopian novels and one short story in the form of a sequel. This large corpus is used to identify and give overviews of how the two motifs of the adolescent mother and adolescent killer are used to discuss age-related power in fictional dystopian worlds. I identify five different types of pregnancies and nine different categories of why adolescents become killers. In addition, I analyze six YA dystopian series in depth, exemplifying how the motifs are tied to the power category of age within the genre. The final chapter of the book includes six suggested teaching designs that include aims, tasks, and evaluation processes. These should be viewed as inspiration for teachers who want to actualize the educational potential of YA dystopian texts in the classroom.

Since the book is written in English and I want teachers in different countries to be able to use the primary texts in their teaching, a majority of the texts in the corpus are written in English and published in English-speaking countries (87 out of 101). In brief, the selection of the texts was based on my definition criteria for the YA dystopian genre (see Alkestrand 26–33) and the presence of the adolescent mother motif and/or the adolescent killer motif.

One Swedish example of a YA dystopian text that, just like Henry’s novel, depicts a pandemic is Sofia Nordin’s One Second at a Time Series (2013–2017). All adults and most children and adolescents die from a mysterious fever. It is never clarified how the fever spread, but a few of the surviving adolescents discuss if it could possibly be someone who willingly let loose a virus, since everyone died within a few hours. In this alternate version of Sweden without adults, electricity, and the comforts of a high-technology society, Ella, who is only 14 years old, finds out that she is pregnant. She is terrified to give birth in a society without hospitals and medics. However, her partner Esmael encourages her and tells her that he will read up on giving birth and do everything he can to help her.

Contrary to most Anglophone examples of adolescent mothers in my corpus, Ella is not part of a romantic, monogamous relationship. She has had sex with three boys who could all potentially be the father of her child, but she picks Esmael, who she thinks will be able to give her child what it needs. At this point, the two are no longer involved in a romantic relationship. Ella also enjoys sex and makes sure to please herself when Esmael is unable to give her an orgasm. In addition, she is not exclusively sexually attracted to boys. All these aspects make Nordin’s series stand out from the Anglophone examples of adolescent mothers in my corpus.

On the cover of my monograph, there is a dandelion. On the backside, the dandelion is letting its seeds fly out over the blurb. Why did I pick this image for a book about mothers and murderers? In the final installment of Suzanne Collins’ famous Hunger Games trilogy (2008—2010), the protagonist Katniss Everdeen talks about how important hope is for her to be able to move on from all the terrible things she has had to endure throughout the trilogy:

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. (Collins 453)

For Katniss, who has been forced to become an adolescent killer in order to survive, the dandelion symbolizes the resilience and hopefulness of rebirth. The dandelion can grow in the most desolate and unfriendly of places, and it keeps coming back every spring, to the great dismay of many garden lovers. It stands for hope in dark times.

And just like the dandelion, the adolescent mothers and killers of the YA dystopian texts I study symbolize hope, resilience, and a refusal to let adults and their institutions oppress them and destroy the world. Even though they figuratively must go through hell, they keep fighting for a better world for both themselves and their children. The dandelion on the cover grows from a pool of blood. It stands tall in the face of an unfriendly environment. And it manages to let its seeds fly out and create new life. The same is true for the adolescent mothers and killers, who are indeed oppressed by adults via extreme measures, but still manage to fight for a better world.

The Coronavirus pandemic has forever changed how I, an adult privileged Swede, view the world. Preparations and hoarding essentials can indeed be useful, but as Red in Henry’s novel clarifies, there is only so much one can do to protect themselves: “No amount of caution or knowledge or perfectly packed supplies could eliminate danger” (Henry 359). The world outside of the book pages is sometimes a harsh place to live in, not so different from YA dystopian texts’ depictions of dystopian worlds. But through the lens of these books, readers—both young and old—can learn more about the way children and adolescents are in an extra vulnerable position during a crisis. Hopefully, this can lead to more careful considerations of how adults can protect children and adolescents without negating their agency and without abusing the power that being an adult bestows upon them.

Works Cited

• Alkestrand, Malin. Mothers and Murderers: Adults’ Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature. Makadam Publishing, 2021.

• Collins, Suzanne. 2010. Mockingjay. Scholastic, 2013.

• Henry, Christina. The Girl in Red. Titan Books, 2019.

• Nordin, Sofia. 2013. En sekund i taget [One second at a time]. Rabén & Sjögren, 2016.
  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Malin Alkestrand has a Ph. D. in comparative literature from Lund University, Sweden, and is an assistant professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She teaches and researches in the field of children’s and young adult literature and has published on fantasy literature and dystopian literature for young adults. In her doctoral thesis Magiska möjligheter: Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl och Cirkeln i skolans värdegrundsarbete [Magical possibilities: Teaching fundamental values in schools using Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and the Circle] (Makadam Publishing, 2016), she explored how fantasy literature, such as the Harry Potter books, can be used in the classroom to discuss democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism. In October 2021, she published a monograph called Mothers and Murderers: Adults’ Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature (Makadam Publishing, 2021).