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So. Over in a more anonymously-marked location, there was a discussion going about Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility, in which this conversation occurred:
#
Someone Else:
Marianne is so, so young, like nonny above said -- and both her mother and Elinor protect her in her youth -- her mother by encouraging her, and Elinor by reigning her in. I guess I have a lot of feelings right now about how Marianne's (normal, youthful, silly, necessary) attempts to be open-hearted and to love passionately and all these other romantic ideals have made her vulnerable to [spoilers redacted].
Marianne's raptures and sloughs of despair were so funny to me, and then I hit The Reveal (when we learn how dangerous her "sensibility" might have been to her under even slightly different circumstances) and it's like a punch to the gut. The line between respectability and desolation is so thin in these books. I don't know; I feel really, really protective of Marianne right now. :(
Me:
One of the things that I love about Jane Austen, actually, is that beneath all that dry wit and dinner party tomfoolery and obsession over clothes and balls and who might've been seen whispering to who where and when, there's that unseen (but never unknown) pit of destruction for all these well-bred young women with connections and money and youth on their side. They pretty much have a ten-year-window, on the outside, to acquire a Good Husband, and their entire life is riding on their ability to make this work. And it's a decision a lot of them are trying to make while barely out of adolescence, and seldom having been given much responsibility at all.
And if you pick wrong, you are miserable, and possibly die. If you don't attract someone suitable who you accept in time, you end up sitting around doing nothing for the rest of your life, an object of pity to your entire social group, and that's if you're lucky enough to be supported as a spinster. It's pretty people having melodrama over 'insignificant' things, but it's not insignificant: it really is life-defining major choices, all this stuff, for the protagonists and their unmarried female friends and relatives.
Someone Else:
YES EXACTLY. It's hideously important, and no one is really allowed to acknowledge how important it is -- that would be tacky and forward! But everyone knows.
And the borders of Decent Society are very clear once you cross them, but misty and vague a lot of the time from the other side. The older generation doesn't always seem to know what's going on, which I guess is nothing new. I'm thinking of Marianne here, but also some of the characters in Mansfield Park, and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, who should have had someone to catch her but never did until it was almost too late in one sense, and too late in another.
It's all the pitfalls of social interaction and adolescence that are familiar to us, in all their real-time intensity, only with heightened, permanent, and frequently devastating consequences for anyone who gets it wrong. The ultimate YA dystopia?
Me:
Yes! It's very YA dystopia. You're born into a specific caste, which has a lot of strict behavior rules, and the main difference is that things are a little more...unspoken and fuzzy at the edges, instead of being all "I'm so glad I'm a Beta, I wouldn't want to be an Alpha, they work so hard." Except it's actually true in the time period and for the author writing it, so there's no revolution. You just learn how to fit in with your assigned caste and try to get the best results you can within it, and gossip about people who shifted castes because of poor choices, or hear horror stories about the Unspoken Exiles who transgressed the boundaries of the Rules too hard.
#
And I'm half joking there, but...I'm not, exactly, because it turns out that most dystopian YA novels look a lot like parts of the real world, if you look around for a while. Current or historical. The YA version just puts a big capitalized stamp on things, and makes them explicit, so that instead of everyone gently hinting at Emma that she shouldn't try to convince a young lady of unknown parentage to fall in love with an eligible bachelor of Emma's own social standing, it's someone saying that Alphas and Betas can't marry, don't be ridiculous, that would be against the City Rules. The mysterious disappearances of your friends that no one will talk about may in fact be because they got pregnant and were shuffled off to another location, and maybe they died in childbirth, and maybe you'll never find out.
The difference, I suppose, is that in the dystopian novels, we tend to actually get some revolution in, and focus on protagonists who object to how things go, instead of trying to get their best possible happy ending within the Rules and Caste.
Dystopia's always there. Just gotta know where to look, and how to frame it.
#
Someone Else:
Marianne is so, so young, like nonny above said -- and both her mother and Elinor protect her in her youth -- her mother by encouraging her, and Elinor by reigning her in. I guess I have a lot of feelings right now about how Marianne's (normal, youthful, silly, necessary) attempts to be open-hearted and to love passionately and all these other romantic ideals have made her vulnerable to [spoilers redacted].
Marianne's raptures and sloughs of despair were so funny to me, and then I hit The Reveal (when we learn how dangerous her "sensibility" might have been to her under even slightly different circumstances) and it's like a punch to the gut. The line between respectability and desolation is so thin in these books. I don't know; I feel really, really protective of Marianne right now. :(
Me:
One of the things that I love about Jane Austen, actually, is that beneath all that dry wit and dinner party tomfoolery and obsession over clothes and balls and who might've been seen whispering to who where and when, there's that unseen (but never unknown) pit of destruction for all these well-bred young women with connections and money and youth on their side. They pretty much have a ten-year-window, on the outside, to acquire a Good Husband, and their entire life is riding on their ability to make this work. And it's a decision a lot of them are trying to make while barely out of adolescence, and seldom having been given much responsibility at all.
And if you pick wrong, you are miserable, and possibly die. If you don't attract someone suitable who you accept in time, you end up sitting around doing nothing for the rest of your life, an object of pity to your entire social group, and that's if you're lucky enough to be supported as a spinster. It's pretty people having melodrama over 'insignificant' things, but it's not insignificant: it really is life-defining major choices, all this stuff, for the protagonists and their unmarried female friends and relatives.
Someone Else:
YES EXACTLY. It's hideously important, and no one is really allowed to acknowledge how important it is -- that would be tacky and forward! But everyone knows.
And the borders of Decent Society are very clear once you cross them, but misty and vague a lot of the time from the other side. The older generation doesn't always seem to know what's going on, which I guess is nothing new. I'm thinking of Marianne here, but also some of the characters in Mansfield Park, and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, who should have had someone to catch her but never did until it was almost too late in one sense, and too late in another.
It's all the pitfalls of social interaction and adolescence that are familiar to us, in all their real-time intensity, only with heightened, permanent, and frequently devastating consequences for anyone who gets it wrong. The ultimate YA dystopia?
Me:
Yes! It's very YA dystopia. You're born into a specific caste, which has a lot of strict behavior rules, and the main difference is that things are a little more...unspoken and fuzzy at the edges, instead of being all "I'm so glad I'm a Beta, I wouldn't want to be an Alpha, they work so hard." Except it's actually true in the time period and for the author writing it, so there's no revolution. You just learn how to fit in with your assigned caste and try to get the best results you can within it, and gossip about people who shifted castes because of poor choices, or hear horror stories about the Unspoken Exiles who transgressed the boundaries of the Rules too hard.
#
And I'm half joking there, but...I'm not, exactly, because it turns out that most dystopian YA novels look a lot like parts of the real world, if you look around for a while. Current or historical. The YA version just puts a big capitalized stamp on things, and makes them explicit, so that instead of everyone gently hinting at Emma that she shouldn't try to convince a young lady of unknown parentage to fall in love with an eligible bachelor of Emma's own social standing, it's someone saying that Alphas and Betas can't marry, don't be ridiculous, that would be against the City Rules. The mysterious disappearances of your friends that no one will talk about may in fact be because they got pregnant and were shuffled off to another location, and maybe they died in childbirth, and maybe you'll never find out.
The difference, I suppose, is that in the dystopian novels, we tend to actually get some revolution in, and focus on protagonists who object to how things go, instead of trying to get their best possible happy ending within the Rules and Caste.
Dystopia's always there. Just gotta know where to look, and how to frame it.