SPECIAL ISSUE: NARRATIVE EMOTIONS AND THE

SHAPING(S) OF IDENTITY

Writing the Erasure of Emotions in Dystopian

Young Adult Fiction: Reading Lois Lowry’s The
Giver and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium

Rocío G. Davis
University of Navarra

Young Adult (YA) dystopian fiction blends the traditional developmental

narrative with a heightened concern with issues regarding the individual against
society, often in the context of a post-apocalyptic world. In this article, I
examine the way Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium
(2011) focus on the state’s regulation over or removal of their people’s
emotions and decisions in the context of the representation of future societies. If
we consider the place of emotions in YA literature in general, with its interest
in adolescents’ interaction with their families, each other, their school, or other
communities, we can accept the validity of emotions as a prism through which
to examine the text’s didactic and social purposes. Specifically, by deploying a
discourse that emphasizes the dangerous consequences of unbridled emotions in
earlier historical times, dystopian texts ask us to think about the political
potential of feelings as catalysts for social change.

Young adult dystopian fiction can be read as a response to today’s

mass media culture’s often pessimistic and/or catastrophic vision of the
world. Through all kinds of social and public media, adolescents are
being trained to view humankind as inherently wasteful and oblivious to
the consequences of their actions on the earth. Dystopian Young Adult
(YA) texts blend the traditional developmental narrative with a
heightened concern with issues regarding the individual against society
(generally in the form of strict political organization), often in the context
of a post-apocalyptic world. Clearly based on, but departing in key ways
from, a solid tradition of dystopian works that includes Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We (1921/2009), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932),
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s

NARRATIVE WORKS: ISSUES, INVESTIGATIONS, & INTERVENTIONS 4(2), 48-63

©Rocio G. Davis, 2014
49 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

Tale (1985), the texts envision a future world which often presents, as
Carrie Hinz (2002) notes, “a rigorously planned society, charismatic
leaders or masterminds, control of reproductive freedom, and the
prioritization of collective well-being over the fate of the individual,”
intersecting with depictions of adolescent personal problems, inviting
writers and their readers to “speculate about the way individuals position
themselves in reference to a wider collective” (p. 254). In this article, I
want to examine the way two highly successful novels, Lois Lowry’s The
Giver (1993) and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium (2011), focus on the state’s
regulation over or removal of their people’s emotions and decisions in the
context of the representation of future societies.
Dystopias are best understood in the context of utopias. In
children’s and young adult’s literature, Carrie Hinz and Elaine Ostry
(2003) explain that “utopia” can be used

to signify a non-existent society that is posited as significantly

better than that of the reader. It strives toward perfection, has a
delineated social system, and is described in reasonably specific
detail. Dystopias are likewise precise descriptions of societies,
ones in which the ideals for improvement have gone tragically
amok. (p. 3).

Utopian literature encourages people to examine their society critically,

allowing for a turn to political action, should this be necessary. They
carry out

important social, cultural, and political work by challenging and

reformulating ideas about power and identity, community, the
body, spatio-temporal change, and ecology. Children’s literature is
marked by a pervasive commitment to social practice, and
particularly to representing or interrogating those social practices
deemed worthy of preservation, cultivation, or augmentation, and
those deemed to be in need of reconceiving or discarding”
(Bradford, Mallen, Stephens, & McCallum, 2008, p. 2).

Representations of utopian societies generally privilege cooperation,

equality, and justice. But authors of dystopias seem to ask: do we reach a
point at which “utopian cooperation” becomes “dystopian conformity”?
(Hinz & Ostry, 2003, p. 7) When the measures previously deemed
expedient or beneficial for survival and/or peaceful co-existence are
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 50

transformed into ends in themselves, how do adolescents negotiate their

places in that society? Because YA fiction is generally structured as
bildungsromane, dystopias address the intersection between political or
social action in the contexts of the narrative of formation. Disengaging
the bildung from merely familial or educational locations widens the field
of adolescent action, complicating the ways the maturation process is
represented. So, although these novels continue to attend to teen concerns
such as family and peer relations, sexual awakening, independence, and
identity, they highlight the interconnection between personal growth and
political involvement. Further, as Hinz (2002) explains, the conflation of
the personal and the political in YA novels produces interesting effects in
the reader:

Freedom, for example, is figured simultaneously as a political

issue (should we allow ourselves to be brainwashed by a computer
into a perfectly efficient society?) and a negotiation between
adolescents and their families or friends Presumably, this
conflation is meant to help adolescent readers cope with difficult
political and social ideas within a context they can understand:
their own narrative of development. Good citizenship within the
ideal society (or in opposition to the dystopian society) is figured
as a process of both achieving the autonomy of adulthood and
keeping the clarity of vision held by a child. (p. 263)

Dystopian novels in general serve as cultural critiques and models

as to what might happen if we pursue some of our present courses. The
themes in both adult and YA texts mirror each other significantly and we
can point to key resonances in many of the texts. The organization of
labor and identical clothing in Zamyatin’s We (1921/2009) is replicated in
Lowry’s The Giver (1993); the surveillance of private life embodied by
Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 (1949) recurs in Ally Condie’s Matched
(2010); and the institutionalized deployment of fertile women to produce
babies for the state that shapes Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is
reenacted in a teenage context in Megan McCafferty’s Bumped (2011).
These novels are a sampling of the numerous ways that YA literature
dialogues with its adult tradition. But YA texts are more openly didactic,
teaching with occasionally shocking, negative examples to compel their
young readers to question social and cultural impositions and discern the
rhetoric of corruption. A case in point is the hugely popular Hunger
Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins—The Hunger Games (2008), Catching
51 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010)—where the Capitol maintains

government control by forcing teenagers to kill each other in a televised
reality show. As Kay Sambell (2004) explains,

the dystopia foregrounds future suffering, then, to force readers to

think carefully about where supposed “ideals” may really lead,
underlining the point that these hugely undesirable societies can
and will come about, unless we learn to question the authority of
those in power, however benign they may appear to be. (p. 248)

Thus, they function as critiques precisely by inviting parallels with certain

aspects of contemporary culture, encouraging teens to be more thoughtful
about politics and society and their place in it. Further, in perhaps a nod
towards writing for children, the endings of YA dystopian novels tend to
be more hopeful than those for adults. Indeed, Sambell (2003) notes that
“the narrative closure of the protagonist’s final defeat and failure is
absolutely crucial to the admonitory impulse of the classic adult dystopia”
(p. 166). However, the YA protagonist (a substantial number of whom are
young women) generally manages to help change the system, reverting it
to a version of the status quo, often through revolution but certainly by
using her wits and talents.1
In the dystopian novels I examine in this paper, Lowry’s The
Giver (1993) and Oliver’s Delirium (2011), the societies represented have
established forms of regulation and elimination of emotions, respectively.
I suggest that a perspective that focuses on narratives of emotions or the
narration of emotions illuminates ways these dystopias engage
contemporary YA culture. Thinking about how narrativity and emotions
operate in these texts allows us to further our understanding of the
aesthetic, didactic, social, and cultural works of these texts. 2 If we
consider the place of emotions in YA literature in general, with its
heightened interest in adolescents’ forms of interaction with their
families, each other, their school, or other communities, we can accept the
validity of emotions as a prism through which to examine the text’s
didactic and social purposes. Specifically, by deploying a discourse that
supports this program by emphasizing the dangerous consequences of
unbridled emotions in earlier historical times, dystopian texts take the

1
For a more comprehensive discussion of the differences between adult and YA
dystopias, see Sambell (2003).
2
See Keen (2011) for a cogent discussion of the development of perspectives on
narratives and emotions.
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 52

more domestic form of YA writing a step further and ask us to think

about the political potential of feelings as catalysts for social change.
Sarah Ahmed’s (2004b) model of emotions as a vehicle of
political mobilization, in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, serves as a
useful frame for this discussion. By investigating what emotions do and
produce in current nation-states as they circulate and affect social life, she
connects the personal with the political. Her model, based on ideas from
Marx and Freud, tracks how emotions “circulate between bodies,”
arguing for a “sociality of emotions,” that leads her to examine how
“words for feelings, and objects of feelings, circulate and generate
effects” (pp. 8, 14). Ahmed contends that the study of emotions, which
effect, rather than merely reside within, the boundaries of personal and
collective bodies, can help to show how “subjects become invested in
particular structures,” as well as institutions, values, and entities (p. 12).
Thus, more than viewing emotions as merely psychological dispositions,
in her article “Affective Economies,” Ahmed (2004a) considers “how
they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship
between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the
collective,” a framing that leads to subjects binding together (p. 119).
Moreover, as she explains,

in my model of sociality of emotions, I suggest that emotions

create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us
to distinguish an outside and an inside in the first place. So
emotions are not simply something that ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it
is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that
surfaces and boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and ‘we’ are shaped by,
and even take the shape of, contact with others. (2004b, p. 10)

Emotions, she argues, can play a critical role in making or breaking

political organizations and social movements. They are thus intimately
bound with the work of activism. Her basic premise—the expression and
circulation of emotion as a catalyst for social change—may thus be used
to read the ways Lowry and Oliver allow their young protagonists to
challenge the configuration of their dystopic worlds. 3
The ostensibly benign totalitarian regime presented in The Giver
draws from Cold War rhetoric that leads the inhabitants of the city to
believe they live in an ideal place where national, racial, or ethnic conflict

3
Ahmed’s (2004a, 2004b) theory is more complex than I have explained here. For
reasons of brevity, I have elected to use only her basic premise for the discussion.
53 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

no longer exists, nor does suffering or illness. 4 Michael Levy (1997)

explains that “the world of The Giver is enormously seductive” because
“Lowry has intentionally constructed its society to solve many
contemporary problems, particularly those likely to be of significance to
twelve year olds and their parents” (p. 52). Scientific progress has
managed to erase difference and so, with the exception of a very few,
everyone is the same. Having decided to embrace “Sameness” and
obliterate historical and cultural memory, the people have trapped
themselves in a dystopia that rejects real individual originality as it
purports to celebrate community harmony. Myriad regulations govern
every detail of the people’s existence—from family configurations, to
clothing and food, to their assigned professions. Children (designated as a
collective by their age: Fours, Fives, etc.) all turn a year older in
December, at which point they move on to another carefully calculated
developmental stage. Families are non-biological—couples are matched
to ensure harmony and can then apply for “newchildren” when they feel
they are ready, ultimately receiving a maximum of two, a “male” and
“female.” People’s clothes (generally tunics) are designed for utilitarian
and pedagogical purposes. For example, Fours, Fives, and Sixes wear
jackets buttoned down the back so that they have to help each other dress
and therefore learn interdependence (p. 40). The front-buttoned jacket
received at the public ceremony at Seven is the first mark of
independence (p. 40). Receiving a bicycle at Nine becomes “the powerful
emblem of moving gradually out into the community, away from the
protective family unit” (p. 41). At Ten, the children all receive their
distinguishing haircuts: females lose their braids and males get a shorter
cut. At Twelve, the children are assigned their vocations by the
Committee of Elders, which has carefully watched them throughout their
childhoods.
The Giver is narrated by Jonas, an Eleven, who, when the novel
opens, is apprehensive about the December ceremony in which he will
learn what vocation he has been assigned. Though the characters speak
about feelings, only after Jonas has been chosen to be the community’s

4
Critical studies on The Giver have noted that the lack of “diversity”—actually creating
an all-white world and the conservative nature of Jonah’s decisions in the novel—is
quite problematic. Susan Stewart (2007), in “A Return to Normal,” argues that “as
innovative as The Giver might be, it is nonetheless a ‘return to normal.’ Rather than
offering something different, the text ideologically undermines itself by returning most
readers to a familiar subject position. … Jonas and The Giver, two light skinned, pale
eyed characters, replicate contemporary cultural assumptions in that they serve as the
decision makers and saviors” for the community (p. 21).
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 54

next Receiver of Memory will he (and the reader) understand that true
emotions have been purged from his world. Lowry’s dystopian paradigm
hinges on the fact that citizens in The Giver have been genetically
manipulated to preserve only individual memory and prohibited from
access to historical and cultural memory, from the knowledge of a past
time, events, and cultural manifestations such as art and music, with their
attendant passions such as fear, pride, envy, sorrow, joy, and love. They
live in a colorless climate-controlled environment that has eliminated the
experience of weather and seasons, and eradicated animals (children from
One to Eight are allowed to have a Comfort Object, usually a stuffed
animal, which they think is mythological). The community engages in
numerous rituals, such as the “evening telling of feelings” (p. 5), and the
morning telling of dreams, a sharing family session which actually
becomes a way for adults to gently regulate their children’s personal
preferences, ideas, feelings, towards the common aim of community
harmony. Indeed, the society is designed to manage or eliminate all
personal volition that may lead to suffering and conflict. The children in
this world are uniformly polite, reciting standard phrases of apology to
adults and to each other and having these accepted in a sincere scripted
dialogue.
In order to ensure that all citizens live placidly, no biological
family bonds are created, pills are taken to suppress “stirrings” (sexual
urges), the weak and elderly are “released” (the word “death” is not used),
and there is no contact with the natural world. In this world, “nothing was
ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color,
pain or past” (p. 165). Yet the founders of this society consider it
important to have at least one person who remembers existence before
emotional and physical reality are changed—a person who can serve as
advisor in particular situations. Jonas, who has exhibited some of the
characteristics of someone who might be capable of receiving memory,
notably his pale eyes (unlike the others who have dark eyes), is assigned
to the task. The current Receiver of Memory (now called the Giver), an
old man, begins to transfer his memories to Jonas, literally removing
them from his consciousness. The boy begins to re-experience the past,
reliving the positive and negative emotions associated with those events,
in order to preserve them for the community. Thus, in his sessions with
the Giver, Jonas experiences the gamut of feelings and emotions, from the
most physical—the cold of a snowy day and a sunburn—to exhilaration
(his first ride down a hill on a sled), pain (a broken leg), terror and sorrow
55 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

(at war), peacefulness (watching a sunset), and love (watching a multi-

generational family celebrate Christmas).
Jonas’ process of receiving memory becomes an occasion for him
and the Giver to reexamine the decisions the leaders of the community
made: harmony and stability in exchange for memory, freedom, and
diversity. Color, for example, has been abolished. So Jonas’ realization
that color exists—in an apple, in his friend Fiona’s hair, in a baby’s
cheeks—is a shock, which the Giver explains in these terms: “Our people
made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness.… We relinquished color
when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences…. We
gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others” (p. 95). In
a conversation with the Giver about choices, he exclaims: “If everything’s
the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning
and decide things! A blue tunic or a red one?” (p. 98). The Giver, leading
Jonas to logical conclusions, notes that choice is a dangerous thing
because sometimes, when choice is involved, we “might make wrong
choices” (p. 98). Jonas initially agrees:

“We don’t dare let people make choices of their own.” “Not
Safe?” The Giver suggested. “Definitely not safe,” Jonas said with
certainty. “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate?
And chose wrong?” “Or what if,” he went on, almost laughing at
the absurdity, “they chose their own jobs?” “Frightening, isn’t it?”
The Giver said. Jonas chuckled. “Very frightening. I can’t even
imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”
“It’s safer.” “Yes,” Jonas agreed. “Much safer.” (pp. 98–99)

Receiving more memories will soon lead Jonas to rethink his

commitment to security. The rhetoric of community safety and concern
marks the perspective of the boy who, until now, has not experienced
diversity or freedom. Interestingly, Lowry makes the community deploy
rhetoric as a tool for control. Emphasis on precise and accurate speech
enables members of the community to control each other, particularly
with regard to the expression of feelings. Though it seems that people are
allowed to feel emotions—indeed, the novel opens with Jonas feeling
“frightened” (p. 1) by an unscheduled plane flying overhead and
“apprehensive” (p. 6) about the coming December meeting where he will
be assigned his profession, and families enact the “evening telling of
feelings” (p. 6)—the community has clearly privileged the more benign
forms of emotions and erased the others, partly through pills that suppress
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 56

them and partly by linguistic redirection. Crucially, after experiencing the

memory of a family Christmas celebration suffused by love, Jonas goes
home and asks his parents:

“Do you love me?” There was an awkward silence for a moment.
Then Father gave a little chuckle. “Jonas. You of all people.
Precision of language, please!” “What do you mean?” Jonas
asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated. “Your
father means that you used a very generalized word, so
meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother
explained carefully. Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He has
never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory. “And of
course our community can’t function smoothly if people don’t use
precise language. You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer
is ‘Yes,’” his mother said. “Or,” his father suggested, “‘Do you
take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is
wholeheartedly ‘Yes.’” “Do you understand why it’s inappropriate
to use a word like ‘love’?” Mother asked. Jonas nodded. “Yes,
thank you, I do,” he replied slowly. This was his first lie to his
parents. (p. 127)

In the end, Jonas and the Giver resolve to return all their
memories to the community, a decision that requires Jonas to leave it
forever. Taking with him a toddler with pale eyes who had been
condemned to release because he would not conform to the kind of
nurturing he was being given, Jonas walks away. The novel ends with
him arriving, hungry and cold, to

the place that he had always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that
held their future and their past.… He forced his eyes open as they
went downward, downward, sliding, and all at once he could see
lights and he recognized them now. He knew they were shining
through the windows of rooms, that they were the red, blue, and
yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families
created and kept memories, where they celebrated love.” (p. 178)

But this ending is not without its complications: the decision to return the
memories to people who were not ready to receive them might actually be
problematic. Having chosen to live in a utopia, where they give up choice
57 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

and are spared injustices, the people might actually not welcome the
transformation that memory will bring. But that story is not told.
The Giver, though classified as YA fiction, is actually meant for
pre-teens; Lauren Oliver’s Delirium (2011) engages more adolescent
concerns, particularly romantic love. The novel is set in Portland, Maine,
in a future time after war has obliged the country to close its borders and
enforce civil order by vigilantism and “the cure,” an operation that all
citizens have at the age of 18, which amounts to a coming-of-age
lobotomy that renders people incapable of feeling emotions, particularly,
the disease called amor deliria nervosa, love.5 As A Brief History of the
United States of America, by E. D. Thompson, explains:

In the decades before the development of the cure, the disease had
become so virulent and widespread it was extraordinarily rare for
a person to reach adulthood without having contracted a
significant case of amor deliria nervosa…. Many historians have
argued that pre-cure society was itself a reflection of the disease,
characterized by fracture, chaos, and instabilit…. Almost half of
all marriages ended in dissolution…. Incidence of drug use
skyrocketed, as did alcohol-related deaths.” (p. 164)

The Government’s official publication, The Book of Shhh (The Safety,

Health, and Happiness Handbook) justifies the “procedure” by noting
that: “Humans, unregulated, are cruel and capricious; violent and selfish;
miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic
emotions have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and
good” (p. 317). Indeed, inscribed on American currency is the country’s
new motto: “Ex remedium salus. From the cure, salvation” (p. 288).

5
Oliver makes a plausible argument for the diagnosis of love as a disease, considering
its symptoms: “Phase One: preoccupation; difficulty focusing, dry mouth … fits of
dizziness and disorientation, reduced mental awareness; racing thoughts; impaired
reasoning skills. Phase Two: periods of euphoria; hysterical laughter and heightened
energy, periods of despair; lethargy … disruption of sleep patterns; insomnia or constant
fatigue, obsessive thoughts and actions … . Phase Three (Critical): difficulty breathing,
pain in the chest, throat, or stomach … complete breakdown of rational faculties; erratic
behavior; violent thoughts and fantasies; hallucinations and delusions. Phase Four
(Fatal): emotional or physical paralysis (partial or total), death” (p. 132). The society has
established a toll-free hotline (1-800-PREVENT) to call in case citizens fear that they
might have the disease or know someone who does.
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 58

When the novel opens, Lena Halloway is nearly 18 and eagerly

awaiting the day of her procedure. Her mother had committed suicide
years earlier, a victim of love, leading Lena to believe that love equals
suffering and that its ruinous possibilities are unfathomed:

They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness.
That’s bad enough. The Book of Shhh also tells stories of those
who died because of love lost or never found, which is what
terrifies me the most. The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills
you both when you have it and when you don’t.” (p. 4)

As an Uncured teenager, she is particularly vigilant, knowing that her

blood is tainted by her family history of the disease and relatives who
were “sympathizers,” supporters of the group of people called “Invalids,”
citizens who rejected the cure (they are so ill they do not even realize they
have been infected!) and live in the Wilds. Her last memory of her mother
terrifies her:

[she] had remained uncured despite three separate procedures, and

the disease had claimed her, nipped at her insides, and turned her
eyes hollow and her cheeks pale, had taken control of her feet and
led her, inch by inch, to the edge of a sandy cliff and into the
bright, thin air of the plunge beyond.… I remember only the hot
pressure of her fingers on my face in the nighttime and her last
whispered words to me. I love you. Remember. They cannot take
it.” (pp. 28-29)

The world Lena lives in is perfectly regulated:

Fifty years ago the government closed the borders of the United
States. The border is guarded constantly by military personnel. No
one can get in. No one goes out. … This is for our own protection.
Safety, Sanctity, Community: That is our country’s motto.…
There is no more hatred in the United States, at least among the
cured. (p. 39)

In this world, marriage exists as an institution controlled by the

Government: people are matched after their procedure and informed of
how many children they may have, based on their character and ability:
“It’s the way things are. ‘Marriage is Order and Stability, the mark of a
59 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

Healthy society.’ (See The Book of Shhh, ‘Fundamentals of Society,’ p.

114)” (p. 10). Lena’s aunt, who raised her after her mother died, “has
always talked about marriage with words straight out of The Book of
Shhh, words like duty, responsibility, perseverance” (p. 13). Parenting
must be performed “normally, dutifully, and responsibly” (p. 7). Though
they admit that sometimes, “in the absence of deliria nervosa, some
people find parenting distasteful,” Lena notes that “cases of full-blown
detachment—where a mother or father is unable to bond with his or her
children …, and winds up drowning them or sitting on their windpipes or
beating them to death when they cry—are few” (p. 7).
In Oliver’s dystopia, Church, State, and Science have fused into
one fundamentalist institution and religious, literary, philosophical, and
scientific texts have been rewritten to support the Government’s
regulations. In the book of Genesis, for example, God is recast as a
passionless ruler and children learn about God’s order together with
atoms and probabilities (284). Adam and Eve, eternal partners, “were
untouched by illness, pain, or desire. They did not dream. They did not
ask questions” (p. 234). Indeed, in this version, the devil

stole into the Garden of Eden. He carried with him the disease—
amor deliria nervosa—in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered
into a magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as
blood. –From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the
Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University. (p.
22)

Literature is also reimagined: Romeo and Juliet has become a cautionary

tale about the dangers of love and is “required reading in every freshman-
year health class” (30). The Government also has a list of State-approved
texts that exclude particular kinds of music, art, and writing.
When Lena meets Alex, an Invalid who works underground in the
city to subvert the Government’s policies, she is instantly drawn to him.
The story of forbidden teenage romance becomes complex in a society
where desire has been eradicated and love itself is a disease. But when
Lena begins to believe Alex and suspect that the cure might actually be a
means to control the population, she starts to question everything she has
been taught. She eventually understands that her world is a totalitarian
dystopia and manages to resist the procedure and escape to the Wilds, to
be with Alex and to search for her mother, who has apparently survived.
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 60

So, though this novel ends with Lena’s physical escape from her city, she
will continue to deal with the emotional scars of her upbringing. 6
The world of Delirium, therefore, posits a totalitarian rejection of
free will in the guise of a solution to the problems that emotions bring.
Before the procedure, children are trained to distrust emotions and fear
the consequences of love; after it, citizens are essentially turned into
obedient and unquestioning zombies who support the laws that permit
stability and peace. The central conflict of the novel, however, is
existential and epistemological rather than political. As Hana, Lena’s best
friend, tells her before they head off to be assessed for their procedure:
“You can’t really be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes” (p. 21). In
a world where emotions have been eradicated, acknowledging the
existence of love and experiencing it makes the individual unique and
powerful. The Invalids’ choice not to submit to the procedure, their
embrace of emotions, allows them to possess a knowledge denied to the
cured. They are regarded as dangerous because they threaten the stability
obtained through the removal of emotions. Their power lies, on the one
hand, in their personal agency, obtained by being able to make choices
about what they desire and, on the other, in their perception of the
Government’s strategy for political control. Emotions thus become the
key for political mobilization for the Invalids and, for Lena, a way to
work through the versions of her story she has been fed.
The Giver and Delirium share important elements, generically and
in the context of a discussion about the bildungsroman, political power,
and emotions in YA fiction. First, as bildungsromane, they locate their
protagonists’ personal development within a political context. That is, the
maturity they achieve transcends individual self-awareness as it involves
political insight into systems of corruption that they are compelled to
challenge which, eventually, leads them to abandon their homes.
Intellectual and psychological growth for Jonas and Lena requires them
to, in a sense, unlearn the lessons they have been previously taught.
Having been raised in societies that stifle independent thought and deep
emotional bonds, their coming-of-age process involves challenging the
utopias gone wrong. So Jonas’ received memory of “choice and
unregulated experience” (Hinz, 2002, p. 262) and his decision to give
historical and cultural memory back to his community become a
subversive act. Similarly, Lena’s rejection of the cure and her
abandonment of her city in order to join the Invalids marks her as one of

6
The book is the first of a trilogy: the second and third volumes are Pandemonium
(2012) and Requiem (2013).
61 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

them. The plots of the novels focus on their personal itineraries of self-
awareness, as they are transformed from innocent children who
wholeheartedly support the status quo to teenagers willing to risk their
lives to change it. These texts, therefore, intervene in critical discussions
of YA novels by articulating the bildung as a political, rather than merely
personal, attainment of maturity.
Second, both protagonists have to engage the reality and power of
emotions as their path to this new political maturity. In both, freedoms
taken for granted have been surrendered for “safety,” “security,” and “the
common good” as emotions have been replaced by duty and
responsibility. So for freedom from the perceived conflicts resulting from
emotions, the societies have given up individuality and freedom of
choice: of profession, of marriage partners, or even of how many children
will be part of their family. Admitting emotions becomes a way to access
vital forms of knowledge, which leads them to political action. The
fictional epistemological frame in these texts consists of regulations and
traditions: people do not actually have to learn for themselves, as even
what appears to be sites of learning (both protagonists go to school) are
actually sites of indoctrination disguised as security. Passivity becomes an
ideal as citizens are encouraged to appreciate the life they have and fear
anything that would disrupt the society. As Levy notes, “Utopias are
static, virtually by definition. Having worked so hard to achieve a society
in which there are no serious problems, the citizens of utopia want things
to stay pretty much the way they are. Change essentially becomes the
enemy” (p. 53). For Jonas and Lena, the experience of forbidden
emotions becomes the catalyst for change, but one that their societies—
invested in creating peaceful worlds—might not actually welcome.
Totalitarian adhesion to the created reality becomes, in these novels, the
place of the dystopia.
By deciding to remember and embrace love, the novels’
protagonists enact critical forms of social change in their worlds.
Emotions, then, are shown to have revolutionary possibilities as they
undermine the pre-accorded paradigms of political stability. By positing
emotions, particularly love, as the antithesis of safety and happiness,
these YA dystopias warn of the dangers of rhetorical manipulation and
ideological rule. Turning to Ahmed’s (2004a, 2004b) frame for reading
the use of emotions as a site for social change, we can locate the dystopic
elements in these texts within the structuring of the relationship between
the personal and the social/political. Harnessing emotions, the
 NARRATIVE WORKS 4(2) 62

protagonists are enabled to effect change: first, within themselves and,

later, for their worlds.

References

Ahmed, S. (2004a). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(279), 117-139.

Ahmed, S. (2004b). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge.
Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid’s tale. Toronto, Canada: McClelland and Stewart.
Bradford, C., Mallan, K., Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (Eds.). (2008). New world
orders in contemporary children’s literature: Utopian transformations.
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Collins, S. (2009). Catching fire. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Collins, S. (2010). Mockingjay. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York, NY: Scholastic.
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Lowry, L. (1993). The giver. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.
McCafferty, M. (2011). Bumped. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
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(Original work published 1921)

Rocío G. Davis, PhD, is Professor of English at the University of Navarra. Her

research interests include Asian North American writing, academic
autobiography, life writing and history, and children’s literature. She has
published Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family
Memoirs (University of Hawaii Press, 2011), Begin Here: Reading Asian North
American Autobiographies of Childhood (University of Hawaii Press, 2007),
63 DAVIS: WRITING THE ERASURE OF EMOTIONS

and Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short

Story Cycles (TSAR, 2001). She has co‐edited eight volumes of criticism,
including Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Art, Media, and Music:
Performing Migration (with Dorothea Fischer‐Hornung and Johanna Kardux,
2010), Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, Culture (with
Jaume Aurell and Ana Beatriz Delgado, LIT Verlag, 2007), and Literary
Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing (with Sue‐Im Lee, Temple
University Press, 2006), among others.