Women In The Chrysalids

In most societies, the role of a woman is seen 30.as a vital piece to complete what a typical family has to have to be happy; of course, the definition of what a true family looks like has changed over many decades. These days the typical role of women does not really exist, there are few women who stick to the exact “guidelines” of a woman’s role, and women do not feel as if they have to dedicate their lives to a man to be happy. However, in The Chrysalids, a science fiction novel written by John Wyndham published in 1955, women are belittled and brainwashed into believing they are nothing without the protection of a man. In Waknuk - the main setting throughout the novel- everyone is a religious fanatic, technology is comparable

The true image of god is what god intended women and men to look like and anything else –according to the community of Waknuk- is a blasphemy, a mutant. “God created man in his own image. And god decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm, should be jointed in two places…” (Wyndham 10). This is the passage that the people of Waknuk lived by, if anybody did not meet that criteria you would be exiled and considered a creature that the Devil had created to try and deceive and infiltrate the lives of “the Norms”, that is what they call a deviation. The true image of God is not necessarily limited to humans, if a plant or animal is not the “norm” than it will be removed by means if destruction. For example, Joseph Strorm, a religious fanatic, was very bothered the by the sin of someone who was bringing in horses that were much too large for his taste. “God never made horses the size of these” (Wyndham 36). This is representative of what little things could be seen as such a big problem because of it might entail and how the people of Waknuk obsess over making sure their community is perfect in the sight of god. One day Joseph Strorm’s son, David Storm, was tying a knot and he said something sub-consciously that became much more important than what he intended it to be, what was meant to be a harmless sentence, turned into an overblown

Often David dreams of a city yet he cannot identify what it is he is seeing. " I would sometimes dream of city –which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was... even boats in the harbour; yet waking I had never seen the sea , or a boat." (Wyndham 10). This is evidence of how he is seeing things in his "dreams" that he has never seen in real life, which means that the technology that he is coming across in his dreams is not necessarily, what he was experiencing in his daily life. Since technology is very primitive in Waknuk and anything that even the slightest more technologically advanced than all else in Waknuk." There wasn’t another steam engine within a hundred miles... it was fascinating to watch big timbers moving up and down" (Wyndham 24). The fact that David considers the steam engine and how he said there was not another one for hundreds of miles shows that not even this technology is readily available to the people Waknuk. The height of technology in Waknuk early on in the Chrysalids, when David is talking about his dreams about a city “the traffic in the streets were strange, carts running with no horses to pull them” (Wyndham 1). The machine he is referring to is known as what today we call cars, and David spoke about horses that are supposed to pull the carts which shows that the height of transportation in Waknuk are