I’ve been thinking that perhaps someone out there might want to read the essay I mentioned in the previous post. It’s no big deal, really, but I think it’s pretty good considering that I banged it out in about an hour yesterday afternoon. It’s a basic high school English type of thing, but that’s partly why I enjoyed writing it so much. It was exercise for a part of my brain that’s been slumped in a corner, staring at the wall and drooling for a long time now, and after a few preliminary stretches, I found that the workout felt very good.
Anyhow, for your reading pleasure and in the name of the on-going obsession with nostalgia that is Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is:
Conformity vs. Individuality and Personal Responsibility in L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
Imagine if you will a world where there is no war, no sickness, no inequality and no unhappiness. This is a world where everyone has an integral role to play and no one suffers from want or envy, where every meal is a banquet and everyone works together toward a common goal. Wouldn’t a world like this be paradise compared to our own messy, conflicted, shades-of-gray planet Earth? One might think so, but one would be wrong. For this world is the planet Camazotz, as described in one of my favorite childhood novels, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Camazotz has indeed achieved what one character describes as “consistent perfection,” but the price of this perfection is a totalitarian nightmare, and only the misfit who accepts personal responsibility for her actions can defeat the evil that threatens to engulf her family.
A Wrinkle in Time begins when teenaged Meg Murry, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin encounter three mysterious beings who offer them a chance to find the Murrys’ missing father. What the children don’t know is that Mr. Murry, a research scientist working on a highly advanced physics experiment, is no longer on the planet Earth. The children’s quest to rescue him will lead them to Camazotz, a planet very much like our own, except that it has lost its battle with an evil power known as The Black Thing. As a result, the population of this world has fallen into a state of absolute conformity. Meg and her companions first realize something is strange on this planet when they wander through a residential neighborhood and see children bouncing balls and skipping rope in perfect rhythm with each other. A dropped ball is an Aberration, something that provokes extreme fear in the parents of these strange Camazotzian children. Another character speaks of how a simple maintenance error could lead to “a danger of jammed minds,” something he is desperate to avoid.
When Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin encounter the Prime Coordinator, the apparent leader of Camazotz, he tries to put a positive spin on the sights they have seen by explaining that the population of his world enjoys “peace and utter rest. Freedom from all responsibility.” But the children soon learn the terrifying price of this peace is a complete loss of individuality. Even normal emotions such as love are an Aberration, as Meg learns when Charles Wallace’s mind is taken over by the powerful force that actually rules this planet, transforming the normally sweet-natured child into a cruel and distant “zombie.”
The message of A Wrinkle in Time is obvious: absolute conformity is a negative, evil force, no matter what benefits it may offer society as a whole. As a counterbalance to this evil, the book offers up the twin values of individuality and personal responsibility. During a conversation early in the book, Meg and the others learn that Earth is itself fighting The Black Thing, and that past “warriors” in this struggle have included Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, Buddha, and Rembrandt. These men were great artists, thinkers, and philosophers, but the one thing they had in common was that they possessed singular visions of the world, and those visions were often in contrast to the society around them. They were, above all else, individuals. The ultimate warrior-hero of A Wrinkle in Time is Meg, a girl who has always felt like a misfit. In her family of geniuses, she’s the only one who has done poorly in school. She is, by her own description “the snaggle-toothed, the myopic, the clumsy.” But she is a unique individual – the only character in the book who is not a great beauty, a great mind, or an athlete, not to mention the only female in the central trio of characters. She has a gift that is unique to her and that will allow her to retrieve her brother from the clutches of The Black Thing. It is the very fact that she is a misfit that makes her the hero of this story.
First, however, Meg must accept that it is her responsibility to rescue Charles Wallace. No one else can return to Camazotz and accomplish this mission, not even the three seemingly divine creatures that set her on this quest. On a planet where everyone is alike and no one is responsible for his or her actions, it is the individual acting according to her own free will that triumphs over evil.
When this novel was first published in 1962, the crushing conformity of Camazotz was most likely intended as a metaphor for the evils of Communism. Today, with Communism mostly gone from the world, a new force of conformity has risen in the form of mass media, corporate branding, and a dumbed-down consumer culture that encourages people not to think too much about the issues that really matter. This reality makes the values expressed by A Wrinkle in Time more important than ever before. I strongly believe that schools should encourage children to think for themselves, to question the world around them and form their own opinions, and to value their own unique attributes above the idea of what they “should be.” Conformity leads to stagnation, while innovation and progress depend on self-reliance, self-confidence and imagination, qualities that can only be fostered if we allow children to be themselves. However, individualism is not enough. Accepting responsibility for one’s actions is equally important, or else chaos reigns. In the end, it wasn’t enough that Meg was unique; she had to choose to take on the burden of her rescue mission before she could use her unique gift against her enemy. These are ideas that children should hear early, and often. Our very planet may depend on them as we struggle against the very real Black Things that threaten us.
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