From the cocoon into a butterfly: Wyndham’s theocratic dystopia as a bildungsroman

Abstract

The Chrysalids (1955), previously titled Re-Birth in the U.S. edition, is set in a post-apocalyptic fictional country called Labrador and narrates the story of a small agricultural community striving to live for thousands of years after the world was devastated by a massive nuclear disaster. It is regarded as one of Wyndham’s science fiction masterpieces together with other novels written after 1940s. However, The Chrysalids has generally been regarded as a post-apocalyptic novel focusing on a speculative future where a new generation with telepathic abilities emerge. The severe criticism of a theocratic dystopia in the book has been neglected by most of the critics. The current paper aims to present the way religious dystopia is established in The Chrysalids by elaborating on how Wyndham uses narratives of Christian theology as a context in constructing the dystopian religious society in the novel. It further discusses how individuality is oppressed by religious authority in the hands of religious devices and presents the bildungsroman perspective of the story by depicting the spiritual metamorphosis David, the protagonist, undergoes in parallel with what the title of the novel allegorically signifies. In this regard, the study tries to figure out how Wyndham’s dystopian narrative include the characteristics of bildungsroman tradition.