Continued from Part 1
Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours strives for a very different style of pariah in the figure of freida, an Eve on the verge of leaving the school which has groomed her since birth to be either a companion wife, a concubine or a chastity, women who live alone and instil the order of the totalitarian society. The narrative circles around freida in a first person perspective as she navigates her final year, but what consumes most of the text is the interrogations or compatibility seminars with the young males of the Euro-Zone. Through freida we learn that her status as pariah is created as the narrative reaches its conclusion. She achieves this eventual status through her sexual intercourse and declaration of love for the highest ranking male in the compatibility seminars: Darwin Goldsmith. The girl however is unsure of the love she offers to Darwin as he rejects her love and she questions whether she means what she says, or is she merely performing what is expected of her by society:
“ ‘Just choose me…’ I push the thoughts away. ‘I … I love you?’ My tone is questioning, asking him if this is the right thing to say”.
The text’s dystopian markers are evident in its narrative structure which includes a prior cataclysmic event seemingly caused by a combination of environmental collapse and rampant consumerism. As freida watches the nature channel in her dorm-room one day she imagines this catastrophic landscape where the capital landmarks from across the globe are:
“baking like clay in the blistering heat. Or maybe they’re swimming underneath the Great Ocean, only fishbones left to keep them company”.
Her vision revealing the environmental destruction that has occurred but while nature has become unstable the totalitarian order of the Euro-Zone patriarchal society operates to impose control over the female population. They enforce this control of the female by constructing them as consumable products, showing that hyper capitalist has resulted in the natural world disintegrating. The Eve’s are also threatened with being sent underground to be experimented on by the Engineer’s if they break the rules, reinforcing the male control. The two tier society based on gender is reinforced through language as we see the female’s names containing no capital letters degrading their status from human beings into object status:
“Years passed in the Zones and no female babies were born. Soon there was only a handful of the original women left, all past childbearing age, and the threat of extinction seemed far too certain. Genetic Engineers were forced to create women to ensure the survival of the human race…would have been foolish not to make necessary improvements in the new women, the eves”.
Darwin’s rejection of freida towards the narratives end undermines his cool image that the girls have fallen for, and much like his father, he judges freida as less then human by declaring that she would make a good concubine, not a companion. Darwin is reflective of the burgeoning male ego in its youth, his father, Judge Goldsmith appearance in the text foreshadowing what will become of the young man. As the tyrant father imposes his will over the boy, we see masculinity becoming as contrived as consumer femininity:
“ ‘What is this shit?’ Judge Goldsmith says, shoving him aside and wiping his hands on the lapels of Darwin’s suit. ‘Hair gel? You can be such a girl at times, Darwin.’ ”.
What we are witnessing prior to freida’s tragic incident in the Heaven Seventy room (a room artificially designed for romance by the school) with Darwin is a child incorporated into the social order. She does not try to break or operate outside of the school system, in fact she tries to be an exemplary of the schools ethos. We see her begin to fray and alter her outlook however once she has suffered humiliation in front of Darwin. This altering of her persona to pariah within the narrative may be due to her incident with Darwin but within her society her greater pariah status is actually not revealed until this moment with Darwin where she confesses to herself that she is actually in love with isabel:
“Why am I even saying this? I don’t love him. isabel took any love I might ever have been capable of. She sucked my heart dry of it”.
What freida represents for the reader then is the suppression of sexual freedom and a degradation of the female identity, her dystopia acting as a warning to what will become of society if hyper capitalist patriarchal society degenerate. The females of the text operate in a sub capitalist hierarchy system where their values, their worth, are organised into a numerical subjective list that the men decide upon. The girls however are cyborgs as depicted by Haraway. Their lives are defined by their relationship to technology. One of the first concerns of freida in the narrative is her inability to sleep to her programmed sleeping pattern on SleepSound:
“The chastities keep asking me why I can’t sleep. I am at the maximum permitted dosage of SleepSound, they say, eyes narrowed in suspicious concerns”.
The girls’ lives are plastered over social media websites and their health is controlled and recorded by computers:
“A shiver of satisfaction runs through me as the video-status uploads, as if this somehow proves that I’m real. I exist”.
O’Neill’s use of technology in her construction of these cyborg girls leans heavily on Haraway’s belief that the cyborg is an offspring of patriarchal capitalism. Unlike McCormack who tries to solve this conceptual problem, O’Neill text operates to explore and humanise the tragedy of these cyborgs under her speculative.
Harrowingly freida’s narrative concludes with her becoming stripped of her cyborg persona following the revelation of her actions with Darwin and being subjected to humiliation but becoming a chastity as punishment. In this role her access to the technology she once possessed is restricted and she becomes lost, confused, as her whole prior school training is unravelled, revealing its uselessness. Even her name is removed, as if the name freida is contaminated. Going by chastity-felicity she goes about her school, not even allowed to teach like other chastity’s, reciting the rules of her patriarchal society, reinforcing her guilt:
“As a chastity, I must be silent…As a chastity, I must be surrender”.
What O’Neill’s pariah figure forces the reader to experience is freida acceptance of what has become of her life as she does not attempt to escape nor fight her way out of her predicament which is found in most Young Adult Dystopia Fiction. O’Neill expressed that while radical this ending is a closer reflection of how individuals in society operate compared to a fantasied heroism:
“I set up certain rules within the world of the text and any other ending would have betrayed those rules. I also believe that dystopian fiction should act as a warning, as a parable for the reader”.
Once chastity-ruth reveals that it has been isabel who has kept freida from going underground following the former taking her own
life, the narratives true world redeemer is revealed.
While freida operates as our pariah figure by the narratives end it is actually her love, isabel, who is the world redeemer figure. isabel acts as the pariah for most of the book until it is revealed at the Eve’s end of school ceremony, where they are selected for occupation, that the truth is revealed. For isabel has acted out of character for most of the text as we are informed of how prior to the narratives beginning she was ranked as the most attractive girl by the males. Yet she eats as she pleases and dress’s how she chooses to for most of the text, the reason for her this: she has been selected by the Father, the tyrant of this society, as his new companion. We are informed by chastity-ruth that she has been sexually abused by this figure too prior to the narratives commencement. It is also isabel who attempted to cover up the events following Darwin and freida sexual actions in order to protect her from the chastities laws, which forbid women declaring love. Yet even when this has failed isabel ensures that her love will not be sent underground to be experimented on as punishment but instead become a chastity.
Her world redeemer status lies in her attempt to provide salvation for freida from the scorn of society after the latter’s incident with Darwin. Through her association with the Father, which allows her a greater freedom of autonomy then the other girls, isabel’s feminine love opposes the materialistic sexualisation of her society. This confrontation though is not presented to the reader opaquely but operates as the undercurrent of the text cumulating in the frustrated Judge Goldman and chastity-ruth accepting that, due to isabel’s persuasion of the Father, they cannot send freida underground. Both are representations of the law and social order of this dystopia yet, through isabel’s manoeuvring, she has halted them:
Because isabel- wonderful, darling, special isabel…She loved you…And with her love came protection. It was all so inappropriate. I could hardly bear to look at you, as with each passing year you continued to undermine the natural order of things with your existence.
Much like JJ in Notes from a Coma, isabel preaches a message of love, of acceptance. Sadly her message is only temporary and the protection she can give to freida, only a reprieve. The underground acts as the freida’s separation from her society. She is brought here, to this R and D laboratory in order to be experimented. All with the intention of improving the Eve’s, the female as product. This relationship between the female body and consumerism is compounded by the other faulty women who occupy the lab. Looked in containers, all silent behind glass, they look like figures to be bought in a toy shop, straight from the consumer shelves. In these labs we are also confronted with the Mad Scientist figure the Engineer, the creator of the Eve’s, their father figure:
“wearing the white cloak of the Engineers, a white mask covering his face. Thick furry eyebrows are knitted together over pale brown eyes”.
The Engineer has been hidden away below the surface working away where he is still attempting to build Flann O’Brien’s robotic woman. It is here where the reader is given the textual salvation figure of freida, as she becomes more machine then woman as they are confronted with the final warning of what will become of society if the rampant patriarchal consumerism is not corrected:
“You want to help me with my research, don’t you? Don’t you want to be of some use?”.
Man In The Attic 