‘Uglies’ is a science fiction, fantasy, adventure book written by Scott Westerfeld. Scott Westerfeld’s inspiration to writing Uglies was because his friend whose dentist asked him to consider getting cosmetic surgery. Uglies is set in a distant future where the technology is far more advanced. Uglies is a dystopian society where the world got wiped out by a horrible disaster and fell into ruins as the years went by. In Uglies a whole new civilization is created, and a law which the people in ‘Uglies’ have the option to make themselves beautiful when they turn sixteen. ‘Uglies’ introduces a civilization where people are judged and divided based on their appearance. The inspiration of a dystopian society was because Scott Westerfeld read the …show more content…
‘Tripods’ series by John Christopher as a child. The novel tells the story of ‘Tally Youngblood’ who is soon to have an operation to turn her beautiful. The world of Uglies is a society that is so obsessed with their appearance that they have a law to divide the different people from the society’s standard of ‘beautiful’, they created and named towns and cities based on the looks of people.
For example, ‘Uglyville’ is a place where the supposedly ‘ugly’ people lived, however, the society’s standard of beautiful, rich and superior to all the towns in Uglies is ‘New Pretty Town’ where the ‘pretty’ people lived. A quote from the book “I used to think that too. But when Peris and I would go into town, we’d see a lot of them and we realized that the pretties do look different. They look like themselves. It’s just a lot more subtle because they’re not all freaks.” What the quote meant is that the people who undergone surgery to make themselves look beautiful changed, and living in New Pretty Town showed that they adapted to the community’s fashion and became more superficial. Another quote “Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.” The meaning of the quote is that everyone is not unique in any way if they all look the same. Addition to this is another quote that is happening in our world right now, ”Everyone judged everyone else based on their appearance. People who were taller got better jobs, and people even voted for politicians just because they weren’t quite as ugly as everybody else.” The transformation of turning into a ‘pretty’ happens when you are sixteen and then goes …show more content…
onto three stages depending on age: new, middle and late pretty. In Uglies there is a place called the ‘Rusty Ruins’ which is a city in our world, it is an example that our world got wiped out by a horrible disaster. There is one character from Uglies that survived the disaster his name is ‘David’, David lives in ‘The Smoke’ which is a city hidden in the Rusty Ruins outside Uglyville and New Pretty Town. Uglies is an example of a dystopian society is because the laws have changed, it became controlling and forceful, “You’re all brainwashed into believing you’re ugly.” The quote depicts that when you are born you are automatically an ugly. The society has become more superficial, “You don’t believe all that crap do you, that there is only one way to look, and everyone's programmed to agree on it?” This means that everyone is programmed to look pretty when they turn sixteen. Tally goes to The Smoke looking for Shay to bring her to New Pretty Town so she and Tally can get the operation to make themselves look pretty. The technology in Uglies is more advanced than the current technology we have now.
For example, hoverboards, hovercars, interface ring, hologram, crash bracelets, smart gates and smart bedroom are all in Uglies. In the beginning of the book Tally says ‘goodnight’ to the room and the room replies ‘Sweet dreams’. For Tally to sneak into New Pretty Town she had to trick the smart gate by not wearing her interface ring. There was a moment in Uglies where Tally sneaked into New Pretty Town and got caught and police hovercars started to search for her, so she was in a hurry to go back to Uglyville, then she met Shay who also sneaked in and they escaped on hoverboards. There was a game that Tally and Shay was playing it is called ‘imagine your pretty face’, the game was a simulation of what your face would look like when you get the operation. Shay didn’t like the game because she didn’t want to be called ugly “making ourselves feel ugly is not fun.” Furthermore, Shay modifies Tally’s hoverboard so they could go to the Rusty Ruins and explore. Shay showed her a roller coaster which was broken and Tally ended falling but her crash bracelets caught her fall. The hoverboards use magnetic levitation to hover on metal, and have built in fans if there are no metal around. In addition, the crash bracelets also have metal inside in case anyone falls off their
hoverboard. The novel Uglies written by Scott Westerfeld that have many themes but the themes that I included in this essay are the rejection of utopian society, technology, and appearance. I picked these themes because I think that these three are the main themes of Uglies. First, appearance is an important theme of Uglies is because the society of Uglies is obsessed with their appearance. Furthermore, the rejection of society is important in Uglies is because, in order to create the perfect world, the society controlled the people. Finally, the technology is an important theme is because Uglies is set in a distant future where technology is smarter. As a result, Uglies introduced an interesting society that is a treat to dystopian society fans.
Mary Hoge had gone into labor Sunday 23rd of July 1972 giving birth to her fifth child, Robert Hoge. When Robert Hoge was born, his own mother didn’t want him. Robert’s mother Mary thought he was too ugly, that he was, in appearance, a monstrous baby. Robert was born with a tumor the size of a tennis ball right in the middle of his face and with short twisted legs. Robert was born in Australia, where he would have to undergo numerous operations that carried very high risk in order to try and live a “normal” life.
In the article “Beating Anorexia and Ganing Feminism,” Marni Grossman shares her experiance of how she overcame her struggle with anorexia through understanding the feminist movement. Marni objectafies the ways in which society’s expectations and ideas of what it means to have “beauty” is having and negitaive impact. I had a very similar experiance to Marni, in fact the first time I hated my apperance was in the seventh grade. I have olive skin and bold brows, features which i was often complamented on, yet hated. Shawn and Lee argue that “there is no fixed idea of beauty”, suggesting how social ideals from society differs depending on the culture (183). I remember A male student was bullying all the females in the class by Inscribing Gender
In this story the main character, Tally, changed a lot. First of all, she was so set on becoming a pretty, she new she was an Ugly and she wanted to change that. “She put her fingers up to her face, felt the wide nose and thin lips, the too-high forehead and tangled mass of frizzy hair” (p. 8). This quote shows that Tally was very aware that she did not fit it with the pretties, she was very ready to change they way she looked to fit in. During the course of the story Tally wanted to stay ugly. She totally changed her perspective on the way she looked. I think was also one of the biggest turning points in the story.
"Skin blemishes made it impossible for me to really enjoy myself. I was always worrying about the way I looked" (Brumberg, p. 87). Woman all around the world share the same problem, they feel unhappy and self-conscious with the appearance of their bodies. In The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, she successfully illustrates the way adolescents begin to change focus from inner to outer beauty in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Through use of personal diaries and historical research, Brumberg shows her readers the physical differences between girls then and now. Brumberg talks about an array of topics in her book – periods, acne, dieting, piercing, virginity, and sexuality. From their roots in the 1800’s through the Victorian era and into modern society the reader gets a glimpse of the way young women evaluate their bodies and turn them into body projects, and is still to this day sweeping the nation more than ever.
In the Uglies, being a pretty is the one thing everyone can’t wait to be. If you’re not a pretty, you’re pretty much thought of as useless until you turn 16 and get to have the long awaited surgery that transforms your face into something completely new and better. It is nearly impossible for Uglies to not want to look pretty. Even if one was to hate another, they would still want to look and be like them if they had big eyes or full lips. The text says, “There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid's; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain” (Westerfeld 19). In other words, Tally is saying that it is part of their biology to want to be pretty. There is almost no freedom in Tally’s world and the only way to be accepted is to undergo the surgery and look like everyone else. The author is showing today's generation that this will be the future if teenagers keep idolizing and doing the same things as celebrities. Teenagers see someone they idolize with big lips and go get lip injections or see someone with long eyelashes and get eyelash extensions instead of just embracing how they
Uglies by Scott Westerfield is a young adult dystopian novel that deals with geopolitics, social and economic totalitarianism, and the spatial analysis of the dynamic of futuristic cities controlled by such a government. In the book, everyone receives dramatic surgery at the age of sixteen that makes them super-humanly beautiful, turning them into Pretties. This procedure was put into place to create peace amongst men by making everyone look the same and has no biological advantages, therefore they are equals. The cities in which the population live are a self-sustainable and controlled by a totalitarian world government that decides where people live, how they work, and how they will look. The government took the shape of the Pretty Committee,
In this society everyone is obsessed with beauty. And the Uglies are the people between the ages of 12 and 16 they live in a remote community far from the beautiful people. In this community the Uglies anxiously wait for their 16th birthday. At the age of 16 they go through a mandatory plastic surgery in order to live up to society’s standards. After they go through plastic surgery they will be known as pretties, and they will also live with all of the other gorgeous people.
Susie stated “film, print, and photo, magazine, newspaper, TV – magnifies the object. It is hard to escape. It enters us, and then out interest in that object becomes part of who we are, entwined with our sense of self and community, an aspect of our identity as crucial as church iconography was several centuries ago”(Orbach). She focused on the fact that we are heavily influenced by the mass media to the point where we no longer have our own voice or beliefs on a certain topic. For example, the Western beauty, long before the media had anything to do with this, each person had their own definition of beauty and everyone accepts everyone else for whom they are. Nowadays, words such as pretty, ugly, skinny, or fat can be a life-changing weapon that changes people‘s life to both the negative and positive
What forms Our Identity is individualization, no one is a carbon-copy of one another and there are many things that makes each person unique whether that be their ethnic background, personality, religious beliefs which can range from Non-religious, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Etc; In the book Uglies by Scott Westerfeld the book is set three hundred years into the future, with the government giving surgical operations which provides every citizen with the “Pretty” operation which makes everyone meet the standard of societal beauty.
To begin, a mechanism of discriminatory and violent systems is appearance. Appearance is the way that someone or something looks, meaning not everyone looks or acts the same by performance. In Roxane Gay’s novel, she points out that she wants acceptance for her body shape, and yet wanting to change it. Although she tried
Marilyn is told many times by people close to her that undergoing the transformation will make her beautiful and powerful, whereas if she doesn’t she will be unattractive and unappealing. “But afterwards, you'll be beautiful.” (Number 12 Looks Just Like You). Lana mentions to Marilyn many times that the transformation was the best decision she ever made and she was very ugly before going through the process, despite Marilyn thinking she was beautiful even before the process. Marilyn’s good friend, Valerie, also tries to convince her to undergo the transformation. She brings up Marilyn’s family and her own, she also mentions how painless and easy the process is. The high praise put onto the transformation process cause people in this society to be brainwashed into believe anyone who does not undergo the transformation is ugly and foolish. Not wanting to be labeled as such, many people, including Marilyn and her father, decide to undergo the transformation against their heart’s desires. Although transformation improves physical appearance and allows humans to live longer, it deprives people of basic life experiences that are necessary to enjoy it. If you have forever youth, you would not cherish your youthful years as much as if it had a limit. If everyone looked perfect and extraordinary then no one would be beautiful, instead
Everyone dreams of being “perfect”, but what they don’t know is that they are perfect. One just has to see within themselves. Everyone is uniquely and secretly beautiful, but that gets taken away because it is not what society wants. What society wants is for women’s self-esteem to be broken so that they can be morphed into a product of someone else's idea of perfect. In “Barbie Doll” Piercy argues that the pressures put on women by society affect their self-esteem. No one needs to change who they are for anyone. If anyone wants to change, they should change for themselves! Being you is all that really matters. The key to beauty is confidence. Something that everyone should keep in mind is that, don’t let someone change who you are, to become what they need; otherwise you don’t need them in your
Scott Westerfeld’s dystopian series, Uglies, is based in the future Seattle area, where people are placed into pigeon holes based on looks and actions. In this world, Tally sets out to rid the city of the cruel categories that the citizens are placed in, and let everybody be whoever they want to be. A theme that this book suggests is that people in today’s society are expected to look or act a certain way, when we should be defying stereotypes set by the masses.
Beauty is dangerous, especially when you lack it. In the book "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, we witness the effects that beauty brings. Specifically the collapse of Pecola Breedlove, due to her belief that she did not hold beauty. The media in the 1940's as well as today imposes standards in which beauty is measured up to; but in reality beauty dwells within us all whether it's visible or not there's beauty in all; that beauty is unworthy if society brands you with the label of being ugly.
...e ability to achieve anything in life. Hopefully, readers would learn from this novel that beauty is not the most important aspect in life. Society today emphasizes the beauty of one's outer facade. The external appearance of a person is the first thing that is noticed. People should look for a person's inner beauty and love the person for the beauty inside. Beauty, a powerful aspect of life, can draw attention but at the same time it can hide things that one does not want disclosed. Beauty can be used in a variety of ways to affect one's status in culture, politics, and society. Beauty most certainly should not be used to excuse punishment for bad deeds. Beauty is associated with goodness, but that it is not always the case. This story describes how the external attractiveness of a person can influence people's behavior and can corrupt their inner beauty.