Perfection and Purity Theme Analysis

In The Adoration of Jenna Fox, perfection and purity are opposing ideals—but the novel suggests that both ideals are ultimately harmful. Teenage protagonist Jenna Fox has always felt that her mother Claire and her biotech-pioneer father Matthew want her to be perfect. The pressure this feeling puts on Jenna leads her to ignore her own desires and interests in favor of pleasing her parents. For example, Jenna dances ballet because her mother is deeply invested in Jenna becoming a ballerina—even though Jenna herself prefers other forms of dance and feels she’s too tall for ballet anyway. After Jenna gets into a near-fatal car accident, her biotech-pioneer father uses his signature invention, Bio Gel, to rebuild Jenna’s body. Additionally, her parents decide to upload the high-school curriculum into Jenna’s cyborg brain to compensate for her missing school and to make her two inches shorter for improved post-accident “mechanics.” When Jenna realizes what her parents have done to her, she is horrified, feeling that her parents’ desire for perfection has led them to treat her like a commodity rather than a human being. Thus, the novel suggests that placing too much emphasis on perfection leads not to loving relationships, but to unfulfilling relationships and even objectification.

In the novel’s biotech-saturated world, the ideal of purity opposes the ideal of perfection. Whereas people like Jenna’s parents use technology to make their daughter more perfect, people like Jenna’s grandmother Lily want to keep humanity and nature “pure” and thus view biotechnological interventions into human life with deep suspicion. For much of the novel, Lily even doubts whether post-accident Jenna is really her granddaughter because so much of Jenna’s body, including her brain, is biotechnological rather than “original.” Like Jenna’s parents’ desire for perfection, Lily’s desire for human purity harms her relationship with Jenna. Thus, the novel suggests that neither perfection nor purity is ultimately a beneficial ideal—both are too extreme, leading to the dehumanization of “imperfect” or “impure” people.