Beauty, Science, and Influence Theme Analysis

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.

“You know,” Shay said, “I read that the real Cleopatra wasn’t even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was.”

“Yeah, right. And you’ve seen a picture of her?”

“They didn’t have cameras back then, Squint.”

“Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?”

“Because that’s what historians wrote at the time.”

Tally shrugged. “She was probably a classic pretty and they didn’t even know it. Back then, they had weird ideas about beauty. They didn’t know about biology.”

“Yeah, and people killed each other over stuff like having different skin color.” Tally shook her head. No matter how many times they repeated it at school, she’d never really quite believed that one. “So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”

“I didn’t know these things weighed so much.”

“Yeah, this is what a board weighs when it’s not hovering. Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.”

“You can’t change it by wishing, or by telling yourself that you’re pretty. That’s why they invented the operation.”

“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“It’s not programming, it’s just a natural reaction. And more important than that, it’s fair.”

“Look, Skinny, I’m with you,” Tally said sharply. “Doing tricks is great! Okay? Breaking the rules is fun! But eventually you’ve got to do something besides being a clever little ugly.”

“Like being a vapid, boring pretty?”

“No, like being an adult. Did you ever think that when you’re pretty you might not need to play tricks and mess things up? Maybe just being ugly is why uglies always fight and pick on one another, because they aren’t happy with who they are. Well, I want to be happy, and looking like a real person is the first step.”

The flying machine had been just like what Tally imagined when her teachers had described Rusty contraptions: a portable tornado crashing along, destroying everything in its path. [...]

But the Rusties had been gone a long time. Who would be stupid enough to rebuild their insane machines?

Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

“So this is what people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone stand to open their eyes?”

“Yeah. It’s scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it.”

“Maybe they’re just worried because we’re kids. You know?”

“That’s the problem with the cities, Tally. Everyone’s a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty. Just like they say in school: Big-eyed means vulnerable. Well, like you once told me, you have to grow up sometime.”

The physical beauty of the Smoke also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Then Tally trembled inside, realizing what the feeling was. It was the same warmth she’d felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she’d ever gotten from an ugly before. Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn’t make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.

Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they’d never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she’d seen him... “Becoming pretty doesn’t just change the way you look,” she said.

“No,” David said. “It changes the way you think.”

For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly, Peris had made fun of them—but he hadn’t waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?

Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.

“That’s not what’s important to me. What’s inside you matters a lot more.”

“But first you see my face. You react to symmetry, skin tone, the shape of my eyes. And you decide what’s inside me, based on all your reactions. You’re programmed to!”

“I’m not programmed. I didn’t grow up in a city.”

“It’s not just culture, it’s evolution!”

She scanned the captives, looking for Shay and David. The familiar faces in the crowd were haggard, dirty, crumpled by shock and defeat, but Tally realized that she no longer thought of them as ugly. It was the cold expressions of the Specials, beautiful though they were, that seemed horrific to her now.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. But that was all ugly stuff. Crazy love and jealousy and needing to rebel against the city. Every kid’s like that. But you grow up, you know?”

“You grew up because of an operation? Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”