The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Theme Analysis

For uglies in Uglyville, having their operation to become pretty and moving to New Pretty Town is the agreed-upon definition of growing up. This trajectory also follows the broader arc of civilization in Uglies: after a horrifying manmade disaster, the few survivors of the Rusties (the civilization on Earth prior to Tally’s society) built the cities and developed the society that Tally inhabits several hundred hears later—and her society is one that, in her opinion, doesn’t abuse nature like the Rusties once did. However, as Tally moves into the natural world herself through her journey to the Smoke, she learns things about the Rusties—and her own society—that muddy her belief in her society’s superiority, especially when it comes to what it means to grow up. By drawing out clear parallels and comparisons between Tally’s civilization, the Rusties’ civilization, and the untamed natural world, Uglies is able to show that growing up doesn’t just mean undergoing surgery and moving to a new part of town. Rather, growing up entails expanding one’s horizons to learn about the wider world and other cultures, as well as accepting that civilization may not hold all the answers.

Tally’s teachers portray the Rusties in a consistently negative light—she mentions at several points that her teachers never missed an opportunity to denigrate their predecessors. Tally’s society sees the Rusties (a society based on mid-2000s America) as wildly unintelligent, greedy, and ugly. It’s considered horrific that the Rusties killed trees and animals until a fiery disaster stopped this destruction by burning most of the Rusties and their cities. The Rusties’ world was also one in which racism and discrimination based on people’s looks was common, and as far as young people in the novel’s present are concerned, the Rusties knew they were headed for destruction and did nothing to try to save themselves. Tally’s society, meanwhile, seeks to fix these perceived flaws, most notably by carrying out the pretty surgeries so that discrimination based on looks simply doesn’t exist. However, this isn’t the only way they seek to distance themselves from the Rusties. Rather than use wood or animal products, everything people eat is soy-based, and all technology and things that run on electricity are solar-powered. Everything discarded is recycled immediately, and people are better able to make use of space by building vertically via “hoverstruts,” or magnetically-powered poles that thrust buildings high into the air. Furthermore, people seldom venture into the natural world—it is, after all, not meant for humans. Why, Tally asks, would anyone want to spend time in nature (save for a few childhood camping trips) where they have to work so hard to survive, when instead they can have all their needs met in the cities? At first, the answer seems obvious to Tally: no one would.

However, Tally eventually begins to rethink her answer, especially when she sees the difference between David, who was raised entirely in the Smoke (the secret settlement of uglies who don’t want to become pretty), and other uglies from the city like Tally. As Tally begins to lean into and enjoy the hard work necessary to live in the Smoke, she realizes that she has purpose for the first time in her life. As a worker, she’s part of a larger effort to make life better for everyone—whereas pretties don’t have to do anything but party. Eventually, life as a pretty begins to seem small and meaningless, especially once Tally also learns about the personality-altering brain lesions that come with the pretty operation. Becoming pretty, she starts to understand, means moving into a lifelong childish state of dependence in which one never fully comes of age.

The natural world itself also gives Tally lots to think about in terms of how she thinks about being pretty and adult. Tally has grown up believing that in order to be an adult, she must undergo the pretty operation and change how she looks—but the natural world begins to push back on this idea. The environment doesn’t need an operation to be beautiful; it just is. As this understanding takes hold, Tally begins to apply this idea to herself and gradually comes to believe in the Smoke’s mission: to give uglies the choice of whether to undergo the operation or not, and to teach people to focus on who they naturally are, rather than on who their city wants them to be.

While the natural world gives Tally a place in which to grow and think, possibly more important to her own coming of age are the things she learns about the Rusties and how they met their downfall. David and his mother, Maddy, explain that the Rusties all died because their society was too dependent on oil, and a new bacteria infected all their oil and caused it to explode. While this clearly speaks to the Rusties’ dangerous dependence on oil (as well as their love of flammable building materials), Tally also learns that the Rusties used wind and solar energy—they may have made some bad choices, but they weren’t entirely bad people and even made some good choices. In learning this, Tally is forced to confront that her current society may be making different mistakes than the Rusties did, but they’re not flawless either. They may run on solar power, for instance, but they still alter the brains of their young people without consent to make them more pliant and unquestioning. Through this, Tally begins to view her current society as an adult version of the Rusties, the Rusties as an adult version of the pre-Rusties (presumably, Indigenous peoples), and the natural world as a fountain of undeveloped, beautiful potential that the novel suggests is akin to that of young people. Maturity and coming of age, the novel shows, happen as individuals or societies make choices about who they want to be, based on what they see of the present and learn of the past—and some of those choices will, inevitably, be mistakes.