Context

Context  

CONTEXT

The novel “The Chrysalids” by author John Wyndham was first published in 1955, a mere ten years after the end of World War II. Wyndham actually served in the war as a censor with the British Ministry of Information and then as a cipher in the Royal Corps of Signals. He participated in the Normandy landings but not on D-Day. World War II would ultimately end with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; the first time these bombs were use against a civilian population. The unimaginable destruction of those cities and their populations were unprecedented in human history, the effects of which are still being felt to this very day. Wyndham would have noted the awful accounts coming from people who experienced the “bomb” and it would become a primary source of inspiration on the writings of this groundbreaking novel.    

In “The Chrysalids” we encounter a post-apocalyptic world and in particular a society known as “Waknuk”, which is recovering from a great disaster in its past known as “Tribulation” (most likely a nuclear war but this is never directly mentioned). Waknuk’s setting is described as a type of pre-industrial revolution society which relied on subsistence farming, tight knit communities and beasts of burden as the major mode of transportation. It does appear that Wyndham is alluding to the fallout experienced after WW II in Europe and the dropping of those nuclear bombs in Japan in 1945. Wyndham would have witnessed directly and indirectly some of the modern cities of Europe such as London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and many others reduced to rubble after the war. The connection can be made between the recovery efforts of those great cities which lost their modern capabilities for some years and that of Waknuk’s rustic setting after “Tribulation”.

World War II also heavily inspired the major theme of “otherness” in the novel that is experienced by the “deviants or mutants” and subsequently by our protagonist David Strorm. Wyndham’s generation was the first to become aware of the horrors of that terrible war. At the end of WWII, allied forces had liberated dozens of concentration camps set up by the Nazis around Europe (mainly in Poland). They would have noted the deliberate and coordinated efforts utilized by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish race in those concentration camps. In the book the “Fringes” seem to be a representation of ghettoes or concentration camps since the “mutants” were banished there in order to suffer and die.

During the 1920’s to mid 1940’s German chancellor Adolf Hitler and his cohorts had used religious text and writings such as Hitler’s own autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf”, as means of propaganda in an effort to popularise the supposed inferiority of the Jews and to create animosity towards them throughout Europe. The image of the “perfect man” was idealized as “blue eyed, blond hair” men and women. Jews in Nazi Germany were deemed as an inferior race by the Nazis and their physical features were seen as an abomination and even their blood was referred to as impure

In “The Chrysalids” we encounter the book “Nicholson's Repentances” which is used by the folks of Waknuk to identify and separate their superiority from the inferiority of the mutants. Quotes from this book are used as guidelines to identify the perfect human from the deviants. When David encounters Sophie and is made aware of her mutation (her sixth toe), he is asked to keep it secret since this could result in her family’s banishment or death. Countless stories existed during WWII of persons who either concealed their own family history or helped hide Jewish people from persecution, capture and death from the Nazis, of which Wyndham would be aware of. It is interesting to note that David and the other telepaths would become the persecuted ones later in the book and is eventually saved by the people of “Sealand”. This is a clear reference to New Zealand which was not affected greatly during WWII and which Wyndham chose to represent as an advanced society which ironically viewed themselves as superior humans to those of Waknuk.