Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, offers love as the one thing that truly brings about community. Both Camazotz and Jonas’s community are controlled environments where individuality is not allowed. In Jonas’s community, this is called Sameness; Camazotz is also a place of Sameness, as all differences have been eliminated. Both the protagonists in A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver, Meg and Jonas, come to realize that love is the one and only thing that can defeat conformity.
Both Camazotz and Jonas’s community are falsely portrayed as a kind of utopia where everything is perfect because it is the same. When IT is speaking through Charles Wallace, it tells Meg and Calvin that Camazotz is a “beautiful” and “enlightened planet” (132-33). Like Jonas’s community in The Giver, in Camazotz they have “conquered all illness, all deformity” and “let no one suffer” (133). IT brags that “[i]t is so much kinder simply to annihilate anyone who is ill... Rather than endure such discomfort they are simply put to sleep” (133). Calvin accurately sees through IT’s supposed utopia and says that “they’re murdered” (133). This same idea is seen in The Giver in release, which is basically euthanasia. Rather than have an imperfect society, IT and Jonas’s community believe that conformity is better than individuality.
The danger of individuality rests in the fact that individuality creates choice, which can cause problems. In Jonas’s community, people “might make wrong choices” and so choice has been eliminated (Lowry 98). This same thinking is applied on Camazotz, as IT explains that “we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems” (134). A possessed Charles explains to Meg, “Why do you think we have wars at home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live their own, separate, individual lives…Camazotz is ONE mind. It’s IT. And that’s why everybody’s so happy and efficient…Nobody ever suffers here. Nobody is ever unhappy” (135-36). Meg cleverly retorts, “But nobody’s ever happy either” (136). IT has taken away discontent but in the process, has also removed any capacity to be happy, or to truly feel anything. The people on Camazotz are not robots, but they are all possessed by IT and only feel what IT feels, which is not true feeling (107, 119-20). When Charles falls under the power of IT, he still looks like himself, but as Meg soon realizes, “That isn’t Charles! Charles is gone!” (126). In that moment, Charles loses his individuality and loses his capability to truly feel what normal Charles Wallace would feel. In the same way, in Jonas’s community, nobody can ever truly be happy because no one can “have feelings” without the memories (154- 57). Without memories, there is only Sameness. There may be danger in individuality, but Meg and Jonas both realize that it is wrong to remove people’s ability to choose and feel, as that removes a person’s ability to love.
Both Meg and Jonas realize that love is the only thing that can break through imposed conformity. Meg’s love for her darling baby brother is what finally breaks Charles Wallace out of IT’s hold (200). Jonas’s love for Gabriel is what spurs him to leave the community in order to save Gabriel from being released (Lowry 173). Love it what brings true community, connection, and relationship between individuals, not conformity.
Works Cited
L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1993.