Station Eleven Study Guide

Emily St. John Mandel was born in Comox, Canada, in 1979. She was raised in rural British Columbia on the tiny Denman Island, which she used as the basis for Delano Island in Station Eleven. Since the local schools were not very good, Mandel was homeschooled until the age of fifteen. At eighteen she left home to study dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, where she remained until her early twenties, when she decided to pursue something different and began writing professionally. Before Station Eleven, she wrote Last Night in Montreal (2009), The Singer’s Gun (2010), and The Lola Quartet (2012). Mandel has enjoyed critical success from Station Eleven, and she currently lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

While the novel does not include specific historical events as part of its plot, a number of events provide inspiration and resonance. The first is the spread of the bubonic plague (or Black Death) in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the 14th century, when about a quarter of the population perished. Bouts of the plague occasionally returned, and more than once closed theatres in Shakespeare’s England –which places Shakespeare’s plays, a great source of material for Mandel and her characters, in a distant yet similar context to the world devastated by the Georgia Flu. Other historical events of note are the 2009 “Swine Flu” pandemic, which generated tremendous fear and media coverage, as well as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, which occurred around the time of the novel’s publication. Such outbreaks could be said to contribute to the fear surrounding deadly viruses and diseases, while lending some credibility to the future Mandel describes. In other words, while the Georgia Flu is fictional, something like it occurring is far from impossible. It could be considered a worst-case scenario of the Swine Flu or Ebola pandemics.

Station Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King Lear. Thematically, Mandel borrows from the tragedy, and she also stages two production of the play within her novel, one before and one after the collapse. The novel also includes references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and at the other end of the highbrow/lowbrow artistic spectrum, to the television show Star Trek: Voyager, which provides the Symphony with its motto: “survival is insufficient.” In terms of influences on Mandel, it is easy to look to other post-apocalyptic novels, specifically The Road by Cormick McCarthy, which Mandel has said paved the way for works with that subject matter to be seen as valuable literature instead of lesser fiction. However, Mandel pushes against the usual format of the genre, setting her novel many years after the collapse of civilization instead of focusing on the chaos of the fall itself.