Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Uglies, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conformity vs. Individuality
Beauty, Science, and Influence
The Natural World, History, and Growing Up
Friendship and Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
In Tally’s dorm room, she shows Shay some morphos on her wallscreen. Option two is sleek and catlike, and Tally agrees with Shay that it’s probably not legal. Tally’s next morpho is pretty standard. Shay says Tally looks generic in this version, but Tally points out that she looks like Cleopatra. Shay notes that she’s read Cleopatra wasn’t actually beautiful— she was just clever. Tally suggests that Cleopatra was probably a “classic pretty,” but that people had weird ideas about beauty back then and didn’t know about biology. Tally asks Shay to share some of her morphos and she is shocked when Shay says that she never made any. Everyone, even littlies, make morphos, but Shay says she’d rather go hoverboarding. She points out that the doctors do what they want anyway, so morphos are pointless.
There’s not a lot of evidence about what Cleopatra actually looked like, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Cleopatra was very smart and powerful, lending credence to Shay’s assessment of her. That Tally brushes this off by saying that people didn’t know about biology in Cleopatra’s day reflects Tally’s belief in her own society’s superiority. It also suggests that Tally doesn’t believe a person can become so powerful based on anything other than their appearance. In other words, Tally has fully bought into the system that says everyone must undergo pretty surgery to grow up and achieve happiness and success.
Themes
Finally, Shay agrees to make a morpho and lets the wallscreen scan her face. A second later, two faces appear on the screen: one looks wild and one looks like she’s daydreaming. The faces represent versions of Shay that are symmetrical, rather than asymmetrical like all uglies’ faces. Shay insists she’d rather have a face with different sides but agrees to go with the wild looking one. The software takes over and makes Shay’s eyes bigger, gives her bigger cheekbones, and defines her jaw. Tally whistles in approval, but Shay groans that she looks like every other pretty. Tally gives the morpho hair, tweaks the eyebrows, and then pulls Shay’s olive skin lighter, toward the average.
From Shay’s unenthusiastic reactions to the morphos, it’s clear that she’s uninterested in changing her physical appearance. Shay’s asides—that she’d rather have an asymmetrical face and that her morpho looks like all the other pretties—makes it even clearer that she’s not sold on becoming pretty. This situates Shay as an independent and freethinking individual— someone who’s far more interested in making her own way than she is in doing what she’s told.
Themes
Shay tells Tally to stop but Shay refuses to run the software herself. She says she wants to go hoverboarding and that she thinks her face is already “right.” Tally rolls her eyes and says it’s great for an ugly. With a scowl, Shay accuses Tally of not being able to stand her normal face and says that making themselves feel ugly isn’t fun. Tally groans—she doesn’t understand why Shay is so weird about the operation. She points out that when everyone was ugly, everyone judged people on their appearances and people killed each other over their skin color. Tally says that the operation is the only way to make people equal, but Shay suggests that they just make people smarter and asks if they can go hoverboarding. Tally agrees but asks Shay if she doesn’t think the morpho is beautiful. Shay says it’s just a committee’s idea of her.
Shay shows an impressive degree of maturity when she insists that the morpho software is designed to make uglies feel awful about themselves. Tally, however, doesn’t seem to grasp that she’s making herself feel worse by making morphos, which points to how fully she’s bought into her society’s messaging about beauty. When Shay comments that the morpho is a committee’s idea of her, it indicates that she desperately wants to make her own choices about how she looks and how she lives her life—unlike Tally, Shay sees the conformity of becoming pretty as a bad thing.
Themes
