White Tiger Orchids Symbol Analysis

The white orchids that Tally encounters on her journey to the Smoke symbolize the overbearing, conformist culture in which Tally lives. The rangers Tonk and Jenks share that in the Rusty era, someone began to cultivate the then-rare plant to sell, not realizing that this would turn the orchids into invasive weeds that crowd out everything else—including the trees that house hummingbirds, which spread the orchids’ seeds and thereby enable the flowers to reproduce. These invasive orchids, the rangers explains, create a monoculture, or an ecosystem in which one species has pushed out everything else—and in which everything will die as a result. This, Tally realizes, is a small-scale representation of her own society: while her culture may look shiny and beautiful from the outside, it’s also doing its best to do exactly what the orchids are doing by forcing people to undergo pretty surgeries and thereby stamp out any possibility of diversity in thought or looks. This, she knows, which will eventually lead to the society’s downfall. When Tally learns about the brain lesions that transform uglies into pretties—artificially happy, pliant, unthinking people—this monoculture begins to look increasingly sinister, and makes diversity look more and more like it’s something worth fighting for.