Uglies

by

Scott Westerfeld

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Conformity vs. Individuality Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Conformity vs. Individuality Theme Icon
Beauty, Science, and Influence Theme Icon
The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Theme Icon
Friendship and Loyalty Theme Icon
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 Theme Icon

Uglies plunges the reader into a futuristic, seemingly utopian world in which one’s physical appearance at birth doesn’t matter—at age 16, all teens, who are known as “uglies,” undergo extensive plastic surgery that turns them into “pretties.” Fifteen-year-old Tally looks forward to her operation so that she can join her best friend, Peris, in New Pretty Town across the river and enjoy the endless party that is life as a “new pretty.” This is what Tally has spent her whole life waiting for: a chance to finally be gorgeous and happy, just like all of the other pretties. However, when Tally’s new friend Shay runs away to a mysterious place called the Smoke so that she doesn’t have to receive the operation, Tally (under threat of not being allowed to become pretty herself) grudgingly agrees to cooperate with a government agency known as Special Circumstances to retrieve Shay. As Tally’s journey unfolds, she’s forced to confront the fact that becoming a pretty means conforming to societal standards she didn’t even know existed and that, upon closer inspection, make conforming look significantly less attractive. Through this realization, Uglies makes the case that although at first glance conformity may appear ideal while individuality appears risky and undesirable, in actuality the opposite is true: conforming deprives a person of who they truly are, something the novel portrays as irreparably damaging and even dangerous.

Tally’s government goes to great lengths to make it seem as though conforming is truly the only option. All young people are raised to look forward to their 16th birthday and their pretty surgery, which many see as the first day of their real lives—being ugly is considered a purgatory of sorts, and not truly living. Everyone is taught to desire life as a pretty, in which one is happy, parties nonstop, and is treated kindly and reverently by everyone else. In Tally’s society, then, conforming to the required pretty surgery is the only accepted path to achieving a good life. There are, as far as Tally knows, no other options—while there are rumors that some people are refused their operations, these stories are unproven and possibly just hearsay. Conformity, then, is equated with happiness. This idea gains traction in Tally’s world in part because of the way uglies—that is, the only people who are told that they’re not cute or pretty—are treated. Uglies arrive in Uglyville at age 12, after they graduate from being an adorable littlie (a child). Uglies are the only group in Tally’s world that cannot move freely between the different parts of the greater city—the only time they can legally leave Uglyville is if they go to their parents’ house in the suburbs. Out in public, pretties visibly recoil away from uglies. Uglies like Tally are essentially told that their individuality is horrific, and are the ones who are most heavily policed—in comparison, conformity looks like paradise.

At first, Tally is horrified and bewildered when her friend Shay says that she’s serious about not wanting to undergo the pretty operation. However, when Tally agrees to cooperate with Special Circumstances and follows Shay to the Smoke a few weeks after Shay disappears, it only takes a few days before Tally starts to suspect that there’s something to be said for individuality. Though part of this has to do with living in a culture that outright rejects the idea of “pretty” on principle (as well as her budding romance with David, the young leader of the group), Tally begins to learn how truly dangerous conformity can be when David takes Tally to visit his parents, Maddy and Az, former cosmetic surgeons from Tally’s city. As doctors and researchers (Maddy was part of the “Pretty Committee,” the global group that conducts research and decides what constitutes pretty each year), Maddy and Az got an intimate look at how pretty surgery works. Disturbingly, Maddy discovered that after surgery, most pretties had lesions on their brain that she suspects makes pretties pliant and happy—but individuals who worked in professions where they had to think on their feet and make decisions, such as surgeons and the government agents in Special Circumstances, didn’t have them. What Maddy and Az essentially discovered, and what begins to truly change Tally’s mind about becoming pretty, is that all pretties seem happy for a reason—but that reason isn’t because they finally fit in. Rather, the government has altered their brains to make them happy and deprive them of all independent thought. This major revelation brings about all manner of other revelations regarding independence for Tally. Though as an ugly she was one of the more independent kids who liked doing “tricks” (sneaking out and playing pranks) and thought that habit made her edgy and cool, Maddy notes that many uglies who grow up to work in thinking professions and lose their lesions are the ones who started life as tricksters. She believes it’s possible that the fact that uglies can get away with tricks at all in their overbearing, surveillance-heavy society is because tricks are a test—tricks may be framed as acting out and misbehaving, but those uglies who do tricks might be doing exactly what’s expected of them.

With this, Uglies presents a world in which even the little bit of individuality uglies can achieve may not actually be individuality at all, but part of a greater system of surveillance, control, and brainwashed conformity. Given this, Tally comes to the novel’s most important conclusion: while conforming to the status quo may look like happiness, it’s actually something quite sinister that deprives people of the ability to understand who they are and the culture they inhabit. Genuine individuality, meanwhile, not only gives people control over their lives, but gives them the tools to ask important questions—and, hopefully, to change their culture for the better.

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Conformity vs. Individuality Quotes in Uglies

Below you will find the important quotes in Uglies related to the theme of Conformity vs. Individuality.
Best Friends Forever Quotes

There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid’s; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Peris
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Facing the Future Quotes

“Yeah, and people killed each other over stuff like having different skin color.” Tally shook her head. No matter how many times they repeated it at school, she’d never really quite believed that one. “So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Rapids Quotes

“I didn’t know these things weighed so much.”

“Yeah, this is what a board weighs when it’s not hovering. Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Related Symbols: Hoverboards
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
Fight Quotes

“You can’t change it by wishing, or by telling yourself that you’re pretty. That’s why they invented the operation.”

“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“It’s not programming, it’s just a natural reaction. And more important than that, it’s fair.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

“Look, Skinny, I’m with you,” Tally said sharply. “Doing tricks is great! Okay? Breaking the rules is fun! But eventually you’ve got to do something besides being a clever little ugly.”

“Like being a vapid, boring pretty?”

“No, like being an adult. Did you ever think that when you’re pretty you might not need to play tricks and mess things up? Maybe just being ugly is why uglies always fight and pick on one another, because they aren’t happy with who they are. Well, I want to be happy, and looking like a real person is the first step.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Spagbol Quotes

Mountains rose up on her right, tall enough that snow capped their tops even in the early autumn chill. Tally had always thought of the city as huge, a whole world in itself, but the scale of everything out here was so much grander. And so beautiful. She could see why people used to live out in nature, even if there weren’t any party towers or mansions. Or even dorms.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood
Related Symbols: Hoverboards
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
Bug Eyes Quotes

Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Tonk
Related Symbols: White Tiger Orchids
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Lies Quotes

The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Shay, David
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:
Heartthrob Quotes

“Maybe they’re just worried because we’re kids. You know?”

“That’s the problem with the cities, Tally. Everyone’s a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty. Just like they say in school: Big-eyed means vulnerable. Well, like you once told me, you have to grow up sometime.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Page Number: 216
Explanation and Analysis:
Bravery Quotes

Then Tally trembled inside, realizing what the feeling was. It was the same warmth she’d felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she’d ever gotten from an ugly before. Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn’t make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, David, Peris
Page Number: 236-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Pretty Minds Quotes

Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they’d never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she’d seen him... “Becoming pretty doesn’t just change the way you look,” she said.

“No,” David said. “It changes the way you think.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), David (speaker), Maddy, Peris, Az
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Burning Bridges Quotes

For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly, Peris had made fun of them—but he hadn’t waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?

Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, David, Maddy, Peris, Az
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:
The Rabbit Pen Quotes

She scanned the captives, looking for Shay and David. The familiar faces in the crowd were haggard, dirty, crumpled by shock and defeat, but Tally realized that she no longer thought of them as ugly. It was the cold expressions of the Specials, beautiful though they were, that seemed horrific to her now.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Shay, David
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Familiar Sights Quotes

David nodded. “It’s kind of creepy how well preserved it is. Of all the ruins I’ve seen, it looks the most recent.”

“They sprayed it with something to keep it up for school trips.” And that was her city in a nutshell, Tally realized. Nothing left to itself. Everything turned into a bribe, a warning, or a lesson.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), David (speaker)
Page Number: 334
Explanation and Analysis: