Love among Ruins. The Subversive Potential of Love in the Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Fiction

Love’s labor is an overwhelmingly present theme in the dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, notably in the best-selling novels or blockbuster movies aimed at an YA audience, yet it is one of the least studied. Acknowledging this ubiquity of the love theme, the present paper seeks to explore possible views that might shed light on the reasons for such a cultural preference, both with the content creators and the public. One of the obvious perspectives, which is emphasized by Thomas Horan in his study published in 2018, Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction, is that love goes together with the growing awareness of moral collapse in dystopian societies, and with a regeneration of the moral and social sense of responsibility. Particularly in classical dystopian texts such as Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Boye’s Kallocain or Orwell’s 1984, subversiveness derives from awakening and rejecting propaganda, which derives in turn from love. The same plot pairing can be noted in recent dystopias, including film texts, as briefly explored in Equilibrium, The Matrix, Oblivion, Mortal Engines or The Hunger Games, and particularly so in YA dystopian novels and movies. Nonetheless, far from being the red thread of a grand narrative explaining the current growing appetency for dystopian and end-of-the-world stories, the love and revolt pair does offer other explanatory paths. Love/Eros is a natural companion in the plot of almost every human story, so it is not surprising to see it as such in dystopias as well. But we need to question the obvious answers. What we can suspect, with good reason, is that in dystopian fiction’s case it is also a culture industry’s recipe for character identification, softening the impact of rough descriptions of totalitarian or catastrophic contexts, but mostly raising hope and creating an eventual feel good mood. That is, it can be seen as a way to induce in the audience the awareness that as bad as the current times or society may seem, they are far less so than the fictionalized dystopian landscapes. Although several interpretation keys can be easily discerned from the analysis of the love theme’s presence in dystopian fiction, they can be wrapped-up in a twofold explanation of its function, keeping in mind, though, the obvious peril of oversimplification. On one hand, love seems to be a natural companion to anagnorisis, moral regeneration and subversiveness in dystopian and totalitarian times. On the other hand, back in the publishers’ and movies’ world, it pragmatically makes digestible a virulent critique of the existing society and establishment (in critical dystopias), and at the same time, love sells. The insertion of the love theme supports the marketable and profitable segments of the entertainment dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction.