Hello!
Today I’d like to introduce you Lena Haloway –
the main character of the novel. You’ve already read about her in my posts but
now I want you to know her better and could imagine who she is.
Lena was named after Mary Magdalena, who,
according to Lena's Bible, "was nearly killed from love…but was the very
first cured". Some people say that our name can influence our destiny. Interesting,
will it right for Lena’s destiny?
Lena is not proud of her physical appearance. She describes herself neither ugly nor pretty. Her eyes are not green or brown,
but a muddle. She is not thin, but she is not fat, either. As she says
everything is in-between. “The only thing you could definitely say about me is
this: I’m short.” We can conclude that Lena sees herself as an average and
unremarkable person. “No guy in his right mind
would ever choose me when there are people like Hana in
the world: It would be like settling for a stale cookie when what you really
want is a big bowl of ice cream, whipped cream and cherries and
chocolate sprinkles included”. All say about Lena’s uncertainty.
She doesn’t look like other girls who are
interested in makeup, clothes. She doesn’t care about it. Instead of that, she
takes to running and even was a co-captain of the cross-country team for two
years. Still, Lena with her best-friend Hana try to run together as much as
they can. She spends her free time not only running but taking photos (“I’m
interested in photography because I like the way it captures and preserves a
single moment of time”). Like most young people she enjoys hanging out
with her friends, but like most elder sisters she often babysits the younger
members of her family.
Unfortunately, Lena doesn’t have happy
home backgrounds. Lena’s father died when she was just less than a year old and
her mother committed suicide when she was six. In the childhood she had a very
close relationship with her mother and her sister, but that was before her
mother died and her sister was cured. From time to time, she remembers some
pleasant moments from her childhood. For example, dance parties. “My mother
called them “sock jams,” because we would roll up the carpets in the living
room and put on our thickest socks, and slip and slide along the
wooden hallways… We laughed so hard I always went to bed with a stomachache”.
Her mother was different from others because she was sensitive, she was not
afraid of showing her feelings to her daughters although in their society it
was forbidden.
Now Lena is 17 (but she will be 18 in a
few months’ time) and she just has graduated school. She lives with her aunt Carol, uncle William and her cousins
Grace and Jenny. She changed her surname Haloway into Tiddle after mother’s
death (“At least the Tiddles are a real family. The Haloways are nothing but a
memory”). No doubt, Lena is grateful to Carol. “I’ve never spoken back to her,
have always tried to be as patient and obedient and good as possible—have
always tried to be as invisible as possible, a nice girl who helps with the
dishes and the little kids and does her homework and listens and keeps her head
down. I know that I owe Carol for taking Rachel and me in after my mother died.”
She understands that Carol saved her and her sister Rachel. If Carol hadn’t
taken them, they would have been wasting away in one of the orphanages,
uneducated, unnoticed. “No foster parent will adopt a child whose past has been
tainted by the disease.”
As a result of growing up in
this restrictive world, Lena is afraid of anything that deviates from the norm. She's obsessed with safety,
believing that "The definition of happiness is security". Because
this is what her government has taught her to believe. Freedom? Choice?Her deep-seated fears make Lena value none of these things. All she thinks she
wants is security, at any expense to her freedoms. It
is not submissiveness but obedience. She is obedient citizen of her country. We
can’t blame her for it. I sympathize Lena. Why? I like the way of her thinking
(she often finds such successful and in the same time funny or serious
comparisons that she makes me laugh or be sad), her constant hesitation and
good-nature. She is a girl with secrets and I keep on getting to know her…
With love,
Kate
