The Chrysalids - Lit.

• Certificate of Normalcy


  Document given to a child who looks like a normal child
• Old People is the term used to describe the people who lived before Tribulation. Very little is known about them, but the Waknukian religion holds that Waknukians should model their lives after the Old People.
• New People is the term the Zealander woman uses for people who are able to think-together.
• Waknuk operates under a set of laws and beliefs that discriminates against anyone or anything that does not look "normal."
• Those who appear different in any way from the Image of God as prescribed by the Definition of Man are segregated from society and sterilized, so that they cannot produce more Deviations.
• The Chrysalids exposes the hypocrisy and ludicrousness of any society that kills its members in an attempt to be more pure and moral.
• The people who are the targets of this moralistic racism prove to be those with the highest moral standards, and the novel makes a clear statement about the impossibility of determining someone's character from their appearance.
• The Waknukians' doctrine is fueled by a fear of the unknown. Rather than explore the world, the Waknukians isolate themselves to an extreme extent—so much so that they will go to extraordinary lengths to keep out the rest of the world.
• The Zealanders show a greater willingness to travel and explore, but they exhibit supremacist and xenophobic (a fear of foreigners) tendencies as well.
• The Waknukians would classify Zealanders as Deviations, while Zealanders consider Waknukians to be an inferior race deserving of death because they lack the ability to telepathically think-together, demonstrates the highly arbitrary nature of racism.
• Wyndham wrote The Chrysalids in the 1950s, after the atrocities of World War II and in the midst of the Cold War, and the ideologies espoused by the Waknukians and the Zealanders are similar to those of real-world groups at that time.
• The Waknukian's insistence on racial purity is similar to that of the Nazis, while the decision to segregate Blasphemies into a specific area is reminiscent of both Nazi concentration camps and the racially-driven segregation occurring in the American South at the time.
• David and the others with the ability to think-together, however, are persecuted for their thoughts and beliefs—an oppression similar to that suffered by the Jews during the Holocaust.
• The beliefs of the Zealanders can be read as an allegory for Soviet ideologies. For example, their promotion of think-together and belief that history is a series of struggles in which one group overthrows another have strongly Marxist undertones.
• At the same time, within the context of the Cold War, one could also interpret the Zealanders as a stand-in for the United States, which was ready to bomb the Soviet Union in order to promote democratic ideals.
• The novel is a testament to the importance of thinking critically and independently and evaluating ones own beliefs and actions, rather than thoughtlessly conforming to the norm.
• David Strorm: '"There was only one true trail, and by following it we should, with God's help and in His own good time, regain all that had been lost. But so faint was the trail, so set with traps and deceits, that every step must be taken with caution, and it was too dangerous for a man to rely on his own judgment. Only the authorities, ecclesiastical and lay, were in a position to judge whether the next step was a rediscovery, and so, safe to take; or whether it deviated from the true re-ascent, and so was sinful."'
• David Strorm: '"Most of the numerous precepts, arguments, and examples in Ethics were condensed for us into this: the duty and purpose of man in this world is to fight unceasingly against the evils that Tribulation loosed upon it. Above all, he must see that the human form is kept true to the divine pattern in order that one day it may be permitted to regain the high place in which, as the image of God, it was set."'
• The Inspector: '"Well, every part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn't come within it, then it isn't human, and that means it doesn't have as soul. It is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is always some mistake. Only God produces perfection, so although deviations may look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something quite different."'
• Uncle Axel: '"But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that's the way it is; it's trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas."'
• Uncle Axel: '"But what's more worrying is that most of them…think that their type is the true pattern of the Old People, and anything different is a Deviation. That seems silly at first, but when you find more and more kinds just as convinced of it as we are ourselves—well you begin to wonder a bit. You start asking yourself: well, what real evidence have we got about the true image?"'
• Uncle Axel: '"Perhaps the Old People were the image: very well then, one of the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long distances. Now we can't do that—but you and Rosalind can. Just think that over, Davie. You two may be nearer to the image than we are."'
• Joseph Strorm: '"You have sinned, woman, search your heart, and you will know that you have sinned. Your sin has weakened our defenses, and the enemy has struck through you. You wear the cross on your dress to protect you, but you have not worn it always in your heart. You have not kept constant vigilance for impurity. So there has been a Deviation; and deviation, any deviation from the true image is blasphemy—no less. You have produced a defilement!"'
• Aunt Harriet: '"I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body….And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken."'
• Uncle Axel: '"A word…a rusted mirror, reflecting nothing. It'd do the preachers good to see it for themselves. They'd not understand, but they might begin to think. They might begin to ask themselves…Are we right? For it is clear, boy, that however wonderful the Old People were, they were not too wonderful to make mistakes—and nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, where they were wise and where they were mistaken."'
• Jacob: '"Of course they should be burnt like they used to be. But what happened? The sentimentalists in Rigo who never have to deal with them themselves said: 'Even though they aren't human, they look nearly human, therefore extermination looks like murder, or execution, and that troubles some people's minds.'"'
• Authorities in Waknuk find psychics


  Outraged that psychics have survived undetected for so long
• One piece of paper can deprive someone of their rights and declare them non-human
• Intolerance


  Willful ignorance of the complex realities of the world
• Intolerance takes many different forms but always boils down to the same thing: hatred for those who are different
• The Fringes Man: 'God doesn't have any last word. If He did, He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive.'
• Life


  A process of constant change, not something that can be fixed or made permanent
• Waknukians desire to maintain the status quo

  Willfully blind to the realities of life
• Woman from Zealand: 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they have nowhere more to go.'
• The woman from Zealand seems to be offering David another strict, deterministic model of the universe - the opposite and yet the equal of the one on which David was raised
• Woman from Zealand: 'Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do.'
• Change


  The essential quality of living, part of the inevitable cycle of evolution
• ed Sophie while he was playing at the edge of town. When he meets her, he is shocked to encounter a stranger, because he knows everyone in the town. Sophie and David play together until Sophie's shoe gets stuck between two rocks.
• So far David just seems like a normal, curious child, so as Wyndham reveals more details about his world we are surprised that David is somehow "unusual." Only once we learn what the town considers normal can we identify David as strange. At the time of meeting Sophie, David himself has not yet internalized these norms.
• When David tells Sophie that she'll have to take off her shoe to get free, Sophie becomes upset and adamantly tells David she has to keep her shoe on her foot, even though she is in a great deal of pain. Finally she agrees to remove it, but makes David promise to look away. He doesn't, and when he sees her foot, Sophie says that he "musn't ever tell," but he doesn't understand what she's talking about. David tells the reader that at the time he didn't notice that she had an extra toe.