After reading The Chrysalids I decided to surf the web for some interpretations regarding the title's mischievous meaning... Here are some of the opinions I found out were the most structured and reliable. Btw, I am ZealanianResident03 so do not freak out about my comment you bloggers :) cheers!
Telepath94: Recently, I finished reading “The
Chrysalids by John Wyndham, and the title caught my attention. I wanted to know
why the autor put this name to his novel. I read a quote from W.J. Holt from
the 1965 House of Grant edition and he stated that the word chrysalid is a term
that refers to the state, which the larva passes before turning into a perfect
insect. When I read this, it clicked in my head the relationship between the title
and the book. I think that The Chrysalids refers to the people with mutations
specially the telepaths that in Waknuk, they are in a sheath and later become
“perfect” when they get to Zealand where they live in a perfect society and
reach a world not with fear and persecution, but with freedom and harmony.
SophieFanGirl: I agree with your interpretation
of the name of the book but I feel it goes beyond the literal meaning of a
chrysalid in which a larva becomes a perfect and beautiful butterfly. I mean,
at the end of the book, the civilized country doesn’t seem perfect, actually it
is a little disturbing since it uses people (women) mostly as objects for
breeding purposes and prefers killing other civilizations because they don’t
have the same values. I feel it is called The Chrysalids because the Waknuk
society can be seen as the society we are currently living with that doesn’t
allow people to grow, to change and to evolve.
ZealanianResident03: I feel that both of your
interpretations are quite precise, but definitely @SophieFanGirl's can be a lot
more controversial because of its depth. We see in Waknuk, a society without
hope for change, full of fundamentalist leaders and inhabitants that do not
seem to be in a metamorphic state, but somewhat in a stagnated state; one could
call a permanent larvae. Now, we can also consider that a chrysalid, like any
biological form, may secrete certain substances, sometimes considered waste. This
happens to be the axis by which this fantastic novel revolves: Waknuk telepaths
are these “substances” that do not fit in in their stagnated society; they are
people destined to transcend, and this is why they eventually escape from
Waknuk to the quest of David’s dreamland. The dreamland can thus be considered
to be the opposite biological form of a chrysalid, a fully developed biological
organism.
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