79 pages • 2 hours read
Neal StephensonThe Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Culture, Technology, and Imperialism
An important part of the context of The Diamond Age is an ongoing debate about comparing cultures. One of the motivating questions of the novel and behind the actions of many characters is this: Are some cultures simply better than others? That’s a controversial question made even more so by the impact of new forms of imperialism on the various cultures and groups in the novel.
Stephenson incorporates many cultures in the novel. Some are rooted in history and geography, such as the Confucian culture of the Celestial Kingdom, built on the edge of old mainland China. Confucian ideology focuses on making sure that every level of society, from family to government, is ordered in such a way that people and groups are more likely to be virtuous and in harmony with each other. Peace, order, and respect for traditions are most conducive to virtue, so these are the central values of Confucianism as Stephenson represents it in the novel.
Dr. X, a Mandarin (high-ranking power) tasked with ordering the Celestial Kingdom, is forced to do so in a world that is both disrupted and ordered by nanotechnology. He is on the one hand the head of the Flea Circus, which gains most of its money from bootleg, black-market activities such as theft of intellectual property or straightforward theft and violence like that practiced by Harv and his gang. On the other hand, he thinks about the larger impact of the Feed, the abandonment of infant girls in the ravaged interior of China, and the task of educating these girls.
In the world of The Diamond Age, Dr. X’s focus on these larger societal questions save him from simply being a hypocrite (Finkle-McGraw serves the same function in his phyle). Dr. X is pragmatic, and his is a pragmatism honed by a culture that is thousands of years old. The age and endurance of the culture make it one of the hegemonic (dominant) forces in the world of the novel. Stephenson spends little time developing a more detailed picture of “Nipponese” (Japanese) culture, but powerful characters such as Finkle-McGraw and Miss Matheson identify it as one of the big three phyles/cultures in this world. Stephenson’s representation of the Celestial Kingdom implies that a culture capable of enduring for millennia with enough flexibility to respond to the challenges of the world is indeed better than many others.
The neo-Victorian phyle isn’t necessarily bound by geography or biological/racial affinity, making it a “synthetic” phyle or culture. Like the British Empire in its heyday, the neo-Victorian New Atlantis phyle comprises heritage English-language speakers or people who learn English to assimilate to the phyle. A New Atlantean might be from the former United States, London, or Shanghai, for example, but will most certainly be fluent in English.
Although the British Empire is long dead by the time of the events of this novel, the relations of power between New Atlantis and most of the other phyles represents relations of power that existed between Great Britain and colonies in its empire. Miss Matheson offers a theory that rationalizes these relations of power. She contends that humility, discipline, and reason make New Atlantis winners in the new world dominated by nanotechnology, and thus New Atlantis is “better” than the other phyles. Left unsaid is what impact old-school imperialism, which extracted centuries’ worth of wealth, people, and resources from colonies, has on the present dominance of New Atlantis, which is built on the ashes of that empire and the American hegemony that came after it.
Both Miss Matheson and Madame Ping call Nell’s attention to the practical implications of this dominance. Madame Ping explains that titillating Colonel Napier extracts money from the man, but more important, it allows her to create ractives that sell to people of other phyles who want some of what New Atlanteans have. Miss Matheson claims that schools like hers are also means of spreading around New Atlantean power or the appearance of it. All she needs to do is make tweaks “to allow for cultural differences” (313). Dress, art, education, style—all of it allows for what Miss Matheson calls “the propagation of Atlantan memes” (220). Madame Ping calls her monetizing of this dynamic a “magic trick” to attract clients (313), but it is one that New Atlantis performs as well. There is no need for New Atlantis to colonize geographic spaces when culture and technology allow it to circulate values and goods that shore up its power.
In some ways, The Diamond Age is about a contest between cultures or phyles, represented in the struggle over whether the Feed or the Seed will dominate. Dr. X explains as much in his exposition on yong and ti. The Feed, which is technology (yong, the appearance of the thing) that alienates ordinary people from work and the means of production, has ti (essence) that is profoundly Western/Atlantean. When a member of the Celestial Kingdom uses the Feed, they cannot help but absorb the ways of thinking and being of the creators of the Feed. The Seed, which grows where it is planted and doesn’t require an engagement with feeds built using New Atlantean/Western technology, connects people to their own cultures and means of production. Dr. X makes a moral argument—Hackworth and the neo-Victorians owe the Seed to the Celestial Kingdom to put an end to “centuries of chaos” resulting from Western imperialism and the technology that facilitated imperialism (383).
Nell, “the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword” (479) and her Mouse Army, presumably represents the happy synthesis of the Feed and the Seed, since Stephenson portrays her and her army as being capable of restoring order, reason, and harmony. It is telling that she interferes with the final Drummer rite needed to create the Seed. She rescues Miranda, the vessel for this creation, because creating the Seed will extinguish Miranda, whose value as a mother and individual Nell values above any good the Seed might do on a societal level. In this case, Nell values the individual over the good of society, a profoundly Western and anti-Confucian stance to take.
Stephenson closes the novel without exploring whether Nell and the Mouse Army can make a better world. The Drummers are “content to wait—for years—if necessary—for a woman who would take Miranda’s place” (418). The implication of this ending is that the struggle between values and cultures hasn’t ended, but that the Seed will inevitably win out.
Childhood and Coming of Age in The Diamond Age
The Diamond Age is a sprawling novel with many subplots and incomplete character arcs, but one theme that runs throughout the book is that of coming of age. The novel is a bildungsroman (a novel of development). Stephenson represents childhood as a series of traumas for children of her class because of their socioeconomic status, gender norms, and the presence or absence of parental figures. Coming of age is ultimately about figuring out how to survive these traumas and gain control over one’s own life.
Nell is the central character readers observe coming of age, and she does so alongside Harv in difficult circumstances that force her to function as an adult early on. When the novel opens, Nell seems to be about four or five, but much of the care she receives comes from Harv because Nell is the child of a “thete” named Tequila. She and her family survive through criminal activity, low-paying service work, and/or dependence on subsistence-level food, clothing, and housing that is the bounty of the Feed.
Nell and her family live in Enchantment, an ironically named neighborhood in the no-man’s-land of the Leased Territories, where air pollution and a lack of community policing make for unhealthy environs for a child. Nell spends much of her time indoors because going outside means becoming vulnerable to deadly mites or child traffickers. Harv’s arc—gang member, criminality, interactions with the criminal justice system, and early death due to a health condition that would be entirely treatable with more money—is the direct result of his socioeconomic status.
The dangers Nell and Harv face aren’t just the result of threats outside the home, however. Neglect and abuse are frequent in their home because parental figures are either absent or dangerous when they are around. Stephenson opens the novel with Bud, whose focus in life is acquiring weapons and scaling the ranks of what is essentially an organized crime mob. He identifies himself as a father only when he thinks it may help him survive incarceration or a death sentence.
In place of Bud, Nell and Harv contend with boyfriends who sexually abuse Nell and severely beat both children. Tequila is a biological mother, but one who wishes she had been able to afford to abort her pregnancies. She is either absent or an ineffectual buffer between her children and her abusive boyfriends. What Nell has in place of a mother is a quartet of plush toys who later come to life within the Primer. Stephenson presents the early childhoods of Nell and Harv as typical for thetes.
Nell’s childhood is also shaped by gender. Through her observation of Tequila, Nell learns that to be a girl or a woman is to be coerced by threats from people like Burt. Harv warns her about “pirates” who might snatch a little girl, but such pirates can also take the form of sexual abusers like Mark. Nell also encounters bullies like Kevin who assume she is an easy victim because she is a girl. Although the bulk of the narrative concerning childhood focuses on Nell, the origins of the Mouse Army show that it is not thete culture alone that disadvantages girls. Dr. X rescues countless girls left to die in interior China as a result of their parents’ poverty, open conflict that makes survival almost impossible, and a disregard for girls that Dr. X names as a part of Chinese culture. Girls like the members of the Mouse Army and Nell are at best seen as negligible and at worst as prey.
Nell goes through rites of passage as she survives the challenges of childhood. She learns the power and limits of the Primer when her plan to kill Burt fails. Her effort to hide herself and Harv in the greenspace works because she applies what she learned in the Primer to real life. One of the most important rites of passage occurs while she is in the care of Constable Moore. He helps her understand that she has been shaped by trauma by explicitly telling her this and explaining that telling safe adults like him is an important way of moving through that trauma. He also serves a cautionary tale when Nell witnesses firsthand what unprocessed trauma has done to him.
At Miss Matheson’s school, Nell learns that academic success is a game played in a rule-based setting designed to reinforce the values of adults and the dominant culture. In the Primer, she goes through adventures that help her learn about human nature, the unfairness of life, how to process the loss of beloved figures like Duck, and the need for strategic thinking.
Nell finally becomes the young woman she is meant to be when she escapes from the Fists. She experiences one last trauma when she is raped, a problematic trope that frequently appears in science fiction and fantasy narratives with female protagonists. She must apply all the lessons she has learned through previous rites of passage—judicious use of violence, trickery when confronted with more powerful opponents, and resilience in the face of violence—to escape. Her emergence as Queen Nell, head of new phyle made up of members of the Mouse Army, is the culmination of the efforts of many beloved figures who taught her life lessons that could not be learned in the pages of a book.
The Purpose of Education
The most significant turning point in Nell’s early life comes as a result of education. In fact, one of the fundamental questions Stephenson explores in the novel is the purpose of education. In The Diamond Age, education takes place in informal and formal settings, can be guided or self-directed, and varies according to one’s economic status, phyle, and gender. The conflicts in the novel are partly the result of distinctions in how characters see the purpose of education.
Stephenson makes clear right from the beginning that educational is a key theme with the full title of the work, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. A primer is a text meant to teach children fundamentals such as the alphabet. The title also directly references gender by specifying the audience for the Primer. The form of the title, two parts separated with a colon, is typical of Victorian works, but the two parts also indicates a connection between neo-Victorian culture, which reaches its peak during a Diamond Age fueled by nanotechnology, and what a young neo-Victorian lady should or can be.
The Primer, an expensive and complex piece of technology, is a project Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw commissions because he believes something has gone awry in the elite education provided to neo-Victorian children who will grow up to be the elites of the next generation. His own educational history primes him to have this belief. As a boy and young adult, he was so indifferent to formal education that he dropped out of school with mediocre grades, only to become one of a handful of people who changed society through his work with technology. John Percival Hackworth starts out as an English major and only later becomes a gifted artifex because he is a quirky and original thinker as a result of this education.
For both men, self-directed education becomes a means of moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Notably, none of the professional spaces where these men work includes girls and women, although Nell does mention the elaborate draping that neo-Victorian career women wear to hide their bodies. Beneficiaries of a system that advantages men, these men nevertheless want something different for the girls in their lives. Finkle-McGraw wants to teach his granddaughter, Elizabeth, a subversiveness that will make her an effective leader in her phyle. Hackworth, desperate to rise through the ranks to achieve status, believes the Primer will allow his daughter, Fiona, to rise where he cannot. In his case, he hopes the Primer will allow for social mobility, the ability to move up in a world in which class controls who and what one can be.
Like Hackworth, Harv is a thief, and his motivation for giving a girl a Primer isn’t even clear to him at first. He is Nell’s first teacher, explaining to her what the mediaglyphs are and how the matter compiler works. He warns her about traffickers in Enchantment and tries to help her navigate the violence in their home. These life skills are essential to the survival of a child of the thete class. Still, he is aware of his limitations as a child of this class (he cannot read text, for example), so the theft of the Primer is his way of giving Nell a fine thing that she would not otherwise have.
Formal education of children is mostly represented by Miss Matheson’s school. Miss Matheson is one of the few fully fleshed-out female characters, aside from Nell. Miss Matheson has no qualms about what neo-Victorian education, especially that provided to young women, is for. Its purpose is to propagate neo-Victorian values, which include conformity and reason. The young women in her charge learn enough self-defense and physical education to protect their sexual purity and to make their bodies and comportment conform to the phyle’s ideal of feminine beauty. History and religion, the part of the curriculum that Nell, Elizabeth, and Fiona most despise, is designed to inculcate discipline and respect for authority.
For all three young women, the Primer ends up being a counterforce to the formal and informal education they encounter. Elizabeth rejects the academic and pacifying education she receives at Miss Matheson’s to join CryptNet. The combination of her privilege, the subversiveness she learns in her adventures in the Primer, and her rejection of it as mere academic knowledge places her at cross-purposes with her grandfather. Finkle-McGraw concludes that education mediated by technology alone wasn’t enough to make Elizabeth a good neo-Victorian with just enough irreverence to be a creative thinker on behalf of her phyle. She lacked a consistent human presence on the other side of the Primer.
Fiona mostly fails to thrive or achieve in the formal education available to her. Like Elizabeth, she receives an education in the Primer that makes her unfit for the gender roles assigned to neo-Victorian women—wife and mother. Her engagement with her father, who connects with her through the Primer, make her assume one of the most subversive roles of all—the artist. When she takes up with Dramatis Personae, she places herself firmly outside of the respectability expected of young neo-Victorian women. She becomes subversive but not at all in the way Finkle-McGraw would have wanted.
Nell’s encounter with the Primer might be the outcome that is closest to what Finkle-McGraw hoped to achieve, but her original class position as a thete would likely have given him pause had he known about it. What Nell has that the other girls do not is education that supplements or even supplants what she learns in the Primer. Constable Moore’s discussion with her about what makes a person intelligent—ease with contradiction and the ability to apply what one learns—is the most important lesson she learns during a time when she is deeply engaged with the stories in the Primer. The consistent nurturing and presence of Miranda also give her emotional safety when no other adults can. Her ability to think ahead and navigate systems like the Three Graces is certainly the result of what she learns in the Primer, but she would not have survived her harrowing childhood, losing Harv, or her captivity with the Fists without the grit she learned in Enchantment as a child.
Stephenson also includes other scenes of education. One that the reader only glimpses is that provided to the Mouse Army. Hackworth, who suspects that engagement with the Primer that excludes human interaction via ractives will only teach the reader to be subversive, convinces Dr. X to accept Primers without those features. Dr. X hopes to provide mass education, mediated by technology, to girls of the Celestial Kingdom, an education they would not otherwise have because they are girls. By the end of the novel, Dr. X concludes that the project to educate the Mouse Army in Confucian ethics has failed. The Mouse Army is, as far as he is concerned, anarchic and heedless of duty to community and the Celestial Kingdom. The lack of a consistent human presence made the Primer an imperfect vessel for transmitting those values. The girls consult their Primers as they invade Shanghai and Pudong during the collapse.
Education as conceived by authority figures such as Finkle-McGraw, Miss Matheson, Hackworth, and Dr. X is supposed to ensure just enough subversiveness as well as applied and theoretical knowledge to help children become adults who contribute to their phyles. None of their educational projects achieves those aims, however, because young people in The Diamond Age put their education to unintended uses; their personal, human connections with others undercut education as a tool of conformity. This outcome serves as a critique both of the poverty of educational experiences provided to children and of the limitations of technology as a force for good.
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By Neal Stephenson
