52 pages • 1 hour read
Dhonielle ClaytonThe Marvellers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2022A 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
The Challenges of Integration
In The Marvellers, Clayton creates a magical world divided by intolerance and prejudice of one magical community against another, paralleling the history of racial injustice and discrimination against communities of color in the United States. Clayton’s analogy foregrounds the inevitable challenges of attempting to integrate a population into a prejudiced majority that derives its power from the oppression of the former. In the world of the novel, Marvellers banded together 300 years earlier to live in the sky, separating themselves from both the non-magical Fewels and the magical Conjurors, whose magic they deem inferior since it’s closely tied to the natural world and the Underworld. In discriminating against Conjurors, Marvellers established a prejudicial ideology that framed Conjurors as both worthy of suspicion and inferior to themselves.
Clayton parallels Ella’s experience as the first Conjuror student admitted to the Arcanum Institute of Marvelling with the historical example of Ruby Bridges—the first Black child to attend a formerly all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960. Ruby’s experience was captured in a Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With (1963), whose title evokes the challenges inherent in taking concrete steps toward social change. As Ella’s journey progresses, she experiences overt intolerance and hostility, as well as the efforts of those trying to build a bridge of understanding between two very different communities. The Headmarvellers are particularly concerned with presenting a harmonious image to the world. As Headmarveller Rivera remarks to Ella:
Throughout our history, many communities have struggled to acclimate to the Marvellian way. They each faced their unique set of challenges, but our global society has become more welcoming, more open over time. We hope you feel that way. We hope that the Arcanum represents the best of our community (203).
Ella walks a continuous tightrope at the Arcanum between the few who welcome her presence and the majority who treat her as an unwelcome, undesirable imposter. As the bullying and hostility continue, Ella’s own family becomes wary of allowing her to remain at the school. The conflict between Ella’s parents highlights the tension between whether to prioritize the integration of the Arcanum and its importance for the magical community or Ella’s personal well-being and safety. Ella’s mother in particular fears that exposure to the Marvellers will change Ella’s nature.
While the Headmarvellers emphasize both their strong desire to assimilate Ella into the Arcanum and their fear that the experiment will fail, only Masterji recognizes the dilemma this creates for Ella herself, pointing the problem out to his colleagues:
You say that we must honor the Marvellian way. To honor order and tradition. But what happens when most of it is rooted in prejudice? [...] We placed Ella Durand under a microscope. She had to be perfect, and even then, she was not accepted (380).
In highlighting the inherent tensions and challenges of Ella’s integration into the Arcanum and Marvellers’ culture, Clayton interrogates the root problems of inequality, prejudice, and injustice that make Ella’s integration so fraught.
The Inherent Injustice of Segregation
Clayton contextualizes The Challenges of Integration within the larger societal framework in which the former status quo of segregation reified the power and status of Marvellers. In this context, Clayton positions the former segregation of the Arcanum as a tool of oppression. Throughout the novel, Clayton employs the rhetoric and ideology of racism to emphasize the analogy between the Marvellers’ treatment of the Conjurors and the history of racial injustice in the United States. When Ella is accused of attacking Clare Lumen, Clare’s father, Jefferson, responds with hate speech and rhetoric that directly mirrors contemporary white supremacist ideology:
Make the Marvellian World Light Again! Our government has lost its way and forgotten its core values. Clean up the skies! Get rid of Conjuror influence and sympathizers. PUT MARVELLERS FIRST! Integration is not the answer! (273).
Jefferson exemplifies the pro-segregation views of the mainstream Marveller community who view integration as a threat to their safety and power.
Clayton contrasts the perspectives of her protagonist, Ella, with her antagonist, Gia, to highlight a spectrum of approaches to fighting The Inherent Injustice of Segregation. While Ella pushes back against injustice by attempting to assimilate into the Arcanum and prove the worth of all Conjurors via her own success within Marveller culture, Gia desires to burn the whole corrupt system to the ground. Gia comes from the shady side of the sky city of Betelmore. As a circus performer—a group traditionally viewed as transients who operate outside social norms—Gia’s status as an outsider escalates when she develops unusual Marveller abilities that result in an accidental death. The Marvellers’ unjust treatment of Gia catalyzes her deep desire for control—the ability to ensure that no one can ever oppress her or make her feel inferior for her differences ever again. Rather than trying to win her way back into the world that rejected her, Gia goes on a rampage of vengeance.
During their climactic confrontation, Clayton makes the connection between her protagonist and antagonist clear: Gia identifies with outsiders everywhere and frames her actions as a crusade against those who seek to elevate themselves at the expense of the downtrodden. She tells her daughter, Brigit,
With more than one marvel, I can harness all the light. I will be the most powerful Marveller in the world. No one will be able to take anything from me again. Not you, Brigit, not anything. I’d offer this up to others who have been made targets. Others who have had things stripped from them (364-65).
In aligning the experiences of Ella and Gia, Clayton nuances the relationship between protagonist and antagonist. While Ella dislikes Gia’s methods (particularly her imprisonment and abuse of Masterji), they both want radical change in the systems of power that govern their complex magical world.
Navigating Questions of Identity
As the first Conjuror student admitted to the formerly segregated Marveller Arcanum, Ella straddles two worlds throughout the novel, causing her to question who she is and where she truly belongs. Her father’s elevated position in the Underworld generates an expectation in her community that the Durand children will grow up to be central players in the Conjure hierarchy. Despite agreeing to let her attend the Arcanum, Ella’s mother worries that Ella’s exposure to Marvellers will change her in some fundamental way. While Ella desperately wants to fit in among the Marvellers, the overt hostility and bigotry she encounters from both students and faculty make her doubt her right to be there. For Ella, assimilation into the culture of the Arcanum is necessary for survival. Under constant scrutiny and prejudicial treatment, Ella fixates on identifying her Paragon and marvel, hoping that discovering them will finally allow her to be accepted. The character arc that Clayton establishes for Ella sees her evolve from believing that she needs to prove herself to those who look down on her to a place of embracing her uniqueness.
Clayton surrounds her protagonist with friends who each experience their own crisis of identity—common ground that forms the foundation for their friendships. Brigit, an orphan raised in the Fewel city of New York with no knowledge of her birth family, feels confused and resentful at being plucked out of her familiar environment and forced to learn magic skills. Even after Ella befriends her, Brigit remains intent on running away from the Arcanum. Jason—the youngest member of a large family who relates more easily to animals and magical creatures than to humans—actively conceals the secret of his family’s Conjuror blood to escape discrimination by passing as a Marveller (a situation analogous to historical and contemporary racial passing in the United States). Since Conjurors have traditionally not been allowed to attend the Arcanum, Jason and his siblings needed to suppress their heritage in order to be accepted.
Over the course of the novel, all three of the children must confront the aspect of their identity that troubles them most. Ultimately Ella’s epiphany in the novel’s conclusion applies to all three of them, asserting their right to embrace all of who they are and rejecting the entrenched ideology of the Arcanum that shuns difference: “[Ella] realized after everything she’d been through and everything Masterji Thakur had shown her…she already belonged here” (401).
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By Dhonielle Clayton
