The Host

This article refers to the 2008 science fiction novel by Stephenie Meyer. For other uses, see The Host (disambiguation).

Summary

The Host takes place in a world reminiscent of the scenario in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It follows the emotional journey of Wanderer, a member of an altruistic alien society known on Earth as souls, as she experiences the emotions and complexities of human relationships, and discovers what it means to be human through her human host body’s original owner.

Plot

At the opening of the novel, Earth has been all but completely colonized by a society of peaceful beings called souls. The souls have taken over human bodies and are living human lives, but have solved many problems—such as war, poverty, and disease—that were a major part of life in human times. The story begins with the insertion of the soul called Wanderer into a host body that was captured by the peacekeeping individuals in the alien society, who are called Seekers.

Upon her awakening into the new body, Wanderer finds that she has been given the task of using the memories of her host to help a Seeker discover pockets of human resistance. At first, Wanderer is complicit, though she dislikes the Seeker. But Melanie Stryder, her host body’s owner, refuses to disappear, and at first resists Wanderer’s intrusion upon her memories. Eventually, however, the memories begin to come out in dreams, and Wanderer, torn between loving the people Melanie shows her through these dreams and feeling weak at her inability to make Melanie fade away, decides to have herself removed from the troublesome host body.

On the journey to visit her Healer, however, Wanderer has a change of heart. She and Melanie, united in their distaste for the Seeker and their desire to protect the people in the memories they share, strike out into the desert to find Melanie’s brother, Jamie, and her lover, Jared Howe, using clues left to Melanie by her eccentric Uncle Jeb.

After collapsing in the desert, the two are rescued by Uncle Jeb, who brings them to his hiding place, full of human survivors, and protects them from the wrath of the other humans. Jared and Jamie are there as well. Believing that telling them the truth about Melanie will provoke them to violence against her, Wanderer conceals the truth from the humans, especially Jared, who is cruel to her, isolating her from the rest of the camp, insisting on giving her only the bare essentials of survival, and even physically harming her.

Eventually, however, Jared leaves with several of those who have shown the most hostility towards Wanderer, and Uncle Jeb insists on beginning to assimilate her into the small society. Slowly, she begins to work beside the humans until most of them are no longer openly hostile toward her, with a few exceptions. She becomes friends with Jamie, who seems not to blame her for his sister’s capture, and acquires a protector in the form of Ian O’Shea, one of the humans who tried to kill her when she first arrived. She even begins to tell the humans stories of her lives on other planets, and answer their questions.

Upon Jared’s return, however, the precarious truce is upset and Wanderer—now known as Wanda by many of the humans—finds herself once again surrounded by hostile faces. Slowly, however, she gains the trust of the humans one by one through her compassionate and selfless actions, including saving the life of Ian’s brother, Kyle O’Shea, after he attempts to ambush her and throw her into an underground river. Jared begins to believe, as Jamie and Jeb already do, that Melanie might still be alive in Wanda’s mind. Finally, she is accepted by almost everyone as a member of the community, going on raids to bring back much-needed supplies such as food and medication, always doing whatever she can to help the humans that she has come to see as her family.

Everything is changed when the Seeker from Wanda’s life with the souls kills a member of the small community and is captured. After going to see the Seeker, Wanda decides that she cannot allow the humans to kill her, and goes to the community’s doctor for help. In exchange for the secret of how to remove souls from human minds without damaging either one, she demands that Doc promise both to send the Seeker to a new life on another planet, and to remove her from Melanie’s brain and bury her body with those of her deceased friends, Walter and Wes.

Though Doc agrees, Ian—who has fallen in love with Wanda—is furious when he finds out, and tries to convince Wanda to change her mind. He then attempts to make Jared, Jeb, and Doc intervene to save her. Wanda, however, explains that she doesn’t want to be a “parasite” anymore, and argues that Melanie deserves her life. She also admits that while she loves Ian, Melanie’s body longs for Jared, keeping her in constant emotional turmoil. Though Ian doesn’t budge in his determination to keep her alive, she sneaks off while he is asleep to go to Doc and be extracted from Melanie’s mind.

After being sedating, Wanda is confused to find herself waking up in Doc’s “hospital” with the memories of another soul running through her head. Melanie, Jamie, and Ian explain to her that they were unwilling to let her go, and that they—along with Jared—found a host body with no lingering human consciousness in it for her to live in. Though at first upset, Wanda accepts this turn of events and continues to live among her human family, all of which have ceased open hostility toward her since she was extracted from Melanie’s body. She also begins a relationship with Ian. The novel ends when, while on a raid, Wanda and a group of her companions run into another group of rogue humans who also have a soul with them. The two souls express the sentiment that Earth is the strangest of the worlds they have seen, but that they are hopeful for the future.

Conception

According to an MTV interview with Larry Carroll, Meyer came up with the idea for The Host in an attempt to stave off boredom on a drive from Phoenix to Salt Lake City. “I tend to tell myself stories in those situations,” she said, “and I just caught myself in the middle of this idea about two people sharing a body, both in love with the same guy.”

Reactions

Though The Host debuted to a majority of positive reviews, some readers are still concerned about the way she portrays gender and relationships. On SF Site, reviewer Nicki Gerlach explained her complaint:

Meyer writes relatively passive women, which is unfortunate, considering that teen girls make up the vast majority of her fan base. Wanderer is stronger than Bella, but she still doesn't have a whole lot of agency, and there's a lingering whiff of "whatever the men think is best" that rankles.

Among the complaints made about the novel is the glorification of male characters even when those characters prove to be abusive, controlling, or just generally undeserving.

Themes

Humanity

The main theme of the novel deals with what it means to be human. Alternate definitions of humanity are presented through the changing perspective of Wanderer as she interacts with the members of Uncle Jeb’s hideaway, as well as the observations of Melanie and Uncle Jeb as they interact with her. From Wanderer’s initial perspective—that of the souls—humans are a dangerous race to whom brutality is more natural than mercy or compassion. Wanderer views humans as volatile and unpredictable, and is afraid to act or speak around them for much of the story. Her view of human relationships is conflicted: on the one hand, the love she develops for Jamie and Jared through Melanie’s memories is so strong that she wonders whether there must be an afterlife where such bonds can continue after death. On the other hand, she observes that the best she can hope for in her friendship with Uncle Jeb is that it will bother him if he has to kill her. Interestingly, though she views souls as ultimately loving and good, she does not equate the strength of that love and goodness with the strength of Melanie’s loves.

As Wanderer lives among the humans, however, she begins to see a broad scope in their individual potentials for good and evil. This is shown to her poignantly in the person of Walter, a member of the group who is dying of what appears to be cancer. He is kind to Wanda despite her being a soul, accepting her and then asking for her in his final hours. As she sits by his deathbed, she observes the gentleness with which Doc cares for Walter, and how he truly feels his patient’s pain. Through these events, as well as through the kindness and protection of Ian, she begins to believe that humans have a great potential for compassion, even as she is horrified by their proclivity for violence.

One of the key moments in Wanda’s understanding of humans occurs after she discovers the dismembered bodies of two souls—one of them a child—in Doc’s hospital area. Horrified by the scene, she flees into the darkness of the caves and begins a silent vigil of mourning and fasting for her fellow souls. During this time, she views the humans in the worst light possible, as monsters and murderers, their compassion limited to their own kind. This taps a key feature of humanity: the indifference to the “other.” Because they do not truly view the alien souls as people, the humans in Jeb’s compound are not bothered by the mangling of soul bodies, and at first fail to realize that it is this sight that horrified Wanda. She is convinced that they would do the same to her if they saw her true form, and rejects the attempts of her friends to comfort her, even beginning to view Jamie as a monster.

Finally, it is Uncle Jeb that gets through to her, asking: "'Did you expect us to just give up, Wanderer?' Jeb’s voice was stern and more serious than I had ever heard it before. 'We have a stronger survival instinct than that. Of course we want to find a way to get our minds back.'" (p. 419)

Though still horrified and disgusted by what she saw in the hospital, Wanda concedes that their actions were only natural, a product of a genetic disposition to using violence as a solution to problems.

Altruism vs. Selfishness

One of the key discrepancies between Wanderer and her human companions is her altruistic behavior. She repeatedly acts to protect, enhance and preserve the lives of the humans around her. The measure of her altruism varies widely, from the mostly self-interested act of risking her life to save Jamie, whom she loves, to the completely selfless act of saving Kyle, who has just tried to kill her.

The rightness and wrongness of altruism versus selfishness is not clearly stated by the author. While it is often Wanda's willingness to do good to those around her, in spite of the way they treat her in return, that eventually wins the trust of the humans, it is also one of her character flaws. As Ian points out, she takes selflessness to an unhealthy extreme, never doing anything for her own pleasure or well-being, and often acting in direct opposition to both for people who do not deserve it. From her perspective, it is only natural. From the perspective of reality in the world she lives in, it is likely to get her killed. The depth of her altruism is such, however, that this fact does not deter her--something the humans around her are unwilling to accept.

The Human Body

Because of the nature of the work, different representations of the human body play a large part in the story. The main characters--and many of the secondary and tertiary characters--are described thoroughly, down to the colors and shapes of their eyes. The characters are all beautiful, Meyer having stated that part of her purpose was to glory in the human body.

This being said, it is interesting to note that among the souls who are described, there are certain physical similarities. The Seeker is described as inappropriately tiny, completely at odds with her personality. Both she and Sunny, the soul who inhabits Kyle's girlfriend's body, are described as petite with dark hair and olive skin. Likewise, Wanderer's final body is described as very small, though her hair is red. Finally, another "defective" soul named Burns is described as having red hair. These similarities seem to mark a kinship between these four souls who have, in one way or another, defected to the human world.

Editor’s Criticism

Human beings are portrayed in this work as motivated primarily by their emotions and survival instincts, prone to violence and sometimes irrational, with equal capacities for love and hate, good and evil, cruelty and kindness. The limitation of the observations, however, comes in the lack of scope and variation in the human experiences. Within the context of this novel, the United States seems to be the only country that exists. The condition of other countries -- their colonization by the souls, the changes wrought in the way their society is ordered, et cetera -- is never addressed. As far as can be told from the text, the globe has been transformed into a cross between 21st-century USA and utopia. The world Meyer creates seems incomplete in this aspect, not only leaving questions about how the souls’ philosophy works in other areas of the globe unanswered, but failing to give an appropriate context for the change the souls have wrought on planet earth.

One of the shocking aspects of this book is the description of consistent brutality—often perpetrated by male characters—toward a female character who not only refuses to defend herself but rationalizes their behavior, and even attempts to protect one of her would-be murderers from justice. Wanderer is slapped, backhanded, thrown against stone walls and floors, yanked around, subjected to romantic advances while Melanie is forced to watch and protest from the inside, and even choked. She is subjected to morphine injections against her will. She is repeatedly referred to as “it,” until she explains that she is in fact a female of her species. Though the reason for the brutality is that she is inhuman, not that she is female, the images are undoubtedly disturbing.

Another criticism -- and one Meyer has already received for her main character, Bella, from the Twilight series -- is Meyer’s treatment of female characters. Thought Melanie and Wanderer both exhibit strength, resilience, and independence, some may feel these qualities are canceled out by the way they are utterly slaves to their physical and emotional desires for Jared. Upon their arrival to the compound, Melanie is reduced to babbling insensibly about Jared, and for much of the time throughout the rest of the novel dwells either on her lust for him or her jealousy concerning him and Wanda. Though she and Wanda face many life-threatening situations during their time among the humans, Melanie is only actively helpful in one of them. She is often silent, contemplating the next time she will get to see Jared’s face, or wondering what he is doing. For all intents and purposes, Melanie functions like an infatuated schoolgirl while Wanda attempts to cope with her difficult and terrifying circumstances.

Another potential problem is the equation of female strength with volatility. Aunt Maggie, undoubtedly an individual of great strength and resilience, whom we are told has managed to keep herself and her daughter alive and free in the midst of a soul-saturated city, is portrayed as bitter and full of hate. While others are portrayed similarly throughout the novel, Aunt Maggie is the only character who is static; she is not moved by the good Wanda does for the human rebels, but continues to hate her with less and less reason to do so. Even in the end of the novel, Aunt Maggie is only allowed to soften a little, becoming less than hostile rather than outright hateful.

The Seeker is another female character who is resilient, resourceful, and capable, yet she is portrayed as hateful, without a redeeming quality. The only concession made on the Seeker is Wanda’s maternal feeling toward her, after the soul has been extracted and is in a weak, vulnerable form. The human body she inhabited, on the other hand, continues to be portrayed in a negative light for her outspokenness and inability to adapt to the harsh conditions of cave life.

References

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Wikipedia Entry)

MTV interview MTV Interview with Stephenie Meyer

SFSite Review Review of The Host on SFSite.com

Stephenie Meyer's official site

--Presscubjulia 05:00, 27 April 2009 (UTC)