The Girl with All the Gifts: Eco-Zombiism, the Anthropocalypse, and Critical Lucidity

The zombie transforms the familiar human into an unfamiliar monster that is an unquenchably violent destroyer of the self. The zombie’s unyielding drive to destroy its counterpart represents how the human insatiable consumption of resources, seemingly without concern for consequence, is the result of an anthropocentric mentality of species elitism. This undying elitism privileges the human over the nonhuman as the perceived dominant species justified by the assumption that humans are uniquely capable of critical imagination and knowledge acquisition. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014, Girl hereafter) appropriates the uncanny zombie figure as the potential damage humans inflict on themselves through the devastation of the ecological system that sustains their existence. Girl poses anthropocentric elitism as a potential cause of human extinction: humanity, no longer capable of evolving intellectually, becomes incompatible with the ever-changing environment on which they depend for existence. Girl opens in the Hotel Echo, a military-science facility operating approximately ten years after the onset of the “hungry plague,” a devastating pandemic that transformed a majority of humanity into “hungries” (Carey’s version of the zombie). The novel establishes the relationship between Melanie, one of a group of second generation sentient hungry children being examined to find a cure for the hungry plague, and her teacher Helen Justineau as a model for a beneficial interaction between human and nonhuman sentient species. Justineau’s mandate is to teach the students in a carceral classroom to evaluate their mental and psychological capacities. However, the primary objective of military-scientist Dr. Caroline Caldwell, director of Hotel Echo, is data acquisition through continuous gruesome laboratory dissections of the children: “Caldwell is very skilled at separating brains from skulls. She does it quickly and methodically, and she gets the brain out in one piece, with minimal tissue damage. She’s reached the point now where she could almost do it in her sleep” (41). The classroom provides the means for the novel to confront the seemingly increasing view of the incompatibility of scientific investigation and humanist critical inquiry (in both discipline and pedagogy). The Hotel Echo