Disclaimer: Even though I think it’s a convenient term to use, I feel like tropes are a highly misused and over applied concept used to inaccurately dissect fiction.
When I first read Oryx and Crake in high school, something about the character of Oryx bothered me – something about how shallowly fleshed out she is, something that I couldn’t exactly articulate. She just seemed, in spite of her vague troubled past, too perfect, with two men wildly in love with her and an ability to innately form bonds with all living beings. This time, in my reread, I had pinned it down – Oryx reads like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, one of the most aggravating (and misogynistic) fictional tropes.
A “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (hereafter shortened to MPDG) was a concept originated by Nathan Rabin to refer to Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown for a 2007 review (which I read in the print edition of the AV Club). Since then, the term has caught on fire, but I’ll rely on TVTropes.org to do the explaining for those who haven’t heard of it:
Have no fear, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is here to give new meaning to the male hero’s life! She’s stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), often with a touch of wild hair dye. She’s inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live freely and love madly.
While Rabin eventually abandoned the term, the damage has been done and you will see any character with vaguely Zooey Deschanel-esque traits being hit with the term. You will have to agree, that the term fits pretty well for Oryx – the only traits we definitively know are how hot she is (something Jimmy/Snowman can’t seem to let us forget), her idiosyncratic speech patterns and behaviors, and how she teaches two men, a jaded sex addict and an impossibly aloof scientist, to love.
Since MPDGs are more plot device than human, they lack depth. Although we only really get a look at Oryx’s depths from Jimmy’s flawed narration, it’s clear that she’s been through a lot. Throughout Oryx and Crake, we get hints at a darker backstory for Oryx presented from Jimmy’s perspective – being trafficked from a young age, living in a man’s locked garage. Still, at least outwardly, she seems to act like these hardships have not influenced her, to the point where Jimmy is frustrated with her serene nature: “Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to bring it up?” (143). Oryx’s behavior compels Jimmy and provokes him, unlike all of these other women he has dated – all of these women tried to change and understand him, while he is trying to change and understand her. However, unlike Jimmy, Oryx never truly displays her emotions, making her seem impossibly calm in the face of some terrible stuff. To the men in her life, and the uninformed reader (look at some frustrated readers and you will see what I’m talking about), this transforms her into a two-dimensional archetype.
Oryx is a character that has lived her whole life learning how to please men, whether it is sexually, financially, or for some general form of companionship. For her, in the context of her relationship with Jimmy, that means obliging him in his beliefs that he’s a savior: “Sometimes he suspected [Oryx] of improvising, just to humour him; sometimes he felt that her entire past – everything she’d told him – was his own invention” (316). This is a moment of lucidity from someone who has otherwise projected a life’s worth of insecurities onto a person. To maintain her relationship with Jimmy, who has spent pretty much his whole life feeling like he’s destined to protect this one woman, she needs to maintain this illusion. Jimmy wants to feel like he’s right about the state of Oryx’s life, that she’s the same person in the porn movies he watched as a child, that she needs to be saved by him. In short, Oryx is trying to be a MPDG – it is this mystery that motivates him to care about her. It’s not sure why Oryx might need Jimmy’s interest – it might be a part of her role as Crake’s employee.
Although as a reader we don’t really get to see it, much of the same goes on with Crake and Oryx – Oryx is shown to have a true admiration of Crake’s scientific genius. However, this could very well be out of this same sense of obligation – when Crake is talking about his hiring process for Oryx, he says: “She was delighted to accept. It was triple the pay she’d been getting, with a lot of perks; but also she said the work intrigued her. I have to say she’s a devoted employee” (310). Although Crake is convinced Oryx is truly fascinated in his work, she is in no position to deny Crake’s request for her to work with him – she is a prostitute in the pleeblands who has spent most of her life in poverty. Crake is a narcissist with confidence in his own skills, so he could easily just be misinterpreting her skills of self-preservation (in how she fulfills his sexual and emotional needs for the sake of a well-paid, comfortable job) as genuine interest. To do so gives Crake some feeling of meaning in his life – he has never felt this sense of affection for another person, and she plays an instrumental role in bringing his evil plans to life. While she might not necessarily be his sole reason for living, she certainly motivates him.
To the reader, Oryx is more than a MPDG – she is someone who’s learned to cope with a world that Jimmy and Crake know nothing about, one where it is essential to be interested in the men in her life and unconditionally support their interests no matter how demented they may be. Neither of these men see that, though – they see a beautiful (yet strange and whimsical) girl, one whose love has some transformative power. Since the novel is presented from the men’s views, Oryx is shown to be an incomprehensible character whose motivations are hazy. Oryx has essentially become a plot device in other men’s lives because it’s easier and more profitable (both in terms of fulfillment and monetarily) than assuming victimhood at the hands of these men. This can be agitating, because as readers we want to see “powerful,” interesting female characters, ones who stand up to the men in their lives when they do disgusting things, but there is power in the way that Oryx has controlled her narrative.
