The Girl with All the Gifts

The mythical story of Pandora, whose name means “the one with all the gifts,” is Melanie’s introduction to Greek mythology—a subject of enduring fascination for her. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman ever created by the gods—a figure whose natural curiosity ultimately condemned humans to a variety of evils when she opened a jar containing all the ills and hardships of the world. This was Zeus’s intention when he created her, angry that Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humanity.

In Carey’s narrative, divine retribution takes the form of the zombie apocalypse, but like Pandora, who is Zeus’s scapegoat, Melanie and her kind represent not the end but a new beginning. As with Eve, whose curiosity about the Tree of Knowledge condemns humanity to sin and shame, these creation stories have a distinctly patriarchal bent to them. When Justineau recounts the story of Pandora to her class, she frames the lesson as feminist revisionism: “Men get the pleasure, women get the rap” (11). Ironically, Pandora’s “gifts” are a series of plagues on the world, but Melanie’s gifts—her cunning, her intelligence, and most of all her ability to find her own humanity beneath the insatiable hunger—ultimately save it.