Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was published in 1932 after two major global events- World War Two from 1914-1918 and The Great Depression of 1929-1933. These two events changed the way people saw the world and made people see the events were beyond the control of individuals and even governments. Also at this time the world was seeing the rise in technology and the view that science could help solve some of the problems. Much of the technology has been developed because of the war and the mass of people had suffered because of it.

All problems with society led to a rise in totalitarian regimes such as those in Russia, Italy and Germany. Huxley uses the novel to question the usefulness of the one party state and shows how it eliminates freedom for the individual. Also in his dystopia, he looks at many areas that we have in our own society such as family, relationships, education, social classes and the role of the individual in society. He shows how far the new world has moved away from nature- they even condition the children to avoid it. The reservation is the only place that has nature and spirituality but it also has its own set of problems that come with freedom.

Themes

In The Wild:

In BNW nature has been eliminated in the ‘civilised’ world and individuals are conditioned to avoid it. For example, in chapter 2, we see babies who crawl towards flowers and books and are conditioned to avoid them by noise, bells and electric shocks. The children are being conditioned because ‘A love of nature keeps no factories busy’. We see the psychological training show its effect in Lenina’s reaction to any form of the natural world. For example, her reaction to Benard stopping to look at the sea is by begging “Let’s go away. I don’t like it”. The citizens are not allowed to react naturally to anything and they don’t have the opportunity to experience love, hate and passion. Everything is done for them and they have no contact with the natural world. An individual’s humanity belongs to the state and not themselves as everything is oppressed for the good of society.

Huxley has created a world where science and technology dominate both the natural world and humanity. The ‘wild’ is shut away behind electric fences that kill and keep in anything natural. In this text the natural world has come to dominate creation in BNW and this shows the lack of need for any natural processes.

Utopia and Dystopia:

In this ironic ‘utopian’ world all problems have been eliminated, pain and disease removed and everyone is happy. All things that could cause a problem for the individual such as families, marriage, religion, all fine arts and love have been taken away by the state. At first it may seem an ideal world but as we enter into it we find that a small number of individuals are unhappy and that stability and happiness has come at a cost. Huxley considers in the text whether humans can live in an alternative environment to one we have today and whether science can provide this environment. The environment that he creates in BNW shows itself to be dystopia. BNW is a dystopian novel for several reasons, the most obvious being that the text presents scientific advancement in the extreme and its effect on humans. Here humanity has been lost to science and ‘Community, Identity, Stability’ rule.

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The reservation is shown as an alternative to the brave new world but it too is presented negatively and not shown to be the solution to the problem. This is a primitive, savage world and Savage (John) can’t live in either world happily. No character seems really happy, instead they are drugged and conditioned to be happy. Individuals are created to be in a certain social class- alphas, betas, gammas, deltas and epsilons and they cannot escape the role they have been designated with. The inhabitants of the Reservation are committed to survival and their appalling conditions have little ...

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