Dystopian Novels

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Dystopian Novels
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Definition Check Utopian

• Utopian refers to human efforts to create a
  hypothetically perfect society.
• It refers to good but impossible proposals - or
  at least ones that are difficult to carry out.

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Dystopian versus Utopian

• Dystopian is the opposite of utopian it is often
  a utopia gone sour, an imaginary place or state
  where everything is as bad as it could possibly
  be.

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Dystopian Novels

• Dystopian novels usually include elements of
  contemporary society and are seen as a warning
  against some modern trend.
• Writers use them as cautionary tales, in which
  humankind is put into a society that may look
  inviting on the surface but in reality, is a
  nightmare.

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Brave New World

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
• At first, the world it describes sounds like a
  utopia humanity is carefree, healthy, and
  technologically advanced.
• Warfare and poverty have been eliminated, and
  everyone is permanently happy.
• However, all of these things have been achieved
  by eliminating family, cultural diversity, art,
  literature, science, religion, and philosophy.

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Relation to the Real World

• The issues raised in the book were influenced by
  the issues of Huxleys time.
• The Industrial Revolution had brought massive
  changes to the world.
• Mass production made cars, telephones, and radios
  cheap and widely available.
• The effects of World War I and totalitarian
  regimes were still being felt.
• Huxley used his book to express the fear of
  losing individual identity in the fast-paced
  world of the future.

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Relation to the Real World

• One event that influenced Huxley was an early
  trip to America.
• Huxley was outraged by the commercial-led
  cheeriness and selfish nature of many of the
  people.
• There was a strong fear in Europe of worldwide
  Americanization.

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Relation to the Real World

• Therefore, in Brave New World, Huxley explores
  the fears of both Soviet communism and American
  capitalism.
• Worse, he suggests that the price of universal
  happiness will be the sacrifice of everything
  important in our culture motherhood, home,
  family, community, and love.

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Summary

• The dystopian literature of the period reflected
  the many concerns that resonated throughout the
  twentieth century.
• The concept of a dystopia was introduced to help
  reveal the potential consequences of a utopia
  turning against itself.

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Do they work?

• What do you think about forming a utopia?
• Is it possible to create a perfect world in which
  to live?

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• "There will be, in the next generation or so, a
  pharmacological method of making people love
  their servitude, and producing dictatorship
  without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of
  painless concentration camp for entire societies,
  so that people will in fact have their liberties
  taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it,
  because they will be distracted from any desire
  to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or
  brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.
  And this seems to be the final revolution."
  Huxley

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Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley

• A satirical piece of fiction, not scientific
  prophecy

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Satire

• A piece of literature designed to ridicule the
  subject of the work.
• While satire can be funny, its aim is not to
  amuse, but to arouse contempt.
• Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other
  techniques are almost always present.

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• As satire, the books purpose is to examine the
  failings of mans behavior in order to encourage
  him to reform.
• It may be painful to recognize todays faults
  through the literature.
• Pain and growth are part of the human condition,
  and prove that Huxleys prophesies have not come
  true.

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• However, many of the cultural concerns seen in
  the novel are still matters of great importance.
  In the years since Huxley first published this
  book, some of his prophesies seem far more
  plausible than they did in 1932.

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This novel presents a world

• of sexual promiscuity
• with a drug culture in the most literal sense
  of the word
• in which the traditional family has been
  rendered taboo
• in which religion has been reduced to rituals
  of physical expression
• in which art panders to the sensations of mass
  communications
• in which the positive values of western
  democracy have been converted into a rigid caste
  system

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• Huxley exploits anxieties about Soviet Communism
  and American capitalism.
• The price of universal happiness will be the
  sacrifice of honored parts of our culture
  motherhood, home, family, freedom, even
  love.

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• Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western
  Europe, governs a society where all aspects of an
  individual's life are determined by the state,
  beginning with conception and conveyor-belt
  reproduction.
• A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides
  all roles in the hierarchy.
• Children are raised and conditioned by the state
  bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families.

• There are only 10,000 last names
• Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have
  their own kids.

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• Brave New World, then, is centered around control
  and manipulation

• He instills the fear that a future world state
  may rob us of the right to be unhappy.

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• time and place written 1931, England
• date of first publication 1932
• settings (place) England, Savage Reservation in
  New Mexico

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• settings (time) 2540 AD referred to in the
  novel as 632 years AF (After Ford), meaning 632
  years after production of the first Model T car
• narrator Third-person omniscient
• point of view Narrated in the third person from
  the point of view of Bernard or John, but also
  from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz
  Watson, and Mustapha Mond

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• Happiness derives from consuming mass-produced
  goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and
  Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, the
  feelies, and most famously of all, a supposedly
  perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

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Soma

• People resort to soma when they feel depressed,
  angry or have negative thoughts it numbs
  feelings
• They take it because their lives, like society
  itself, are empty of spirituality or higher
  meaning.
• Soma keeps the population comfortable with their
  lot in life.

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Why use soma?

• Huxley foresees a culture in which widespread and
  addictive use of drugs offers another way of
  assuring a controlled society.
• This is in addition to the pleasure of frequent
  and promiscuous sexual activity, used to distract
  the population and dissuade them from rebelling.

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Keep in mind

• The sole function of pleasure is to guarantee the
  happiness in the Brave New World, and assure a
  stable, controllable population
• State-encouraged promiscuity assures that loyalty
  to a lover or family will not undermine ones
  loyalty to the state

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This is satire!

• Please keep that in mind
  as you
  read--Huxley does not offer this world as an ideal

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• Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the
  words of the Resident Controller of Western
  Europe "No pains have been spared to make your
  lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, as far
  as that is possible, from having emotions at all."

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• Life-long emotional well-being is not genetically
  pre-programmed. It isn't even assured from birth
  by the soma.
• For example, babies are traumatized with electric
  shock conditioning.

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• The Brave New World is a totalitarian
  welfare-state.
• There is no war, poverty or crime.
• Society is genetically predestined by caste.
  Alphas, the most intellectual, are the top-dogs.
  Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the
  bottom. The lower orders are necessary because
  Alphas, even when they take soma, could never be
  happy doing menial jobs.

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• BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Its
  biotechnology is highly advanced.

• Yet the society itself has no historical dynamic
  History is bunk. In this utopia, knowledge of
  the past is banned by the Controllers.

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• The Brave New World is not an exciting place to
  live in.
• It is geared to the consumption of mass-produced
  goods Ending is better than mending.
• Society is shaped by a single political ideology.
  The motto of the world state is Community,
  Identity, Stability.

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• Clones, the BNW inhabitants, are laboratory-grown
  and bottled from the hatchery.
• They are conditioned and brainwashed, even in
  their sleep. They are never educated to prize
  thinking for themselves.

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• This novel is more applicable today than it was
  in 1932. This is a time of

propaganda, censorship, conformity, genetic
engineering, social conditioning, and mindless
entertainment.

• This was what Huxley saw in our future. His book
  is a warning.

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Questions to consider as you read

• Is it better to be free or to be happy?
• Is freedom compatible with happiness?
• Is the collective more important than the
  individual?
• Can children be taught effectively to think in
  only one certain way?
• Can young people be taught so well that they
  never question their teachings later?
• Is stability more important than freedom?
• Can alterations made by advanced science to
  mankind be made permanent at the DNA-level?
• Can mankind be conditioned by science?
• Should the individual be limited/controlled for
  the greater good? If so, how much?

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• Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily
  turning truth and beauty cant. Aldous Huxley

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• "The books we need are of the kind that act upon
  us like a misfortune,
• that make us suffer like the death
• of someone we love more
• than ourselves, that make us feel
• as though we were on the verge
• of suicide or lost in a forest
• remote from all human habitation
• a book should serve as the ax
• for the frozen sea within us."
• Franz Kafka