Banned Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley




The year is A.F. 632. It is a time of stability. The population is being manufactured so that a certain number of the population is created for each caste system. Children are raised in a State Conditioning Centre where electroshock therapy may be used for conditioning. Hypnotherapy influences the ideas of the population, are executed according to class and change with each age range. Individuality is not promoted. Thinking is not promoted. Everyone is conditioned to feel and act a certain way. Bernard Marx, an Alpha, spends way too much time by himself. His lone activities have made him a source of ridicule. Most people assume something went wrong while he was being created, which would explain why he is so short for an Alpha and why he doesn’t socialize as much. Is he an individual? Bernard ponders that question along with many other ideas. But that’s not what he is supposed to do in this new world. Here everyone belongs to everyone and it isn’t good to go against that party line.
                Brave New World is a different interpretation of a utopian society. What is the ideal? What does it mean to make everyone happy? That is the goal of this new world. Society is created so that everyone is fulfilled and everyone is happy. They even have a drug that people use and are encouraged to use on a daily basis to keep the stress as minimal as possible. There are no more families. There are no more monogamous relationships. There is no more religion. There are no more books. The people are encouraged to be promiscuous and to stay entertained. Bernard, even as an Alpha, wasn’t that attractive to others because he was shorter than most Alpha men, which caused him to be an outcast. He began to fall outside of the social norm. As the novel progressed, the story would show more instances of how dwelling outside of the social norm becomes problematic. An outsider is welcomed in to this new world and his interpretation of the story is very telling of how dramatic this new utopia is.
                Huxley was extremely imaginative with his idea of what this future may be. Here we have a world where everyone is genetically manipulated to fill certain roles. It is completely outside of what is consider normal. People have no choice but to pursue happiness in the most shallow ways imaginable, but it is how they have been conditioned. They couldn’t imagine a world with parents or monogamy or God. It is completely outside of their realm of thinking. This world was so well developed within this novel that is was frightening. What they consider happiness is my hell on earth, filled with the absence of all the things that I value. I’m guessing other people were extremely unsettled by this novel, but unlike me weren’t able to appreciate its value as a piece of literature. It has been banned in the U.S. and Ireland many times because of its reference to casual sex, its language and its moral value. I can see how this novel is a difficult book to grasp because of the extreme differences between the society Huxley has created and the one we live in now but this is such a blatant case of fiction. It’s a satire of the idea of a Utopia. If anything this type of novel would force people to recognize the beauty of the type of society we do live in where our emotions are not controlled and our genetics are not manipulated to fit a certain mold. I would encourage spending time in Huxley’s world, in order to appreciate the world we live in now.


http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics/reasons       Retrieved July 22, 2014

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