Banned Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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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