Brave New World Essay Research Paper The

Brave New World Essay, Research Paper

The theme of Huxley’s Brave New World is community, identity, and stability. Each of these three themes represents what a Brave New World society needs to have in order to survive. According to the new world controllers, community is a result of identity and stability, identity is a part of genetic engineering, and stability is what everyone desires to achieve. These themes are represented in the book by the symbolic meaning of the phrase “Children are from bottles” and the hypnotic phrase “Everybody belongs to everybody else” (qt. Hazlitt 285). For a better understanding it is useful to explore these themes in detail. Community refers to the thought of one whole unit. Everyone is connected, by their actions toward each other in every day life, sexual desires, and what they do to remove the feeling of horrible emotions. This connectedness and lie, and its effects can be seen in the character of Bernard, a person who hates what society has become. Bernard is disgusted by the thought of “having anyone” he says, referring to sexual relations with women. Bernard is longing for a sense of individuality which he cannot posses in Brave New World. “He emerged with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He is utterly miserable, and perhaps it is his own fault” (Huxley 86, ch. 5). Thereby jeopardizing the stability of the community as a whole, near the end, it was decided that he be banished to the Falkland Islands, so that he could not tell anyone else of his individuality. In Brave New World community is upheld and reinforced at any and all costs. Identity is the one thing that no one person can experience. There is no individual identity in Brave New World. There is only a collective identity which is shared by all members of society. Collective Identity is achieved by forcing everyone in society to conform. It is maintained in society by making someone who has any individuality feel different almost as an outcast. But sometimes as in the case of the character Bernard, people in Brave New World long for their own identity. For example, Bernard was having feelings and thoughts he is not proud of, “Did you ever feel you had some sort of extra power,” Bernard said to a friend while talking secret (Huxley 69, ch. 4). The extra power Bernard is referring to is individuality. This shows that as much as the world controllers try to rob people of their individuality, it cannot be taken away that easily. Stability is a third of these three goals, but it is the one most mentioned in the book. “The world is stable now. People are happy; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving the way they ought to behave” (Huxley 226, ch. 16). The desire for stability, requires the production of large numbers of genetically identical humans, because people who are exactly the same are less likely to come into conflict. Stability is seen in Brave New World to minimize conflict, risk, and change. Setting plays a particularly important role in Brave New World. The novel opens about six hundred years in the future. Civilization as people know it has ended. There has become a new world state, an all powerful government headed by ten world controllers. Almost all traces of the past have been erased. Faith in Christ has been replaced by faith in the community. The cross has been replaced by the T, and My Life and Work has replaced the bible. “Religion like genuine learning thrive on sacrifices and passions, which are impossible in a standardized superficial world with its cheap department store happiness” (Hesse 286). But some parts of the world were allowed to remain the same. For example, the savage reservation, the New Mexican home of the Zuni Indians. It is a world away from civilization, the Zunis are still threaten by disease, filth, and religion. “These savages were people of the old regime, living not, according to science but to nature, kept behind fences lest they contaminate the blessed, and yet not exterminated because their blind state could serve a perpetual moral (Buck 288).” The settings of Brave New World only offer a choice between cultured slavery and primitiveness. Of the characters in Brave New World few have a mind of their own and most are not able to do things on their own. People exist to voice ideas or to manifest them in their behavior. Lenina Crowne, a character in the novel, is the perfect example. She is young, pretty, happy, and shallow. Lenina’s one fault is that she sometimes spends more time dating one man then society thinks is correct. Like all well conditioned citizens of the new world state, Lenina believes in utopia and loves it. “The secret of happiness and virtue as one director points out is liking what you’ve got to do” (Hazlitt 285). Lenina spends much of her time spreading the words of utopia to her fellow citizens. The characters in Brave New World can be compared to robots, made in test tubes by scientists and programmed by hypnosis. The controller Mustapha Mond is one of the ten people who control the world. He is good natured, intelligent, and understands that people have different ideas (which is rare in utopia). He has read all the forbidden literature, the Bible and Shakespeare, that the rest of utopia is forbidden to see. Mond was once a gifted scientist, he made the choice to become one of the rulers instead of becoming a troublesome outcast.