Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?īrave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering for all sentient life. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point.
Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.įor sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. I argue that Brave New World anticipates the Foucauldian paradigm of resistance, subversion and containment, ending in eliminating the forces that pose a challenge to the ideology of the world state.Aldous Huxley : Brave New World BRAVE NEW WORLD ?īrave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written.
The world state eradicates love, religion, art and history and deploys language devoid of any emotions and thoughts to control the mind that judges and decides. I argue that Brave New World depicts a dystopian systematic control of mind and body through eugenic engineering, biological conditioning, hypnopaedia, sexual satisfaction, and drugs so as to keep the worldians completely controlled, collectivized and contented in a totalitarian society. In this paper, I discuss the manipulations of minds and bodies with reference to Foucault's biopower and disciplinary systems that make the citizens of the world state more profitable and productive.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) is a nightmarish depiction of a post-human world where human beings are mass-produced to serve production and consumption. Huxley also attempts to challenge his readers and asks them to think about the extent to which technology should determine our social structure and cultural values. In the novel, Huxley warns of dehumanization through a disciplinary system which turns people into docile bodies that are enslaved, both mentally and physically. In this study, Foucault's idea of biopower as a means of control is used to comprehend the manipulation of human beings through the systematic control of thought and behaviour in various ways, such as through genetic engineering, various forms of conditioning and a predetermined route through life from birth to death. This form of power is illustrated in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, which depicts a dystopian future set in London where science progresses to perfection and creates new technologies that affect humanity and banish individuality from the face of the world. This notion of discipline is known as 'biopower' (literally it means control over human bodies). Foucault identifies the emergence of such disciplinary power as a gradual process in which the subjected body becomes submissive when the mind has been manipulated to believe in the correctness of the functioning of the body. The goal of a disciplinary society, according to Michel Foucault (1979), is to make citizens more profitable and productive, and less individual, through mental and physical conditioning in order to turn people into compliant subjects. For the moment, we should interpret it as a warning about what may happen if we focus too much in pleasure and consumption. Nevertheless, those trends have been taken to the extreme by Huxley, and his prophecy has not yet come true. Nowadays, many of the aspects described by Huxley are already present in our society: more sexual freedom, advanced control on reproduction, high use of drugs and medicines, etc. The dystopian novel was also interpreted as a prophetic one. However, the presence of Shakespeare in this novel is very powerful, functioning as a contrast to this empty and materialist world. The society is based on consumerism and foolish distractions, while art, culture, history, religion, and literature are considered dangerous and thus totally forbidden. One of the prevailing ideas in this novel is the loss of individualism by the citizens, people in Brave New World are totally controlled and conditioned to behave as the state wants. It is called a novel of ideas due to the fact that the author focuses mainly in satirize the rapid advancements of technology and its consequences in the twentieth century. Brave New World is a novel of ideas written by Aldous Huxley in 1932.
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