Savage In Brave New World example essay topic

Perversion of Society In today's society a person is shaped by family, friends, and past events, but in Aldous Huxley's classic novel, Brave New World, there is no such thing as family, history and "true" friends. The government controls every aspect of an individual from their creation in the hatcheries to their conditioning for their thoughts and careers. In this brave new world the ideas of stability and community reign supreme, and the concept of individualism is foreign and suppressed, "Everyone belongs to everyone else, after all", (47). Huxley perverse's contemporary morals and concepts in Brave New World, thus distorting the ideas of materialistic pleasures, savagery versus society, and human relationships.

These distortions contribute to the effectiveness of Brave New World, consequently creating a novel that leaves the reader questioning how and why. In the year A.F. 632 no pleasure is denied to the populous. Hypnopaedia is used as a device to form the moral education of children. What is taught through this method is not true ethics, but warped actions trained by words.

An illustration of this is in the teaching of Elementary Sex to children. The society that Huxley created was one where having sex often and with many people was a positive course of action. Anyone who did not have multiple partners, such as Lenina or Bernard, were considered a blight to society. Society as a whole uses the act of having sex as relief from pain and emotions.

A person does not have to lust for someone they merely set up a time and place for them to meet and have sex, and it is completely accepted by everyone. When sex is not enough to relieve a person from pain or loneliness they take soma, a drug that stimulates them into happiness. Unlike the drugs of present day there is no set backs from taking soma, no headaches after use, and after all "One cubic centimetres cure ten gloomy", (60). Finally, there is the concept of fee lies, movies that you can feel what the actors are doing. These fee lies are nothing more than glamorized porn movies giving the participants quick orgasmic feelings without effort.

All these materialistic pleasures are used to substitute an individuals basic emotional needs and to give them a false sense of happiness. Huxley used this warped view on what today's society deems morally right and wrong to reveal how shallow the citizens of the brave new world truly are. John is considered a savage in Brave New World, and is brought back into society because it was of scientific interest to his ford ship Mustapha Mond. Huxley uses this part of the plot to show the twisted views of what appears to be civilized culture versus a savage culture. When John first learns he is going to the civilized world he quotes Shakespeare by saying, "O brave new world that has such people it in", (139). He is excited by the thoughts of all the wonderful things his mother, Linda, has told him about.

John wants to be where no one is unhappy or every alone, because on the reservation he was an outcast, and was constantly alone and unhappy. When John arrived in this brave new world he was accepted by its people, and even though he was more of a freak show to them he wanted to be around them. The more he found out about their culture, though, the less he civilized he considered them to be. When he first saw a Bokanovsky group he became physically ill, and uttered Shakespeare's quote again, but this time with malice in his voice.

The final bit of realization on how dirty and corrupt this society truly was came whenever he witnessed Linda's death. Making death a happy experience is a conditioning factor, and death was considered a good thing because it gave back to the society. John, knowing that death is really something that one should be reverent about, resented the fact that children were let into the hospital for the dying. After Linda's passing he became enraged, and quoted Shakespeare yet again, but this time as a challenge. The distorted view that people who are civilized are more human than those considered savage is shown in Brave New World. Huxley used the irony of John being the most sensible, reflective and human-like character to show that the civilized people who wanted nothing more than to satisfy their carnal urges for sex and happiness were truly the savages.

Any relationship between two people in Brave New World that showed any type of intimacy, other than sexual, was considered bad and immoral. Lenina had been dating Henry Foster for four months and seeing no one but him, and it was considered by her friend, Fanny, to be in bad form. Lenina did not share a relationship with Henry where they revealed private details of their life, after all, in this society there is no individual. Lenina and Henry were together to go play games and have sex, nothing more. When John later tells Lenina he loves her, she reacts not by declaring her love back to him, but by taking off her clothes to sleep with him.

To John, she was nothing but a whore, but Lenina considered herself to be doing the proper thing in the eyes of society. John had proposed the question to Bernard about his and Lenina's status, asking if they were married. Bernard did not know how to answer this question at first because he had never heard of the word "married". The world that Bernard lived in their was no such thing as a marriage. John explains to Bernard that being married means you are with someone forever, and that the relationship cannot be broken.

Bernard laughs at the absurdity of John's question. He had been programmed by the society he rejected to not have a relationship like that, and that he was suppose to have as many partners as possible. Having a faithful bond with any one person in Brave New World was a crime. Huxley used this to his advantage to show how things like marriage, family and abstinence were altered into negative things that caused chaos, while in present times they are far from that. The new world used not having these things as a stabilizing factor, while today not having them would cause pandemonium. Flannery O'Conner best verbalizes what Aldous Huxley was trying to accomplish in his novel, Brave New World, in this quote: "I am interested in making a good case of distortion because I am coming to believe that it is the only way to make people see".

Huxley distorted many elements throughout his work, and each twisted detail help open the eyes of the reader to what being an individual is really about. It is about creating oneself, and not being enslaved by society to act in accordance to a set of nonsensical regulations..