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Journey To A Brave New World Comparative Essay

Decent Essays

The ideas contained in BNW were not new to Huxley, as evident in an earlier work, Crome Yellow (1922), in which Mr. Scogan speaks of a scientific Utopia: "... An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear. . . ." (Huxley). By the time Huxley started to write Brave New World, the tremendous political, economic, and philosophical changes taking place in Europe and America contributed to his disillusionment, such as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the dictatorship of Mussolini in Italy, and the Nazi Party movement in Germany. As stated by David Watts in Journey to a Brave …show more content…

“John Derbyshire (2007) writes of a key distinction between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World: ‘In Orwell’s dystopia the human spirit had been raped; in Huxley’s, it had been seduced.’ The difference he shows is that of force, the utilization or absence of a physicality or threat against the sanctity of Man’s own body and mind” (Wharton). In 1984, citizens are threatened by the all-powerful Big Brother and the thought police but in Brave New World citizens have been distracted by consumerism and drug “vacations”. It is a matter of compliance versus complacency. Like dystopian novels of today, BNW and 1984 were fueled from world events of the time. While the rise of totalitarianism was common inspiration, other events caused each author to focus on specific characteristics of a future society. World War II and the Spanish Civil War influenced Orwell to write a piece warning about what the world’s governments could become. Meanwhile, Huxley was influenced by technological advances/the interwar period and wrote a prediction of how technology could take over every social and biological aspect of

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