BRAVE NEW WORLD
Brave New World
"O wonder! How many godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't." ~William ShakespeareThe novel Brave New World was written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley. The novel is a dystopia, which is a perfect world gone wrong. Huxley's novel was unique to other novels of the time, as Huxley intended to create a frightening view of the future. Brave New World is based on the Utopian idea of universal happiness, but in the process, society has eliminated all true and deep beauty, leaving only shallow pleasures. In this novel, society is ruled by the motto "Community, Identity, Stability." Babies are mass-produced in factories and each child is specifically conditioned to a caste through hypnopaedic (sleep hypnosis) teachings and Pavlovian Conditioning. Natural childbirth is considered disgusting and taboo, and marriage and monogamy are both foreign concepts. Recreational sex is a fundamental part of the stability of the society. whenever the feeling of happiness is questioned, the citizens of this society take a drug called soma; it provides a high with no side effects. God no longer exists in their minds; they worship Henry Ford, developer of the assembly line. Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud all have large parts in the undertones of the novel, both in Shakespeare's ideas of true beauty, and Freud's theories on the id, ego, and superego.
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Essay and Art ProjectSeminar Reflection
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