Sarah Johnson
September 16, 2012
Period 1
Messing With Emotions Happiness, comfort, stability are words that describe a Utopian environment: A perfect world. However, disguised as a Utopia, Brave New World is a Dystopian environment which controls how society behaves, believes, and lives. As long as everything goes as planned, then the people can keep stability in society. Therefore, in order to maintain stability, Brave New World makes it so no relationships exist to prevent from having unstable emotions. In Huxley’s book, the citizens are conditioned to think that “…everyone belongs to everyone else” (56). For the citizens, it means that they are allowed to have anyone they want, to not be fixated on only one person. That is because if these couples were to break up, then it would cause instability in their life, which is what Brave New World is trying to prevent. In this society, they are always trying to enforce stability. Just to keep the society stable, the officials in the book make it so that the people are always happy. They make sure that no one is unhappy because when one person in that situation, then it can affect the rest of society. That is why, when the World Controller asked if anyone had, had a time where they could not have anything they wanted. “Horrible; precisely” (58). When the boy explained how he felt, the World Controller agrees saying that this feeling was not allowed, for it would not let society stable. When Lenina and Bernard visit the reservation, they meet Linda and John. Linda was a citizen of Brave New World also, and when Bernard found out that she was the missing woman that the Director was talking about, he had to bring her and the son John to embarrass him. In this part of the book, it is a parody on custody. When a couple gets divorced, one parent has to take custody of the child, and in this case it was Linda. However, because of John, she was not able to return to civilization always blaming him. Even though they had this type of relationship, they still loved each other because, they are mother and son. This type of relationship is a motherly one, which leads to the fact that one was to die, and then there would be grievance. Therefore, when Linda was on her deathbed because of the soma that she took, he got mad because it was all because of Brave New World fault that Linda was dying. This is the type of relationship that Brave New World is trying to prevent, which is why they create the babies instead of live birth because it will create a life with instability. Finally, is the scene between John and Lenina. When Lenina started acting just like his mother did, he got furious. He got so upset that he started to beat Lenina hard. This type of relationship was to be avoided. That is why they always condition the babies to not do these types of things so everyone can get along. However, since John was a savage, it was inevitable. Since he was never conditioned, he had his own life that only he could control and no one else could. However, in the end, he commits suicide because he could not handle Brave New World any longer. This relationship is the type that if you believe one type of thing, one believes it is true until they see it for their own. Therefore, Huxley is trying to warn people that if society continues to behave in the way the people in Brave New World do, then it will lead to world that will end up in instability. If people are not allowed to experience the world like how normal people do, then when they do happen to experience it, they will not know what to do. Stability is not something society can have because there will always be a moment where people will create a problem. Without instability, a society cannot be stable. Without one, the other one cannot work.