Brianna's Post (her Blogger account exploded on her this morning)

Phase 3 Prompt 3

Margret Atwood believes that Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World” is still applicable in today’s society. Brave New World is a critically acclaimed novel as well as a publically disqualified for content that is just as relevant today as it was in 1932. Brave New World has been banned in public schools and in libraries for many reasons. Some include the communistic tendencies, the graphic descriptions of sexual situations, drug related references and the fact that when reading this novel, and everyone reads it differently.

People will read the book and be able to make their own connections and their own inferences about the book. They will pull different content from the novel and be able to understand the true meaning based on their life’s experiences. Atwood describes a situation in which she found her self when reading Brave New World for the first time. “I first read Brave New World in the early 1850’s when I was 14. It made a deep impression on me, though I didn’t fully understand some of what I was reading,” (Atwood 2). Atwood goes on to describe on of the things that she did not understand. She was too young to know what a pair of knickers are and what camisoles are, but because of Huxley’s description and skill as a writer that she was able to create a mental image that served the purpose that she needed when reading about ‘zippicamiknicks’ (Atwood 2). It is because of Huxley’s skill that his novel is still widely reguarded as inappropriate.

Communism as well as the ideas behind Hitler’s totalitarianism all stem from a utopic society that has gone extremely wrong (Atwood 3). Huxley’s novel’s setting is a utopic society that is borderline communist in the ways the it conditions babies instead of raising them. That everyone has the basics of life provided for them, technology, food, sex, education, job preparation, and housing so to speak. The conditioning that Huxley describes allows for blissful ignorance. The classes, epsilons, have all the basic essentials to live, and they do not question why they cannot strive for more because of the hypneopedia conditioning (Huxley 25). The people of Huxley’s Brave New World have every happiness within arms reach and they never have to question why, everybody is truly happy because they do not know any thing different (Atwood 2). However, critics in 1932 did not like that Huxley presented communism is a positive light so to speak (Huxley 265).  In fact, many of them believed that “With the rise of Fascism in Western Europe’s and a world shaken by massive economic depression, perhaps the novel hit too close to the bone; or maybe Huxley’s harsh and unsettling vision was simply too far ahead of its time,” writes a critic named M. C. Dawson, (Huxley 265). They do not agree with what Huxley had to say about how communism was communicated through literature.

Huxley’s vivid ability to describe sexual situations also is criticized, especially at the time the novel was published. Huxley’s work is said to be way ahead of the times. He repeatedly made predictions about the world how people would interact with one another. More often then not, he was right. What else do you think he was right about?

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Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Everybody is Happy Now.” The Guardian. 16 November 2007: Web.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World,. New York: Harper & Bros., 1946. Print.