Essay on Hypnopaedia in 'Brave New World'

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932, presents a world that is completely superficial and wholly controlled by the World State right from the point of human conception. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, published in 1949, portrays a society whereby the people are also entirely controlled by the government. However, in Orwell’s alternative reality, the government controls the population through indoctrination, force, and the altering of history, rather than through it being inherently learned and therefore easily accepted. This essay will explore the presentation of what is and isn’t controlled to make readers question whether the political and sexual control of the population is right and just.

In part two, chapter two, of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell introduces a thrush bird motif to highlight a dystopian irony. He uses this scene to underline the contrast between Winston’s experience of control and regimentation in the city, and that of the countryside where everything is free, natural, and unobserved. The symbolism of an unfettered bird highlights the constrained and confined every day for Winston shown in chapter one, “though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio face gazed down from every commanding corner… BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said… a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs… it was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows.” (pg. 4). This, especially the idea of the state “snooping” into the citizens lives, dramatically contrasts to how the forest (where the characters Winston and Julia secretly meet) is presented like a safe-haven. Moreover, the semantic field of observation and prying with “watching” and “gazed” emphasizes the contrast between the controlled and uncontrolled worlds; being monitored gives the impression of constant oppression in that everything you do is questioned for motive and intent. Although considered a timeless, political allergy, it is interesting to note that the posters that Orwell depicts mirror the propaganda used during Mussolini’s totalitarian and fascist rule over Italy. However, considering the time that the novel was written (1948), perhaps his description of city life draws on images and ideas from the recent past. Tom Moylan summarises “Dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century”, so it is presumably these images that Orwell is drawing on. Orwell’s use of thrush imagery highlights the harsh realities of Winston’s city life, where the government is constantly watching. Orwell writes “For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival, was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?” (pg. 142), Winston’s perplexity at the freedom the thrush bird has, highlights what we take for granted in today’s society. He looks for the reasoning behind the bird’s singing to him, it lacks purpose, yet the bird continues. Orwell creates a dystopian setting where every action must have a meaning, consequence, or purpose. This purpose-driven mindset and the idea that human existence has been reduced to function aligns with the war-time ideas in which he was writing in. Like Winston, people during and post-war believed that every action should have meaning or productivity to it, otherwise, it was worthless. The bird represents something outside of Orwell’s prediction of a future. Doing something just because you can and/or want to, with no one to question your motives – free will - is slowly drained out of society and replaced with instructions for the use of free time by the government. The documentary maker, Michael Moore, identifies a similarity between the ‘slow draining’ of rights in Atwood’s masterful dystopia The Handmaid's Tale and Trump’s leadership today; this parallel was equally preeminent when Orwell was writing the novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1948 and published in 1949. At this time, the Cold War (a title which coincidentally was coined by Orwell himself) was in its harsh beginnings; rumors of suspected spies were circling and there was a constant fear of nuclear annihilation, promoting paranoia and suspicion. Moreover, the bird is completely free to do what it likes – fly anywhere, sing anything, think anything. As well as admiring the bird’s beauty, Winston is also jealous of the bird and its basic free will and lack of obligation to anything else. Therefore, Orwell uses a simple analogy of a bird and its freedoms to explain to readers the extent of control the government and the “Big Brother” party had over the people.

Similarly, in Brave New World Huxley compares the freedom of nature and natural life to the way that the society (in this instance) encourages their people to live, to highlight the extent to which the government maintains control. The characters Lenina and Bernard holiday to the Savage Reservation in New Mexico – one of the few areas that does not conform to the World State’s ‘ideal’ society and the rules it should obey. The term ‘savage’ suggests animalistic imagery, and this is not somewhere anyone would typically want to holiday; however, it is the intention of this government for people not to want to go there because it presents the opposite way that they want people to live, and also takes away from their work in the ‘real world’. Whilst there, they see people that age naturally, give birth, suffer from various diseases, and where religion is a very important aspect of their lives. To link this to the title quote, the “very humanity” of the people of the World State is being challenged as what is considered normal human behavior to readers has been taken from them. These qualities are eradicated by “AF 632” (page 2) through the use of advanced technology, and those that still maintain them are seen as dirty, old-fashioned, and uncontrollable. However, Huxley presents this unruly area with a peaceful serenity. The fact that it is a place where people commonly holiday implies that the natural way of life – although presented as if it were a zoo – is something of an underlying comfort and is relaxing. This, therefore suggests that the streamlined, carbon-copy life that most people in the World State experience is not one of content but is artificial and unnatural in every sense of the word; however, because of the conditioning the citizens go through they no longer recognize the discomfort. The genetic engineering, selective breeding, mass production of humans, homogeneity, the hypnopaedia, the anti-depressant “soma” drug – all controlled and distributed by the State, yet they are not usually what one instinctively wants or longs for. What Huxley might be trying to say is that although getting rid of the disease, the aging process and corrupt religion may be idealized as the ultimate goal and the point at which humanity has reached perfection, these ‘flaws’ as the World State views it, are what makes us human. Furthermore, about the quotation, modern human rights include rights to family, worship, and health care, and the government here is taking that away from them.

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Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four present very different methods that governments use to control their people, particularly in the way they view sex and people’s sexual fulfillment. In Brave New World, relationships as we define them do not exist; it appears to be more a communism of sexuality – hence the common mantra, “everyone belongs to everyone else” (pg. 34). However, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, relationships are central, but controlled. In Brave New World, sex in terms of reproduction is tightly controlled by the World State. Huxley introduces readers to this from the very first chapter, setting the start in the “CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE” (pg. 1) where the citizens are – if you like - produced. The Director guides a set of students around the building showing them how “three hundred Fertilisers [are] plunged” (pg. 1) and how “one by one the eggs were transferred from their test tubes to the larger containers” (pg. 7); to a certain extent, it can be argued that the students represent the readers, and Huxley utilizes the students as a device to introduce and explain the complexity of the world he has created. The use of the verbs “plunged” and “transferred” are useful in highlighting to readers how factory-like, or ‘functional’ (similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four) this process is, and how contradictory it may seem to use them when discussing the creation of life. Huxley creates an environment where the government has retroactive control over the people it rules. They intervene with the lives of the people from their very creation and are quite literally able to mold them to fit the shape of the ‘desired’ human. Within the first few chapters, Huxley includes complicated ideas such as sleep-teaching techniques (hypnopaedia) and electro-shock therapy which are used on children to teach them what is right and wrong; e.g. they are told that getting pregnant the normal/traditional way is wrong, and that “everyone belongs to everyone else”, which therefore makes free-thought almost impossible. When born, the state decides which women are sterilized and they remove the ovaries of 2/3 of them, taking away their ability to rebel even if they wanted to. In Huxley’s world, sex becomes a form of entertainment or an act of release, comparable to simple pastimes such as reading a book or watching a film, and it is encouraged from a very young age as shown when the children play “rudimentary sexual” games (pg. 26) in the hatchery. Sex is no longer associated with feelings of love or deep attraction, monogamy doesn’t exist at all even though it is clear from Bernard’s longing for Lenina, and Lenina’s wanting to stay with Henry Foster for a longer period, that that is what humans instinctively long for. The phrase “everyone belongs to everyone else” (pg. 34) is continually repeated to the children of the World State through the hypnopaedia procedure where it is drilled in their minds from their time in the Hatchery, as explained in the first section of the novel. What it means is, as well as the idea of a lack of individuality, that their bodies are also included in this idea of sharing everything – encouraging the people’s sexual promiscuity. The character Fanny Crown encompasses this slogan clearly, to the point where she criticizes Lenina for being with Henry Foster for too long and not sharing herself with other people. The context of reception differs from that of Huxley’s generation; promiscuity is as accepted as monogamy. However, in the early 1920s to 1930s, most people married very young and therefore would presumably not have had many partners. The only way that ‘true’ love exists is through their love and admiration for the World State. Sex as a method of entertainment, paired with other forms of fun in the World State such as the soma drug, means that the people are preoccupied, ‘happy’, and ‘content’ with their lives. The intention of this strict control over people’s livelihoods can be seen as a way to prevent people from uprising or noticing any rebel causes because they are simply ‘too happy’ to pay attention to it. They make people so happy that they don’t notice the negatives or bad aspects of their lives, which for readers would possibly ring alarm bells of tyrannical control; which was harnessing the anxiety felt regarding the rise of totalitarianism throughout Europe, such as the infamous Nazi Regime of the 1930s.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, relationships are seen as central and controlled. For the Big Brother Party, it was “to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control” (pg. 75) as “the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible” (pg. 153). Whenever it is allowed, it is purely for the good of procreation; which is why Winston’s wife encouraged it at a specific time each week before she ‘disappeared’ – “They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week in regularity, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was ‘making a baby’, and the other was ‘our duty to the Party’” (pg. 77). She was so engrossed in fulfilling her duty to the party that it took humanity out of a completely natural act and turned it into a chore (again, ideas of ‘human function’ come to play); this links clearly to the quote in question “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity”. Orwell’s use of the word “performance” highlights this devotion to the government, and how they have brainwashed the people to believe that everything they do has to be for them as what was believed to be an intimate, private act is now viewed as a job or show. Katherine’s view on relationships is what the government of Nineteen Eighty-Four wanted and aimed for everyone to hold. The Party has complete control over people’s relationships, placing them together purely for their ends; producing future ideal citizens. Instead of encouraging it, “Big Brother” prefers to instill traditional ideas of purity and suppressing any sexual desires. The society and authorities in Nineteen-Eighty-Four hold the belief that having a private or family life means that the citizens have loyalties away from the government, increasing the risk of revolt or the feared revolution. In Orwell’s alternate reality, building a family is building an army, described as “family had become in effect an extension of the thought police. It was a device using which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately” (page 153). Modern readers may recognize these techniques being used in our own lives, however through our phones rather than children. The Cambridge Analytica scandal uncomfortably resembles this, as does the location feature on Snapchat and the ‘checking-in’ feature on Facebook. Now that almost everyone in Western society has a phone, this kind of manipulative control is very easy, in the same way as it is for the government in Nineteen Eighty-Four to use children to do the same.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Big Brother regime enforces heavy control on the population by the retroactive manipulation of history; whereas in Brave New World people are manipulated proactively before birth. This means that, as the generations progress, people will remember less and less about how society was before they took over. Winston’s job in the “Ministry of Truth” is to physically edit pictures, articles, and news headlines to make sure that whatever is said fits in with what the government wants the people to believe – and therefore promoting their agenda of making their power sovereign. We can see these same techniques today in Trump’s insistence on “alternative facts”. There is a paradox in the fact that he works in a place called “Truth” yet helps to achieve the exact opposite, therein signifying that this area of the government is promoting falsehood rather than complete openness and trust, which is suggested through the use of obvious control mechanisms such as the “telescreen”. M. Keith Booker describes this process in dystopian fiction as “defamiliarization”. The leaders in charge change how people perceive the past, eventually filtering it out of people’s minds completely; therefore, removing any familiarity people may have with past regimes. A key example of this is how “Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia… Winston well knew it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge that he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore, Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia” (page 39). Big Brother makes sure that the people always have an undying hate for something because, similarly to the way Huxley uses sex in Brave New World, it distracts the people from realizing their misery and the corruptness of their society. Under modern standards, people tend to believe that a part of human rights is the right to true and correct knowledge. Nelson Mandela said, “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.” From this angle, it is arguable that Big Brother is infringing on the rights of its citizens by altering what they thought they knew and distorting the past. This is an extreme way to control people – changing their livelihood, ancestry, and personal history to fit with the agenda of the government.

In conclusion, how Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four enforce control is clear, extensive, and numerous. Sexuality is manipulated to the government’s benefit in both novels. Despite their differing foci, both texts present an overwhelmingly negative and uncomfortably lifelike scenario of tightly monitored government control of citizens' lives. Both novels seem to be sending a prescient message of what the world looked like it was becoming when they were writing. Huxley was writing during the rise of totalitarianism throughout Europe and therefore bases his ideas on what he saw evolving. Whereas Orwell’s perspective is post WWII and at the rise of Cold War tensions and he saw a bleak tense future evolving with the battle of communism and capitalism. Although at both times of publication, there were no fully established human rights, Huxley and Orwell saw the beginning of “human rights being denied” and their books became a warning for what would happen should they not exist.