A Brave New World And 1984

Essay by Vinceron29High School, 11th gradeA-, February 2004

download word file, 6 pages 3.6

Many people have tried to predict the future. Eerily enough Aldous Huxley and George Orwell seemed to have a sense of what our world was headed towards with many of their ideas. The main idea behind Huxley's Brave New World was to show how technology and the government could change the very nature of man. Orwell's 1984 focused more on the way war and dictatorship in a society can shape a world into a place where its citizens live in constant terror and paranoia. The Both books are dystopias. Also both books were really controversial and way before their time. The two novels foreshadow present day life. A Brave New World was written almost a year before Hitler came to power and World War II broke out a few years later. Huxley was prophesizing some major problems that we face today. 1984 was published a few years after the war.

The two books Brave New World and 1984 have many of the same visions and themes yet the two books manage to still be so different. So I plan to break down the novels to explain their central themes, and how the two authors chose to express their ideas of the new millennium.

Sex and sexuality for the most part is a controversial subject. Both the novels explored the topic. In Brave New World Huxley uninhibited sex is considered to be constructive and encouraged. In 1984 that is just the opposite. The party, the government in 1984, thinks of sex as a dirty thing and the only time that it should be practiced is in the event of procreation. "The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thought crime" (1984, pg 59). Early on chastity was ingrained in the women of the Party. Sex was thought of a duty...