1984 & Brave new world - compare & contrast

[jfk]

1984 by g.orwell and brave new world by aldous huxley
similarities & differences

the distopian worlds, as depicted in 1984 and brave new world, show similarities as well as differences.
in BNW we have Bernard and Lenina, in 1984 we have Winston and Julia. in both cases, the male characters are the 'sparks', it is their minds that do not rest. they are not described as physically strong or resistant, yet they are both strong minded.
in this text of lenina and a friend of hers, called fanny, we see the type of behind the back conversations about bernard that happen most frequently.

"he's so ugly!" said fanny
"but i rather like his looks"
"and then so small" fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and typically low - caste...."
fanny was shocked
"they say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle - thought he was a gamma and put alcohol in his blood surrogate. that's why he's so stunted."

and a brief description of winston:

"a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasised by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party."

yet julia and lenina are very different, in both cases they are partners with the males. with lenina though it is not such a devoted love as julia's, that is because in BNW there is no love. it is hard for lenina at first to understand bernard, due to her conditioning. julia however is a fully fledged rebel when we first see her. both novels contain human situations and one finds it easy to relate to the characters. apart from the two main characters the rest of the populations, in both worlds, may dwell in ignorance and take it as bliss.
the conditions may seem to be perfect in BNW, and the people may be content with what they have, but, there is severe poverty of the inner mind, a shell blocking out the freedom and keeping them satisfied with what they've got.
BNW conditions the people to adapt to their jobs, and in turn condition their thoughts. this is mr foster talking about heat conditioning:

"we condition them to thrive on heat," concluded mr foster.
"our collegues upstairs will teach them to love it."
"and that," put in the director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue..."

In BNW there is no, in a manner of speaking, 'thoughtcrime', exept for bernard. everyone has thoughtcrime in 1984, if they are found out it is a death sentence. there is no killing in BNW, but for that the people have limited thought.
an important part of BNW's society is soma, a drug which makes the taker happy and shuts out evil or bad feeling in the world. 1984 has no good stimulants and one cannot shut out the world, there is evil and bad felling present at every angle. big brother is presented on telescreens, which are on every street corner and in every room. the world cannot be shut off from it, due to being watched endlessly.

the dhc, here describes the drug soma:

"euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
"take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
"and remember that a gramme is better than a damn."

the last of the descriptions is a good example of the phrases used in conditioning. this is used in 1984 as well

war is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength"

ther is no religeon, as such, in both worlds. machine worship and the love of ford has replaced spiritual worship in BNW. big brother takes over god in 1984. examples of this are that in BNW the charing cross tower has changed to charing - t tower due to the cross being a symbol of ford. in 1984 'big brother is watching you' seems to replace that of god is watching over you. BNW has advanced technology, and is run by technology. 1984 has very little technology. these two opposite aspects produce the same effect, no thought, BNW's technology keeps the people happy, therefore they have no reason to think. no technology in 1984 keeps thought stagnant as development in technology could mean development of thought, and inevitably thought crime.

BNW involves an unconscious love, there is no hate "everybody belongs to every one else" there is no commitment.
1984 involves controlled emotions, ordered by the state, anything else beyond that is thought crime. the state says you must love big brother and your state, and hate your enemy. the inner party, the rulers, stamp out any other emotions, but not always succeeding. winston and julia are criminals for not abiding to this law. BNW has no war, this is how the society works, 1984 has a continuous war, this keeps money for development at zero and keeps the system working, another example of two opposite aspects having the same result is that in BNW everything is clean, this reflects life in society as it does in 1984 where everything is dirty.

"the reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up 19th century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. he seemed to see a vision of london, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins"

due to the cleanliness of BNW the people are healthy, the people in 1984 are unhealthy.

going back to the subject of love in 1984, the ways the law of other emotions are set down are subtle, but the way it is carried out is blatant and hard hitting. the two minutes hate is an example of this. it is used to channel hate into the opposition, and love for the party, in BNW love is cut out, unlike 1984, where it exists, but is suppressed, the only love in BNW is for the bottle of blood surrogate. love songs in BNW are different from what we would expect:

"bottle of mine, it's you i've always wanted!
bottle of mine, why was i ever decanted?
skies are blue inside of you
the weathers always fine,
for
there ain't no bottle in all the world
like that dear little bottle of mine"

in BNW there is only pleasure, reproduction is left to the hatcheries.
the state issue songs or anthems to be sung by the people to show love for ford (or big brother).
a song in BNW, about ford is the first solidarity song.

"ford, we are twelve, oh, make us like drops in the social river,
oh make us now together run
as swiftly as thy shining ....

the past is a severe threat to the rulers. BNW treats the past as disgusting and unpleasant. it is a subject that is considered rude and the subject wasn't taught.

"try to imagine what 'living with one's family meant.' they tried, but obviously without the smallest success. 'and do you know what a home was?'
they shook their heads"

the inner party in 1984 wishes to wipe out the past, this is the job of the people!
people who work in the 'ministry of truth' wipe out the past. it is a question of re writing it in preference to the present party. there are more lies taught to the children, this is from a child's textbook:

"in the old days, before the glorious revolution, london was not the beautiful city that we know today. it was a dark,dirty miserable place"

the 'two minutes hate' is a form of brainwashing when the hate is directed at goldstein as a symbol of the past and the people who believe in it.

the conditioning of the people in BNW is carried out mainly before birth, in the test tube, mr foster describes the conditioning of some future rocket plane engineers

"to improve their sense of balance,' mr foster explained. doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job. we slacken off the circulation when they're right way up...they learnto associate topsy turveydom with wellbeing; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads"

1984 involves conditioning throughout life. using propoganda, rewriting the past, and thoughtcrime. an extreme of conditioning in 1984 is that the thoughtcriminals, by way of physical and mental torture, would clean their minds and cause them to confess all their crimes. the conditioning in BNW involves morals and slogans being repeated countless times to babies . it would become the way they thought, for example

"silence, silence, ' whispered a loudspeaker as they stepped out...the students and even the director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. they were alpha's of course; but even alphas had been well conditioned."

in 1984 there is a call to attention, military music is played, the people must obey. if an individual disobeyed they would be branded a thoughtcriminal. in 1984 people think about freedom but the state stops them. the party hopes that all thoughtcrime, and even thought itself will be wiped out. at the ministry of truth canteen winston listens to a freind

"don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought, in the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it"

in BNW they can choose who can think and what they think

the two worlds are both in some aspects the same, and in others totally different.

"liberty to be inefficient and miserable.
freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."

[chek]

In a few simplified lines, Huxley was an upper class dilettante, and as such had his vapid, if still incisive view of human nature projected into the future.

Blair (nee Orwell) was an upper class rebel, and had direct experience of the jackboots and rifle solution to the problems of history.

Both wrote of what they knew, yet despite superficial differences their predictive literature wasn't so different underneath the surface. They both described 'freedom' within varying State allocated boundariess.

It took the homosexual and (thus totally an outcast in his time) Forster to imagine what might happen if the system - whatever complexion it wore - as a whole crashed completely in The Machine Stops, which should rightly be seen as part of a trilogy.