Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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Introduction Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 , present readers with disturbing depictions of futuristic worlds. Huxley and Orwell both witnessed the excesses of communism and fascism during their lifetimes and the fictional worlds they created provided readers with an ominous warning about the disturbing trend towards totalitarianism that took place in Europe in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Orwell (1946, p.394) himself stated in his essay “Why I Write” that “[e]very line of serious work that [he had] written since 1936 [had] been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”. In the respective dystopian worlds Huxley and Orwell created, every aspect of life is controlled, including sexual activity. Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World , takes place in the year 2495 in the World State. The fictional society is governed by ten World Controllers that administer the whole planet. In this totalitarian state, humanity has been robbed of all free choice and is ironically forced into ‘happiness’ by the World Controllers through the manipulation of genetics and psychology. Human-beings are genetically conditioned to be incapable of reproduction and babies are produced in an embryo factory. Promiscuous sex is promoted as a virtue and the sex act is deliberately dissociated from intimacy, romance and human connection. The World Controllers believe that stability in society can be maintained if the citizens are allowed to indulge their most primal instincts in a controlled environment. 1984 is set in the year 1984 in the fictional nation of Oceania. In this totalitarian state, a political party known as Ingsoc rules and the party’s figurehead is Big Brother. The dehumanization, endless intimidation and anti-intellectualism that besets every person living in Oceania highlights the tyrannous nature of the government. The society is separated into the