Analysis of The Theme of Social Control in George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' Through The Potrayal of The Protagonist.

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Maranatha Christian University

ABSTRACT

Tugas Akhir ini berisi pembahasan tema melalui analisis tokoh utama dari Nineteen Eighty-Four karya George Orwell dan Brave New World karya Aldous

Huxley menggunakan pendekatan sosiologis, khususnya teori kontrol sosial. Baik Nineteen Eighty-Four maupun Brave New World merupakan novel distopia yang

menggambarkan negara totalitarian, yaitu negara yang mengontrol seluruh aspek kehidupan penduduknya. Walaupun kedua negara ini tampak sangat berbeda di permukaan, keduanya memiliki kondisi sosial yang stabil dan teratur.

Penduduk Oceania di Nineteen Eighty-Four hidup dalam ketakutan dan acaman siksaan dari polisi apabila mereka berani melanggar peraturan. Di lain pihak, Brave New World menggambarkan suatu negara di mana semua penduduknya hidup di dalam kegembiraan. Terlepas dari perbedaan yang ada, kedua negara ini terbukti memiliki sistem kontrol sosial yang efektif, yang terlihat dari penggambaran tokoh utama dari kedua novel tersebut.

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APPENDICES

Synopsis of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in the fictional state of Oceania, in the year

1984. Oceania is ruled by the Party with Big Brother as its figurehead. Winston Smith, whose job is to alter historical records in accordance to the Party’s actions and purposes, is a member of the Outer Party. However, he is secretly questioning the validity of the Party and its doctrines.

As the story progresses, Winston finds himself falling in love with a woman named Julia. This leads to a series of affairs between the two of them, each wanting to defy the Party in his or her own way. Together they decide to talk to O’Brien, an Inner Party member who seems to be involved in the Brotherhood, an underground rebel organization. However, this turns out to be a trap because O’Brien is actually an agent of the Party.

Winston and Julia are captured and brought to the Ministry of Love. There, Winston meets O’Brien who tortures him and tries to ‘correct’ his thinking. He is also taken to Room 101, where he has to confront his greatest fear—rats. Winston loses the battle when panic and terror drive him to tell O’Brien to unleash them on Julia instead of him. Having betrayed her, he is then released.

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Synopsis of Brave New World

Brave New World is set approximately six hundred years in the future.

The dystopian world presented in the novel is ruled by a rigid caste system—from Alpha, the highest, to Epsilon, the lowest. Humans are not only biologically engineered, but also psychologically conditioned to fit certain roles in a specific caste. There is also a drug called soma to ensure that no one ever feels unhappy.

The first half of the novel follows the story of Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus who is physically inferior compared to other men in his caste. This makes him bitter and disgruntled, until one day, the beautiful Lenina Crowne agrees to date him. They go for a vacation in the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where there are people still living in an almost primitive manner. In the reservation, they meet John the Savage, the son of Linda, a Beta who was accidentally left behind during an expedition to the reservation many years ago.

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Biography of George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, who used the penname George Orwell, was born in Motihari, India, on June 25, 1903. One year after his birth, he went back to England with his mother and sister. His father, a British civil servant, remained in India. Orwell’s first formal education was at St. Cyprian, a boarding school in Eastbourne, where he experienced the rigidity and discrimination of English class system. He later earned a scholarship to Wellington College and Eton College, where he continued his education.

After a short career in the Indian Imperial Police, Orwell lived in self-imposed poverty for several years before participating in the Spanish Civil War with his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Wounded in the war, he returned to England and began his writing career as a freelance for many small publications. During this period, he wrote many essays, reviews, and documentaries. Later, he began to develop a reputation for his well-crafted literary criticism.

Orwell is most well-known for two of his novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both reflecting his deep-rooted distrust to autocratic

government and proved to be huge successes for the author. However, not long after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Orwell finally succumbed to tuberculosis from which he had been suffering for the last three years of his life. He died on January 21, 1950, in a London Hospital.

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Biography of Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley, born in Godalming, Surrey on July 26, 1894 was the author of Brave New World. He came from a family of intellectuals and literary figures. His father was a teacher, editor, and biographer, while his mother was the niece of Matthew Arnold, a British poet, and one of his aunts was also a novelist.

Huxley studied at Eton College, Berkshire from 1908 to 1913. When he was sixteen, Huxley experienced an eighteen-month period of total blindness due to an attack of keratitis punctata. Later his condition improved, and by wearing special glasses and learning Braille, he was able to continue his education at Balliol College, Oxford, and earn a B.A. in English.

Huxley was a prolific writer. He published a dozen books in eight years, starting with his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). Throughout his writing careers, he experimented in many different genres. His notable works other than Brave New World (1931) are the novels Point Counter Point (1928) and Island (1962),

two volumes of essays, The Art of Seeing (1942) and The Doors of Perception (1954), and a book on philosophy, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which is often credited as one of the early pillars of transpersonal theory. Other than novels, he also wrote travel books, histories, and plays.

Huxley died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Edward Ross, a famous American sociologist and a major figure in the early conception of criminology, defines social control as a system of devices through which society brings its members into conformity with the accepted standards of behaviour. As a result, social control is often associated with the maintenance of order and stability in society (Kumar). To achieve any kind of social order, members of society are expected to behave in accordance to a set of rules, both formal and informal, which are in effect in that particular society. In other words, the objective of applying methods of social control in society is to achieve social order.

According to George H. Mead in his article, “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control”, social control depends on how well the individuals in society can imitate the attitudes of other people with whom they frequently socialise in life, because a uniform society is easier to control. In Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this aspect of social control is brought to such an extreme that it

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Maranatha Christian University control used in these novels are very different, since they were written by two different authors for two different reasons.

Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, was a member of the famous Huxley family who boasted a number of brilliant intellectuals. In the first half of the twentieth century, Huxley was already considered “one of the great intellects of the era, as he produced a wide range of novels, travel books, histories, poems, plays, and essays on philosophy, arts, religion and psychology” (McMillan, “An old-school ideas man heralds a new age”). The credit to his lasting fame, however, mainly rests on one of his novels, Brave New World, which has spawned two films and a radio program. Although often credited as a science fiction, it is actually a political satire and has been regarded as “one of the most long-lived and profoundly disturbing works of fiction written in recent time” (Lightcap).

Brave New World set standards “not only for science fiction, but for

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Maranatha Christian University George Orwell, on the other hand, took the definition of dystopia to its most extreme and presented a society of fear and oppression in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This novel, together with his other hugely successful political fable, Animal

Farm (1954), is “the twentieth century’s biggest sellers for a contemporary

author” (McMillan, “The paradoxes of a political writer’s life”). Orwell’s reputation rests “not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvellously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written” (Ritter). His many works, including essays, documentaries, and criticisms, have long since established him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the best-known novels of the twentieth

century. Most people, even those who have never read it, know that the book tells us about a totalitarian state under the rule of a ‘Party’ and its figurehead, the Big Brother. Not only that it has inspired numerous television and film adaptations, it also has “contributed numerous concepts, words, and phrases to present day language including Newspeak, doublethink . . . thoughtcrime” (“George Orwell”), and many others. In fact, the fame of Nineteen Eighty-Four is such that the word “Orwellian” is still commonly used nowadays to describe totalitarian societies (McMillan, “The paradoxes of a political writer’s life”).

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Maranatha Christian University Nineteen Eighty-Four show. The types of social control used in these two novels,

however, are different, which is why I will endeavour to analyse the theme of the novels from this angle.

Theme in literature is “a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work's treatment of its subject-matter” (“Theme”). I will reveal the theme through the portrayal of the major characters, or characters who play significant roles in the novel. Character, on the other hand, is “any representation of an individual being presented in a dramatic or narrative work through extended dramatic or verbal representation” (“Character”).

I choose sociological approach, specifically social control, to help analyse the portrayal of the major characters. Characters, as human beings, are members of their respective societies and therefore subject to methods of social control enforced in them. “According to Maclver and Page society is a system of usages and procedures of authority and mutual aid of many groupings and divisions, of controls of human behaviour and liberties” (“Definitions of Society”). This definition clearly shows that as a system, society influences the behaviours of its members, which in turn define the characteristics of its members.

Statement of the problem

1. What is the theme of the novel?

2. How is the theme revealed through the portrayal of the protagonists in connection with social control?

Purpose of the Study

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Maranatha Christian University 2. To show how the themes are revealed through the portrayal of the

protagonists in connection with social control.

Method of Research

The method of research that I use is library research. I begin my research by reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, followed by several books which might be relevant to the topic

that I am going to discuss. After that, I analyse the primary text using some theories from relevant textbooks and some references and materials from the Internet that can support the analysis and can help me in writing a good thesis. Finally, I draw conclusions from the analysis.

Organization of the Thesis

This thesis consists of five chapters, preceded by the Cover, the Table of Contents, and the Abstract. Chapter One is the Introduction, which consists of the Background of the Study, the Statement of the Problem, the Purpose of the Study, the Method of Research and the Organization of the Thesis. Chapter Two contains theories of social control which are relevant to the analysis in the later chapters. In Chapter Three, I analyse the theme of social control in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four through the Portrayal of the Protagonist. In Chapter Four, I analyse the theme of social control in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World through the Portrayal of the Protagonist. Chapter Five is the Conclusion.

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CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

Based on the previous analyses of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, I have come to a number of conclusions. As I have mentioned in the

beginning, the purpose of this thesis is to analyse both novels using theories of social control. The protagonists as members of their respective society will be greatly influenced by methods of social control employed by their respective government to achieve social stability; therefore, their characteristics will also reflect such methods as used in that particular society.

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Maranatha Christian University be so effective that in the end it will severely limit the freedom of the people as a way for the state to maintain its strict hold over them.

The protagonist in Brave New World, on the other hand, is a static character who leads a life of easy pleasure within a rigid caste system in which everyone is more or less happy regardless of her or his position in society. The protagonist is shown as boastful, self-oriented, cowardly, and childish, as the result of extreme applications of medical social control in the society in which he lives. Therefore, it is my conclusion that the theme of social control in Brave New World is: A continual and excessive use of medical social control which makes

people completely dependent on pleasure and happiness can be so effective that it will become a way for the state to maintain its absolute hold over them.

It is clear that these two novels share some similarities. First, they are both dystopian novels which portray rigid and relatively stable totalitarian states. A totalitarian state, by its very definition, controls the lives of its people completely. This is shown to be the case with Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the World State in Brave New World. Both have absolute control over their people despite their different means to achieve this control.

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Maranatha Christian University These two novels, however, are not completely similar. They also have several major differences, among others the setting of time. Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in 1984, which is only thirty-six years after the novel was published. The events in Brave New World, on the other hand, take place about six hundred years in the future, most likely to allow for such technological advances in the medical field as described in the novel.

The types of social control used in the novels are also different. Nineteen Eighty-Four chiefly uses various forms of legal social control, from constant

surveillance to torture, all of which are legally sanctioned and carried out by the arm of legal control, which is the Thought Police. Meanwhile, Brave New World uses forms of medical social control, from embryonic manipulation and social conditioning to the administering of medication which allows those who consume it to be happy all the time.

The third difference lies in the devices of social control used in these novels. The legal control in Nineteen Eighty-Four is shown as focused on physical and psychological punishment, resulting in pain and fear. In other words, the government of Oceania threatens its people with the use of pain to bring order to its society. The medical control in Brave New World, on the other hand, emphasises on pleasure and drug addiction to ensure social order. This aspect of Brave New World also lends a slightly utopian look to its society—yet another

difference with Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which everything is bleak and clearly dystopian.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1965. Print.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000. Print.

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Maranatha Christian University “Definitions of Society.” Sociology Guide. Sociology Guide.com, 2011. Web. 21

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