Escaping From Modern Chaos: Brave New World

Abstract

Huxley's Brave New World can be seen as the futuristic and dystopic state of the world with the extreme use of technology and the growing power of totalitarian governments in modern period. It demonstrates how this modernity leads human beings to become inhuman. The struggle in the aftermath of the two destructive world wars, the growing technology and the new political and social ideologies result in an enormous change in the world. The crucial changes in modern period caused the state of chaos and depression in society and it led people and mostly the writers to resist these changes and create their own worlds by demonstrating the possible pessimistic future for humanity, which can be called -dystopia‖. Throughout history, almost every society needed to create a better world because of the problems that they had to face in terms of social, economic and political conditions. In this regard, with Plato's Republic the notion of utopia came into view for the first time and later Sir Thomas More coined the word -utopia‖ with his book Utopia. Until modern period, utopias were used for criticizing the current situation of society. But in the modern chaotic situation, different kinds of worlds were needed to be created but they were the dystopias which were hopeless and depressed. Dystopias such as 1984, We, and Brave New World should be read as a warning and a political criticism towards the modern notions of politics and technology. As Brave New World has such features as a futuristic and technologically developed state and the clash between nature and science, it can be categorized as a science-fiction novel as well. The aim of this study is to discuss how modern period and modernity affect society and literature in the time being and how Huxley structured his utopian-like dystopia Brave New World by comparing the characteristics of utopia and dystopia.