Passion, Power, and Politics in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Date
2017
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
My Senior Essay explores how power, passion and politics interact with one another in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I argue that Huxley's novel imagines a dystopian society wherein biopower operates as the primary mode of power with sovereignty serving as a supplemental and emergency reservoir of power. Additionally, Huxley's novel suggests that passion cannot exist in such a society. The biopolitical modes performed in this society attempt to eradicate passion in order to maintain societal stability; however, these mechanisms occasionally fall short. Characters such as John Savage, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson present as individuals who are unable to be suppressed via the normalized modes of biopower in Huxley’s fictitious World State. As a result, in order to control such characters the leader of the World State, Mustapha Mond, must employ sovereign power. Interestingly, in the moments where sovereign power is unleashed, allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest appear, indicating the possibility that the connection between these texts aims at performing a commentary regarding the power dynamics present in both the novel and play. Overall, I argue that the novel serves as a commentary regarding human passion that presses the reader to ask him or herself what do human beings lose when they sacrifice the experience of being human for political stability?